Philosophy Now Forum

Massimo Pigliucci takes a brief look at the history and current schools of philosophy of mind.

http://philosophynow.org/issues/36/Phil ... t_the_Mind

Philosophers still seem worried about how thought can affect material things.

I have always wondered why so much is made of this issue. To me, there has never been a mind-brain dichotomy because I always regarded thought, consciousness, and awareness as an elaboration and an extension of sensation. The objects of thought are physical objects of sensation, usually symbols and images stored in memory. We physically and directly sense objects stored in the brain. This is thought. This explains how thought really does affect the body. We manipulate and compare these objects to initiate action. The possibilities that our brain poses to us, such as alternatives for action, are physical things in the brain stored as remembered actions, language, and previous reflections.

It is incumbent on us to adhere to some continuity in evolution. I think it is really strange to label the attribution of emotion and thought to animals as "anthropomorphism," an unnecessary projection of human experience on animals. The new findings about mirror neurons seems to explain our ability to lock into the intentions and feelings of animals, as I suppose they are doing with us.

I always felt, when observing animal behavior, "That is exactly what I would do if I had a body like that." Such a statement implies that the animals mental/nerve activity is genuinely limited by its sensory constitution and apparatus. In that, it may be impaired or advanced in comparison with us. But we are right to surmise that its brain is set up the way ours is, using a binary system to record, retrieve and use information.

I do not find the mind-body problem so interesting as the problem of sensation itself. We have to assume that at least some, if not all, sentient beings can record sensations, that is, learn something not recorded in their genes and internally access those memories. In that sense, even a sentient robot as well as other higher animals can see red as we do, as long as they the ability to sense light of that particular frequency and record the experience. What may be different in that experience is not just the physical registration of red, but the distinctive qualia and language that we attach to it.

The qualia are the additional emotional tags, words, and perceptions we attach and use to categorize an object. Categorization is a major part of learning and remembering. Everything is part of something else. One reason different things are stored in different sites in the brain is probably because of the many different qualia attached to an experience or perception. The thought of a radish, for instance, can bring up an image as well as the different aspects of its distinctive taste.

I suggest that a deer. for example, organizes its world in much the same way as we do, because it has much the same equipment. It probably has a very limited language used for communication, lacking the vocal abilities that we have. It will have feelings and other sensible qualia, however, for categorizing objects. The extent of its mental activities are limited throughout by its sensory, emotional, and symbolic abilities.

Unlike George Lakoff and others who feel that most thinking is done in the subconscious, I believe that we are in masterful control of what is stored in our brain. We have millions, billions perhaps, of objects that are available instantly. We can watch our brains work. That is what thought is, physically and sensually examining and exploring the world stored in our memories. We can think new thoughts as we use qualia and metaphors to relate different objects in different ways.

It is most interesting to observe our brain work in an emergency. Lightning-fast, it retrieves and assembles information we once thought had been neglected or forgotten.

Much of our thinking consists in an internal conversation with ourself, the manipulation of words as objects stored in our brain as physical objects. Words there take up physical space and have a physical location, along with the associated qualia used for their categorization.

We can't seem to turn off that internal conversation normally, but maybe it can be done through meditation and practice. But in trying to do that, we can imagine how a deer and other higher animals can possibly think with the bodies they have. The persistence of language in thought is a function of how much brain effort and space is dedicated to language and in the categorizing problem of associating physical experiences with language.

One feature of language is its linearity, the putting together of one word at a time. We speak of a "stream of consciousness." While this may seem as a limitation at first, it may be just another way in which the brain categorizes and manages stored information. For us, language provides a window through which we access memory. In fact, isn't this exactly what neuro-science has revealed, different parts of the brain lighting up as we process a sentence?

Another feature of language is its sociability, which demonstrates how ruggedly thought is an expression and creature of our culture and community. Whatever other qualia we use to categorize our experiences in memory, language tends to override them all, a giant leviathan tending to control and dominate our internal lives.

In precisely this way, we have been taught to regard thought and physical experience as two different things. Thought, however, is a form of physical experience that allows us to watch and experience the physical brain at work.

I neither reckon the need for a dichotomy. Physicalism is a perspective on things: does it matter that some things don't fit the perspective? I find it pretty intuitive that thoughts are just thoughts, and why? Because the perspective is that they are just thoughts. You can't make a perspective another perspective. When the basic perspective is different you can't treat them as inter-changeable. Yes, we will find some day a way to physically manipulate thoughts and qualia, why care for the reason we can't do it now?

The dichotomy is as silly as the question on whether the world exists or not. If you already had a good clue it didn't then please give us a hint, but don't ask questions that go nowhere. Just that with this dichotomy it is even worse, because it is somewhat void of value and therefore doesn't make sense if either true or naught in the abstract. Scientist find or they don't find a way, whatever system of thought some philosopher may have thought out could be hardly relevant as long as that same philosopher basically tries to tell us knowledge out of nothing.