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Philosophy of Mind - summary (2021/2022)
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Summary of all course material of the course Philosophy of Mind.
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Philosophy of Mind – from year 2021/2022WEEK 1
Conscious mind exists.
QUALIA – qualitative aspects of experience – what-it-is-likeness (Thomas Nagel),
qualitative aspects of phenomenal experiences
Phenomenal experiences – characterized by their qualitative feel, how something feels to us,
how it is experienced, phenomenal makes it a pleonasm
Cognitive states posess intentionality – property of being about something – aboutness
Proposition attitude – knowing believing, hoping, wanting
Mental states can only have one of those properties
Emotion - what it is likeness AND aboutness
States of unconscious mind can become conscious given the right circumstances.
JOHN SEARLE – The notion of unconscious mental state implies accessibility to
consciousness. – e.g memory
Central mind-body problem – how the conscious mind fits into the physical world – two
problems – How do qualia fit into the phsical world? How does intentionality fit into the
physical world?
Cognition – part of the mental states that have aboutness
Consciousness – phenomenal states of the mind
METAPHYSICS – goes beyond physics, what is beyond palpable nature, science has no say
in it, armchair philosophy, ignores science, chooses fantasy
We need science.
Science can present us with data and theories that run counter to intuition.
de Montaigne – skeptic, any claim can be open for doubt, What do I know? (Que sais-je?)
Separability thesis – mind exists separately from the body VS inseparability
Skeptics – argue that we can never be certain about anything
Descartes – doubted everything he could doubt, if someone deceived us before how can we
trust them now, also applies to senses, Muller-Lyer illusion, demon who deceived him into
thinking he had a body and that there was a physical world, what's certain is ''just the one
fact that nothing is certain'', I THINK THEREFORE I AM (Cogito ergo sum) – he exists
because he doubts
, has a foundation on which he can build the rest of his knowledge – he exists and is a
thinking being
Cogito – insight
Descartes thinks God exists – because his thoughts come from a perfect being, not a
demon – God does not deceive
He is a mind AND a body.
RES COGITA – thinking substance (does not have a place in space)
RES EXTENSA – physical substance (3d – has a place in space - extended)
according to Descartes they are independent substances – separability theory
Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia – met with Descartes (he dedicated Principles of Philosophy
to her), very smart
Patrick Swayze problem – movie Ghost, how the two substances interact with each other
Interaction problem – how can the physical body and the non-physical mind interact with
each other? – princess Elizabeth noticed
Animal spirits – Galen, they make the body move, pineal gland
It cannot be that a soul moves the body by bumping into it. – analogy of heaviness that moves
the body towards center of the earth (has flaws)
He thinks it is incomprehensible how the body and the mind are able to interact with one
another.
A lot of Descartes' followers think that God is responsible for the interaction (but it does not
make much sense)
Malebranche – thinks that God is the cause of any event in the world, occasional cause –
occasion for God to cause another event – interaction between body and soul impossible – it
only seems like there is one
Parallelism – when two things happen at the same time not because they have a causal
relationship, but because a higher being made them run in such a way
Pre-established harmony between the mental and the physical world (Geulincx), harmonia
praestabilita (Leibniz)
Dualism – not very popular in psych, neurology or phil. of mind
Parapsychology – investigation of paranormal, accepting that parapsychological phenomena
exists – separability thesis accepted by default, investigates claims about paranormal
phenomena
Clairvoyance – alleged ability of some to gain information about others, an event, or an
object through a way that does not use normal senses – instance of extrasensory perception
(ESP) – seen as an evidence of the ability of the mind to exist and function separately from
the body – spirit world
, Magic 8 ball – Mary Carter - fraud
Anecdotes – not evidence
Sylvia Browne – Montel Williams Snow - fraud
Electronic Voice Phenomena – you can ‘’tune’’ a radio or television to a channel between
two stations and record the white noise -> you get messages from the deceased (movie White
Noise) – a lot of people believe it to be true
Bogoras. Jurgenson, Raudive (Raudive voices), Bander (term EVP in book Carry on Talking)
Instrumental Transcommunication – ITC – not only voices but pictures as well
White noise played back has messages.
White noise could be from the signal of another station, or from fluorescent lights – it might
not be the supernatural
Imants Barušs – researched and found nothing
Skinner – verbal summator – a device repeating arbitrary sounds
Verbal transformations (VTs) – illusory changes of the same word (e.g., word ‘trees’)
Pareidolia – phenomenon of recognizing meaningful patterns in random stimuli, different
senses are vulnerable to it (e.g., Led Zeppelin – Stairway to Heaven)
Raudive’s research left such impression because they heard what they were told to hear
Theory ladenness of perception - what we perceive is influenced by a theory that tells us
what to perceive
Substance monism – the view that there is only one substance, not two – solves the
interaction problem
Materialism (physicalism) – everything in the world is physical, made out of matter
Idealism – everything in the world is mental (Berkeley)
JOHN LOCKE – empiricist (claims that we can only gain knowledge about the world
through sensory experiences), naïve realism – thinking for example that colours exist –
actually according to Locke they only exist because we perceive them, distinction between
properties things really have (primary properties), and things they do not have but are
ascribed to them when we perceive them (secondary properties), Galileo Galilei and
Descartes agree, Boyle as well
We gain knowledge from our experience, either via the senses or introspection (he called it
reflection).
GEORGE BERKELEY – was an empiricist, along with Locke and Hume, TO BE IS TO BE
PERCEIVED (esse est percipi), SUBSTANCE – something that has primary properties, he
thinks there is NO physical substance, dialogue between Hylas and Philonius – There is no
material world that exists independently of us or other perceivers. – IDEALISM because it is
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