Tutorial # 19. Philosophy of Mind: The Embodied Mind. Discussion Questions

After having read Anderson, M. How to Study the Mind: An introduction to Embodied Cognition, try to think about these questions:

• What is the relationship between evolutionary thinking and embodied cognition?
• Does the fact that a cognitive trait is advantageous necessarily entail that it has been biologically selected during evolution? Think about fear of handguns. Is this advantageous? Has it been selected?
• Does the fact that a cognitive trait has been selected during evolution necessarily entail that it is advantageous? Think about sickle cell anemia. It has genetic facilitators, but it’s not adaptive. How could we argue for the existence of cognitive adaptations?
• Is cognition a graded notion that comes in degree? Where does it start?
• What is the relation between perception and action? What role do intentions play in action? Try to make examples.
• EC theorists argue that minds are shaped by particular bodies inhabiting particular environments. To what extent is this true? How would they account for highly abstract thinking e.g. chess playing, decision-making?
• What problems are faced by explanations of the mind that neglect to take the
  body into account?
• Think about Tetris. To what extent we use the environment to simplify our cognitive processes? Does the environment changes the nature of the processing or does it simply enable the organisms to use other inexpensive cognitive abilities?
• In which sense the environment is part of the cognitive system? Is this a trivial claim?
• Do blind people see with their canes? In which sense?
• Consider bees learning to forage on certain kind of highly-rewarding flowers. Is it necessary to consider the cognitive activities of the bees to include their environment? Or the environment simply a source of visual input?
• Consider the role of gesture during speech in different cultures. What is the effect of gesture on communication? Does it change the cognitive processes underlying communication (either in the listener or in the speaker) in any interesting way?
• Think about The passage from the Metamorphosis by Kafka. Would it make a crucial difference to your cognitive processes if your body were very different?
• Is it (at least sometimes) explanatorily more useful to see mind/brain as a computer? If so, why?
  

Tutorial # 19. Philosophy of Mind: The Embodied Mind. the metamorphis

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself
transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked. "What's happened to me?" he thought. It wasn't a dream. His room, a proper human room although a little too small, lay peacefully between its four familiar walls. A collection of textile samples lay spread out on the table - Samsa was a travelling salesman - and above it there hung a picture that he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and housed in a nice, gilded frame. It showed a lady fitted out with a fur hat and fur boa who sat upright, raising a heavy fur muff that covered the whole of her lower arm towards the viewer.

Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis

Tutorial #18. Philosophy of Mind: The Mind-Body Problem. "What is it like to be a bat?". Discussion Questions

In light of the readings you have done, especially Nagel (1974), try to think about the following questions:

• What is it about the mind that makes it difficult to study from a scientific perspective?
• How is the mind related to the body\physical world? Can we solve this problem (i.e. the mind-body problem)?
• How could the sciences (e.g. neurosciences, psychology, anthropology, etc) help us understand the mind?
• Is it possible a coherent and complete mapping between types of mental states and types of brain states? That is, would it be possible to identify a law underlying the mind-brain relationship?
• Is consciousness the mark of the mental?
• What does “What it is like to be X” mean?
• Nagel claims: “the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism”. Make examples of organisms without consciousness. Is it possible to conceive an individual identical to you, but without consciousness?
• Can we understand what it is like to be a bat? Do you find Nagel’s argument convincing?
• Can you explain to someone what it is like to taste Nutella?
• Consider such features of scientific method as publicity and objectivity. Is consciousness intrinsically private and subjective? Can it be studied scientifically?
• If consciousness is not reducible to physics (i.e. cannot be explained in physical terms), would it follow that physicalism (i.e. the thesis that everything is physical) is false? Or rather, that consciousness doesn’t exist (since physicalism is true)?

Tutorial #18. Philosophy of Mind: The Mind-Body Problem. "What is it like to be a bat?". Key Ideas

From http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#4.1
By Robert Van Gulick

What it is like

Thomas Nagel's (1974) famous“what it is like” criterion aims to capture another and perhaps more subjective notion of being a conscious organism. According to Nagel, a being is conscious just if there is “something that it is like” to be that creature, i.e., some subjective way the world seems or appears from the creature's mental or experiential point of view. In Nagel's example, bats are conscious because there is something that it is like for a bat to experience its world through its echo-locatory senses, even though we humans from our human point of view can not emphatically understand what such a mode of consciousness is like from the bat's own point of view.

Subjectivity is another notion sometimes equated with the qualitative or the phenomenal aspects of consciousness in the literature, but again there are good reason to recognize it, at least in some of its forms, as a distinct feature of consciousness — related to the qualitative and the phenomenal but different from each. In particular, the epistemic form of subjectivity concerns apparent limits on the knowability or even the understandability of various facts about conscious experience (Nagel 1974).

On Thomas Nagel's (1974) account, facts about what it is like to be a bat are subjective in the relevant sense because they can be fully understood only from the bat-type point of view. Only creatures capable of having or undergoing similar such experiences can understand their what-it's-likeness in the requisite empathetic sense. Facts about conscious experience can be best incompletely understood from an outside third person point of view, such as those associated with objective physical science.

Tutorial #17. Skepticism And "Proof of an External World". Discussion Questions

In Light of Moore's "proof of an external world", try to think at these questions:

• Is commonsense knowledge unrevisable?
• How does Moore know that he has hands?
• Is it relevant whether Moore can prove that he knows that he has two hands?
• From the premises: “Here is one hand”, and "Here is another," would you be justified to conclude that an external world exists?
• If you do know you have hands then do you know there are external things? Or, if you don’t know there are external things then do you know you have hands?
• Should Descartes be satisfied with Moore's proof?
• What is the logical form of Moore’s argument? What is a proof according to Moore?
• Do you know anything better than you have hands?
• Can you know that you have hands without already knowing that there is an external world?
• Do we have more or less reason to doubt that we know there’s an external world?
• What’s the strongest skeptical argument?
• What is the best way to respond to the problem of radical scepticism?

Tutorial #17. Skepticism And "Proof of an External World". G.E.Moore

G.E. Moore (1939). “Proof of an External World.” Proceedings of the British Academy 25.

Certain Keypoints in the argument:

1. According to Moore, to prove that he was holding up his hands would require him, as Descartes pointed out, to prove (not just know) that he isn’t dreaming, which Moore doesn’t think he can do.
2. Moore thinks you can know things you can’t prove.
3. It has been a common view among philosophers, however, that you can’t know things you can’t prove–you can only take them on faith.
4. A test to see if a conclusion is different from a premise (or, if two propositions are different) is to see if one could be true while the other false.
5. To say that something might be proven to exist (or be true) is to say that that thing might be certain to exist or be true.

Tutorial #17. Skepticism. G.E.Moore

"G.E. Moore (1873-1958) (who hated his first names, ‘George Edward’ and never used them — his wife called him ‘Bill’) was an important British philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century. He was one of the trinity of philosophers at Trinity College Cambridge (the others were Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein) who made Cambridge one of centres of what we now call ‘analytical philosophy’. But his work embraced themes and concerns that reach well beyond any single philosophical programme."

* A good overview of his argument against the skeptic:
Common Sense and Certainty

By Tom Baldwin on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy