Philosophy of Mind


Course Materials

Syllabus

Readings


Announcements and Other Stuff

• Have a great summer! Moving to the top: There are lots of good movies and TV shows that deal with many of the issues we’ll be talking about throughout the semester, and that contain (or just are) vivid examples and thought experiments about the nature of minds, persons, consciousness, etc. Some of the best and most well-known include, in no particular order: Westworld; Blade Runner (especially the original, but also 2049); Arrival; Ex Machina; Transcendence; Inside Out; The Imitation Game; The Matrix; The Ghost in the Shell (especially the original animated version); lots of Star Trek.

• Professor Paul Draper of the philosophy department will be giving a guest lecture in our class on Thursday 4/19; he has kindly provided us with his lecture notes on Psychological Aether Theory to peruse ahead of time. The topic will be James' view, which sits somewhere between or nearby to panpsychism and cosmopsychism. He's asked us to read a couple of short things in preparation for his lecture: a recent chippy exchange between Strawson and Dennett in the New York Review of Books as well as Fodor's skeptical review of Strawson's book on panpsychism in the London Review of Books. Finally, and most importantly, he'd like us to read the first objection in William James Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine.

• Topics and parameters for the second paper due in class Thursday April 26th.

A couple of interesting recent companian pieces to our discussions (of narrative selves, of consciousness, of attention) One on A revolution in our sense of self - "In a radical reassessment of how the mind works, a leading behavioural scientist argues the idea of a deep inner life is an illusion. This is cause for celebration, he says, not despair." Another on Disarming the Weapons of Mass Distraction on what social media is doing to our attention (and thus ourselves?) "Attention is the real currency of the future. ... Attention is a complex interaction between memory and perception, in which we continually select what to notice, thus finding the material which correlates in some way with past experience. In this way, patterns develop in the mind. We are always making meaning from the overwhelming raw data. ... Another point is less often emphasized. Ignoring something requires a form of attention. It costs us attention to ignore something. Many of us live and work in environments that require us to ignore a huge amount of information—that flashing advert, a bouncing icon or pop-up." I really like the idea of reestablishing an  attentional commons, taking back the right to not be addressed.

How many senses do us humans have? Aristotle said five. Paulus Berensohn, a "philosopical potter," has been compiling a list and says he's counted up to around 60.

What is it like to be a bat - or these other animals? Birds Can See Earth's Magnetic Fields, And We Finally Know How That's Possible; there's also the Unique Color Vision of Mantis Shrimp. Finally an Invisibilia podcast looks at ways we humans might extend and use our own hearing to get around in the world, maybe taking steps towards coming to know what it'd be like to navigate by ecolocation: How To Become Batman.

• Three Annoucements! The David Roberts talk is an extra credit opportunity worth 1 outline or 3 points on the final exam. The graduate student and Women in Philosopy (among others) sponsored Inclusive Philosophies Conference is April 13 - 14, 2018 at Purdue University.

• On storytelling as a way to organize autobiographical memories, and imagine possible futures for ourselves, here's an absolutely fascinating article about a woman with a very specific kind of mental deficiency, and can't do either. This leaves her living, inescapibly, In The Moment: "But she cannot for the life of her make up a story. She does not daydream. Her mind does not wander. This lack of imagination is common among amnesiacs. ... She cannot fit images together into a finished puzzle. In other words, not only does she lack a window into the past, she also lacks a window into the future ... She achieves effortlessly what some people spend years striving for: She lives entirely in the present."

Andy Clark, of  extended mind fame, gets the New Yorker profile treatment. Here's Fodor's skeptical review of Clark's earlier magnum opus on the extended mind called Supersizing the Mind that focuses on the origin Clark and Chalmers article that we read, and a recent NYTimes article by Andy Clark explaining and defending the idea, called Out of Our Brains.

• Readings For Next Week (all available on website)

a.   David Hume Treatise of Human Nature, Book 1, Part iv, Section 6
b.   D. Dennett, ‘The Self as Centre of Narrative Gravity’
c.   Ismael, J. ‘Saving the Baby: Dennett on Autobiography, Agency, and the Self’


• New crazy-interesting looking paper on extended and collective cognition: The Borg–Eye and the We–I. The Production of a Collective Living Body Through Wearable Computers. by Nicola Liberati Abstract: The aim of this work is to analyze the constitution of a new collective subject thanks to wearable computers. Wearable computers are emerging technologies which are supposed to become pervasively used in the near future. They are devices designed to be on us every single moment of our life and to capture every experience we have. Therefore, we need to be prepared to such intrusive devices and to analyze potential effect they will have on us and our society. Thanks to a phenomenological and postphenomenological analysis, we will show how these technologies are able to generate a new collective subject with its different collective needs and appetites by merging the living body of many subjects into one. The world becomes dwelled by these new collective subjects, and we will feed their own peculiar needs.

• Continuing on recent stuff being published that connects to stuff we've been talking about this semester: remember how Descartes thought the pineal gland was the seat of the soul, the place in the brain where the body and mind exchanged causal influence? Turns out people are still arguing about the full range of things that gland does, and one trippy theory is that is where your brain makes some homegrown psychadelic chemicals that are released when you dream. Another one that brings to mind some of our arguments about the Chinese Room touches on the ways that the tech we're increasingly interacting with and reliant, and whether or not it would be a good thing if the algorithms it runs are modeled on those run by our own brains - because then they could exhibits signs of mental health problems.

• Ideas and claims and arguments about extended cognition and extended minds lend themselves naturally to ideas and claims and arguments about collective intelligence and collective minds - and those ideas and claims and arguments are in turn dovetailing with and finding support in recent advances in evolutionary theory: "Say the word “mind” and most people immediately think about the workings of an individual brain. The idea that something larger than an individual might have a mind seems like science fiction—but modern evolutionary theory says otherwise."

• This is one of the, if not the single, most sensible paper(s) written on the extended mind hypothesis, called Mind: Extended or Scaffolded?

• We've been talking about intentionality (and so about meaning, reference, content, and semantics) for the last couple of classes. It's already complicated, obviously, but it gets even more complicated and more interesting when you bring in the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. The distinction is usually applied first and foremost to langauge use, and one way to think about the idea is that whenever you say something, there are two different forms of information that are being transmitted. On the one hand, there is the semantic value of the words you say - how those words get and stay attached to the things they refer to is what we've been talking about in class, and what the (passive, semantic) externalist school of thought is primarily concerned with. On the other hand is, for want of a better way of putting it, the social significance of your speech act - what you, saying those particular words, to that particular person or group of people, in that particular scenario, conveys, above and beyond the strict semantic content of the words you speak. A good way to see the distinction is by reflecting on the different layers of meaning that are being navigated when people make small talk, and Why (Some People Think) Small Talk is So Excruciating. For those of you interested in this sort of thing, it's a big topic in the philosophy of language, which is often traced back to J.L. Austin's seminal book How To Do Things With Words.

• Where do dictionaries get their alleged authority to define words? Are you more of a prescriptivist or descriptivist about grammar and usage? Too extreme an opinion in either direction is, I think, untenable: too persnickety and you risk becoming an overly authoritarian, uptight, self-satisfied grammar nazi scold; too much in the other direction and your horrible grammar will invite people to think you're incompetent or just unintelligent, people won't be able to understand you, and everyone will likely judge you for committing egregious Word Crimes. An excellent essay called Authority and American Usage lays it all out. You can also read and reflect on these incisive thoughts about good writing that came out of that essay; it will help you think about and get self-conscious (in a good way) about what you're trying to do in your own writing.

• Topics and parameters for the first paper due in class March 22nd.

• Michael Lewis's excellent article The End on (in Clark's language) the "scattered causes" of the 2008 financial meltdown, which he expanded into the book, and later the movie, The Big Short.

• More on Conway's Game of Life, which we watched the video on in conjunction with the Dennett claim about the objective, non-stance dependence of the regularities discernible from (and only from) the intentional stance. He talks this explicitly in relation to the Game of Life in his Real Patterns paper.

• A 3-part Big Thinker lecture by Daniel Dennett that are pretty interesting, and relevant. He got the New Yorker profile treatment a couple of years ago, too.

• A New Yorker profile on the Churchlands from a couple of years ago, which gives a nice synoposis of their views and motivations.

• A TED Talk on head transplants (?!?)

• Great article on the apparent contraditions contained in non-Western thought by contemporary logician Graham Priest called Beyond true and false - Buddhist philosophy is full of contradictions. Now modern logic is learning why that might be a good thing.

• Here's a short youtube video I showed in class before Tim Waring's talk describing a recent new book called The Secret to Our Sucess: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter on the most promising theory about how human minds evolved and what's so special about them (there's a discussion on the evolution website This View of Life, too). The picture, which places culture, cultural evolution, and gene culture co-evolution at the very heard of human evolution and cognition, certainly looks friendly to the active, vehicle externalism that Clark and Chalmers defend.

• Videos of little kids infering the intentions of adults and helping them complete tasks using their folk psychology skills. Also another video on the classic false belief task. and a TED talk by Rebecca Saxe, a leading psychologist working on this stuff at MIT.

In Special Sciences: Still Autonomous After All These Years Fodor addresses an argument made by Jaegwon Kim: “[Kim] just doesn't see why there should be (how there could be) macrolevel regularities at all in a world where, by common consent, macrolevel stabilities have to supervene on a buzzing, blooming confusion of microlevel interactions. Or rather, he doesn't see why there should be (how there could be) unless, at a minimum, macrolevel kinds are homogeneous in respect of their microlevel constitution. Which, however, functionalists in psychology, biology, geology and elsewhere, keep claiming that they typically aren't. … The very existence of the special sciences testifies to reliable macro-level regularities that are realized by mechanisms whose physical substance is quite typically heterogeneous. Does anybody really doubt that mountains are made of all sorts of stuff? … Damn near everything we know about the world suggests that unimaginably complicated to-ings and fro-ings of bits and pieces at the extreme micro-level manage somehow to converge on stable macro-level properties.”

Think of the hierarchical picture we talked about as the hope of the reductive materialist about how the different sciences and the phenomena they study and explain will be related to each other. Fodor is claiming that the ontological picture is right, but the epistemological hope will never be realized - but that no one really understands why, i.e. why heterogenous bunches of lower level stuff sometimes come together to form stable clumps of stuff that behave in newly regular ways, i.e. patterns that we can study and form generalizations about using the concepts and vocabulary of the higher level sciences, and patterns that we wouldn't be able to study and form generalizations about if we didn't have those concepts and that vocabulary. To say that the phenomena or properties in the domain of a higher level science supervene on the phenomena or properties of the domains of lower level sciences is to make claim about metaphysics and ontology, i.e. the nature of reality and the way pieces of it fit together. Each higher level of properties is “supervenient” on all those levels below it on the hierarchy if the following relationship holds: A (higher) set of properties A supervenes upon another (lower) set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties; sloganized: there cannot be a higher level A-difference without a lower level B-difference. Fodor believes this is true of the world, and, with Lycan, he believes that higher level properties are multiply realizable, and often multiply realized by different (i.e. heterogeneous with respect to) sorts of lower level properties. He just doesn’t know how or why this is the case, and doesn’t think he or Kim or anyone else understands why or how it is the case either; he finds it “molto mysterioso”. An upshot of this, he thinks, is that despite this supervenient and multiple realization friendly picture of the metaphysics and ontology, the higher level sciences are in fact autonomous, meaning they are not epistemically reducible to lower level sciences. Whatever the mysterious explanation for why this is the case, he thinks the fact that it is the case, in turn, explains the existence of the special sciences, i.e. why there isn't just physics. He famously defends a form of (epistemologically) non-reductive materialism.

• The consistently good Aeon magazine recently published a suprisingly great article on the practical implications of philospohy of mind as they surface in the field of psychiatry, making it hard to figure out how to treat mental disorders. "Most of our organs can be treated as repairable machines. Why can’t we treat mental illness by simply fixing the brain?" It goes on to claim that "The mysterious, unfathomable gap between psychology and neuroscience bedevils not only psychiatry, but all attempts to understand the meaning of humanity."

• The Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist David Eagleman is starring in his self-written mini-series “The Brain With David Eagleman" is now showing on PBS.

• Another good, short article in The New Yorker, this one about the distinctive character of the adolescent brain - it contains a reference to Edward Fortyhands, and a defense of the theory that when adolsents engage in (what looks to adults like) reckless risk taking or other kinds of hedonistic extremism, it isn't becaues they lack executive function or their frontal lobes aren't fully developed to allow rational behavior or anything like that. Rather, it's because their pleasure centers are bigger than they will be at any other time they're lives. “Nothing—whether it’s being with your friends, having sex, licking an ice-cream cone, zipping along in a convertible on a warm summer evening, hearing your favorite music—will ever feel as good as it did when you were a teenager,” ... this, in turn, explains why adolescents do so many stupid things. It’s not that they are any worse than their elders at assessing danger. It’s just that the potential rewards seem—and, from a neurological standpoint, genuinely are—way, way greater. “The notion that adolescents take risks because they don’t know any better is ludicrous.”

• Our Official Final Exam information has been handed down from the Purdue Powers That Be, and it is: Wednesday 05/02 07:00p - 09:00p BRNG 1248.

• Talk This Week - There Will Be Extra Credit: come, sign in, and stay for the entire talk and receive 3 bonus points on your midterm

Dr. Timothy Waring, University of Maine
The Evolution of Social-Ecological Systems
Date | Time: February 13, 2018, 5:30-7:00 pm
Location: WALC 2007
Coffee and Refreshments served

• For those of you understandably skeptical that a computer, some hunk of sand or silicon could ever becomes conscious: fair enough! But why it that any more or less weird that a hunk of meat could become conscious? Props to the Terry Bisson's great imaginative short story They're Made Out of Meat.

Mind versus Machine. The Atlantic on AI, conversational fluency, and the Turing Test.

• A TEDTalk (see especially from 12:00 onward) with some robots and things designed to provoke our gut level anthropomorphizing instincts.

• What about the internet itself? Could it ever wake up and become conscious?

• The "Midterm" Exam is next Thursday, February 15th. It will be mostly short essay format, and cover the forumulations of, arguments in favor of, and main objections against the foundational views on the mind body problem that we've been discussing so far this semester. Closed note; I'll bring blue books.

• The How To Become Batman episode of the Invisibila podcast, about the interplay between vision and hearing, and how you might be able to "see" via sound waves rather than light waves.

• A leading contemporary philosopher did a series of blog posts arguing that if materialism is true, then countries (like the USA, in his example, or like China, in Block's example) are probably conscious.

• Reconstructing the brain's images into digital video. Whoa.

• A nice BBC article on Buddhist monks, meditation and brain scans.

• Here's a nice interview with contemporary philosophy of mind Berit Brogaard in which she talks about some of her work on synesthesia , and an interesting short Aeon essay arguing we actually all start out on the synaesthetic spectrum.

• A not bad write up of mirror neurons and empathic or sympathetic pain.

• As I mentioned in the informal conversation we were having before class started about what what makes someone cool - here's the article on awesomeness and the modern ethical imperative to be awesome. It's written by a philosopher, who recently published a whole book on the subject: On Being Awesome: A Unified Theory of How Not to Suck. Other philosophers have recently written on similarly pop culture type stuff, i.e. what it is to be a jerk, which isn't quite the same as being a asshole, and  where swearing gets its power.

• That New Yorker articles about The Itch and phantom limb pain. Speaking of which: explanations of phantom limb pain often appeal to the same kinds of psychological processes as explanations of the rubber hand illusion, which makes an appearance in this good TED talk mentioned below.

• You can find stuff on Phineas Gage all over; here are a couple of good discussions.

• Talk This Week - There Will Be Extra Credit: come, sign in, and stay for the entire talk and receive 3 bonus points on your midterm

JENNY SAUL
University of Sheffield
Title: "Dogwhistles and Figleaves: Techniques of Racist Political Manipulation"
Date: Friday January 26, 2018; 3:30 - 5:00pm
Location: BRNG 2280

• There are lots of good TED talks on philosophy of mind related stuff, and this recent one by neuroscientist Anil Seth was particularly insightful. Not only did it touch onto some of the issues that came up in the Dennett and Ismael readings (especially the stabilization and separation of representations of self and world), but it uses the rubber hand illusion to illustrate one of its points.

• As promised, here is an example of what I'm looking for in the outline / thesis / questions assignments. I did this one on Ismael's first chapter from How Physics Makes Us Free, which discuss's Dennett's "Where Am I?"

• Here's an interesting sentence near the end of the Ismael reading for Thursday 1/11, describing how Dennett's thought experiment in 'Where Am I?' works:

"What we are really following in through the story is a subjective point of view that is being shifted from one vantage point to another in the way that a movie can make discontinuous shifts to the content displayed on screen by stringing together the view from different cameras, while still displaying the kinds of internal unity that are characteristic of a single stream of consciousness."

But it also raises the question of why we can follow those shifts so easily. The appeal to film watching reminded me of another interesting short essay in Aeon, about how are brains are so naturally able to deal with all the cuts and discontinuities: Why Don't Our Brains Explode When We Watch Movies?

• You can pick it up a hard copy of The Mind's I on Amazon and there's not infrequently a copy to be had at Von's and other used bookstores, but that link is to an online (and unfortunately typo intensive) text of Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett's still very good, fun, and readable collection.

• Our first class will meet Tuesday January 9, 1:30-2:45 in room 1248 of Beering Hall.


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