What is a Mind?
Encountering Philosophy, Chapter 13
Mind
Travis Joseph Rodgers
What is a mind? This question rests at the nexus between metaphysics and epistemology. In fact, there’s an entire subdiscipline in philosophy called “philosophy of mind.” Philosophers of mind deal with not just the nature of mind but also the nature of intentionality, consciousness, moral motivation, free will, and moral responsibility. There is a wide range of positions on the mind’s status, ranging from a fully existing thing distinct from the body to various ways bodies can be.
Dualism
Dualists hold that minds are very real, and they’re distinct sorts of things from physical things. Minds are, in fact, non-physical substances. The term “dualism” suggests that are two sorts of things. One thing is physical, and one is non-physical. On this picture, a human being consists of a mind and a body or a soul and a body. There’s an impressive pedigree behind this position. Plato and Rene Descartes were dualists. Christians are probably dualists, too.
Dualism faces a challenge called the Interaction Problem. Highlighted in a series of letters between Descartes and herself, Elisabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, wondered how something that is non-physical can move a physical thing. Physical things interact with other physical things by contacting them, she suggested. When a baseball player hits a ball, the bat strikes the ball. It’s harder to see how something that has no dimensions and no mass can be located anywhere or how it could strike physical things in the appropriate sorts of ways to move them. Why think a mind must contact a body? How else does the body move when it moves voluntarily?
Behaviorism
The behaviorist answers that the mind just is behavior. It’s behavior of a certain kind, of course, but it’s just behavior. Consider a trait like affability. We might think there is very little to being affable other than to engage in certain behaviors in a range of cases. Ernesto might, for instance, laugh when someone tells a joke. He might smile when he sees a friend. He might nod his head when he sees a stranger. What more to being affable is there? If behaviorists are right, nothing. BF Skinner puts the point this way: “The intelligent man does not feel his intelligence, or the introvert his introversion. (In fact, these dimensions of mind or character are said to be observable only through complex statistical procedures.)” (Skinner 1971, 21).
Behaviorism is quite unlike dualism. Dualism seems “inflationary,” because it introduces something that is very different from the body. It inflates the number of things that exist beyond the directly observable. Behaviorism is very deflationary. Behaviorism effectively eliminates the mind altogether from the metaphysical picture. While the dualist says there are two sorts of things – mind and body – the behaviorist says that the mind is nothing but bodies behaving in certain ways.
Physicalism
On the physicalist picture, all that is real is physical. On this view, either the mind is ultimately physical, or it’s not real. Being ultimately physical may be different from another position called materialism. Materialism is a more restricted position, typically understood as asserting that all that is real is matter. How could something be physical without being itself matter? If it either lacks mass or doesn’t take up space but has some physical properties, then it’s physical.
On the physicalist picture, what is the mind? If it need not be material, it must at least have some physical properties. This means it can, roughly speaking, cause things or be caused to do things. If my desires can cause my walking to the refrigerator, they’re physical. Jerry Fodor, a kind of physicalist, wrote, "if it isn't literally true that my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching, and my itching is causally responsible for my scratching, …. if none of that is literally true, then practically everything I believe about anything is false and it's the end of the world” (1990, 156). A common view among physicalists about the mind is that the mind (and mental properties) must be identical to something physical.
A physicalist position is often shorthanded this way: “pain is c-fibers firing.” It’s not that there are c-fibers. Rather, “c-fibers firing” stands in for whatever physical state is identical to the mental state of “being in pain.” Science can figure out what that state really is.
Functionalism
A functionalist account of the mental realm holds that minds are not themselves physical, but minds are rather functions of physical things. A function essentially maps inputs to outputs. So, a functionalist account of the mind says something like certain physical substrates change and cause corresponding mental changes. As in the physicalist example, it may be that certain conditions, like c-fibers firing, correspond to mental conditions, like agitation.
The functionalist sees the mind and body not as related through identity but as related through supervenience. The mental supervenes on the physical. This means that mental states are individuated according to the functional role they play. Whatever role pain plays in humans, whatever plays the same functional role in other systems is pain. Now, it may be that some systems do not or cannot admit that functional role. This just means that my sunglasses, for instance, cannot be in pain. Perhaps some surprising things can.
The supervenience thesis is different from the identity thesis. On the latter view, pain is identical to a physical state. On the supervenience view, pain cannot occur without the physical state, but the two are not identical. So, even if pain cannot occur without c-fibers’ firing, pain is not c-fibers firing. It’s damage-detection or something like that.