Mind-Body Problem: Philosophy

• Understanding thought and feeling is central to understanding nature and self.
• Science and philosophy seek to understand nature and self-understanding through the relationship between mental and physical phenomena.
• Discovering the relation between mental and physical phenomena is the most important gap to understanding the natural world.
• The possible answers to the relation pose unacceptable consequences, known as the Mind-Body Problem.
• The goal is to explain the mind-body problem, its solutions, and resolution obstacles.

Consciousness

• Consciousness marks the mental, tracing back to Descartes.
• Consciousness is the most salient feature of mental lives.
• William James explains "the first and foremost concrete fact which every one will affirm to belong to his inner experience is the fact that consciousness of some sort goes on."
• A state or event is mental if conscious, states are individuated by properties objects have.
• Identifying consciousness as a mark of the mental raises the question of what it is to be conscious.

Difficulties in Understanding Consciousness

• Consciousness seems to vanish when we try to focus on it.
• It is unclear if consciousness can be understood in other terms.
• Describing consciousness substantively can be contentious.
• This discussion will indicate our interest point in a way all can agree on.
• The intention is not to analyze consciousness but to describe the phenomenon.

States of Consciousness

• Consciousness occurs when awake or dreaming.
• Conscious states can be discriminated, remembered, and forgotten.
• Each conscious mental state is a mode of being conscious.
• Knowledge of conscious mental states is distinct from perceptual experiences.
• Conscious mental states include perceptual experiences, somatic sensations, proprioception, pains, itches, feelings, thoughts, and desires.
• Thomas Nagel describes conscious mental states as "there is something it is like to be that organism.”
• Unlike organisms a toenail, chair, or blade of grass typically don't have conscious mental states.
• Capturing modes of consciousness suggests that conscious states have phenomenal or qualitative character, called 'qualia'.
• Sometimes ‘qualia’ are reified and treated as objects of awareness, like tables and chairs used in perceptions.
• When aware of conscious mental states or phenomenal qualities, the only object in question is oneself.
• Seeing a red apple involves seeing the apple as red.
• Conscious mental states have non-inferential knowledge with modes of consciousness
• Distinguishing non-inferential knowledge from the qualitative character of conscious mental states is difficult.
• "First-person” knowledge is sui generis.
• People do not have to infer that they are conscious, but observers must do so, often from behavior.

Intentionality

• People have "third-person" knowledge of mental states.
• Special features of conscious states connect to our opening question.
• The central mystery in the mind-body problem and adequate physicalist understanding is consciousness.
• Franz Brentano introduced 'intentionality' to describe another mark of the mental.
• Intentionality is the feature of a state or event that makes it refer to something.
• Intentionality can be clarified with an understanding of an example of intent.
• I may believe I will have coffee, unlike a chair which can not have beliefs.
• Beliefs are intentional states representing the world.
• Belief express a form of satisfaction condition.
• According to John Searle, belief has "mind-to-world direction of fit."
• Any state with mind-to-world direction of fit is an intentional state.
• False beliefs are intentional states, even with nothing to represent.
• Representation can exist without what it represents.
• 'Aboutness' or ‘directedness' is the issue in intentionality.
• Beliefs, expectations, suppositions, convictions, opinions, and doubts, have a mind-to-world direction of fit.
• Desires or wants exemplify another important class.
• Unlike belief, belief doesn't compel its content to match the world.
• Desires work to match the world to the contents.
• World-to-mind direction of fit is an intentional state, that can either be satisfied or fail, just as a belief can be true or false
• The elements in common between beliefs and desires is content.
• 'Concepts', like the concept of coffee, make content an intentional state

Mental economy

• Mental economy concerns whether purpose changes the world to match content (belief) or changes the world to match its content (desire).
• States with expressible contents using sentences are called 'propositional attitudes'.
• Propositional attitudes refers to modes and contents and are individuated by psychological mode.
• States with world-to-mind direction of fit are pro or con attitudes like hope, fear, likes, and dislikes.
• Fully propositional representational content is unclear.
• Perceptual experiences represent our environments and can be veridical or non-veridical.
• They have mind-to-world direction of fit, representational contents, and intentionality.
• Capture through propositionally of attitudes and perceptual experiences might have different qualities.

Complex Relations

• Someone could fear spiders without desires aimed at spiders.
• Fear entails desiring to avoid contact.
• This, with emotional aura, thinking, or perceiving creates our sense of fear.
• This class of states and their intentionality in representational, pro, or con attitudes makes it an intentional state and makes complex interactions possible.
• An intentional state is a state with content or depends on such a state.
• A state is mental only if it is conscious or intentional.
• A thinking thing has mental states.
• If conscious and intentional states are independent, our initial question splits into the relation of consciousness and intentionality to the physical.
• If not independent, the general question requires tackling both subquestions.
• Intentional states are not conscious states.
• Your belief that Australia is not conscious and an occurrent belief. Belief instead is dispositional.
• The distinction generalizes to all attitude types like desire.
• If intentional and conscious states are independent is not settled.
• It is important, in conceiving dispositional mental states as intentional attitudes, that occurrent attitudes with mode and content among manifestation properties.
• Divide and conquer will be unavailable, and we will tackle the projects together.
• Conscious mental states may lack intentionality. For example; euphoria or anxiety.
• Somatic sensations, like itches and pains, have non-representational elements.
• Somatic sensations represent internal events.
• A headache seems represent as in the head, an ache is in the toe.
• Representational content is lacking in pain.
• However desire can cease the pain, desire is not its own indication of pain

Philosophical Problems

• A philosophical problem is a knot in our thinking about something.
• Philosophical problems usually involve difficult to sort through conceptual issues
• Resolving philosophical problems has import for entire fields of inquiry.
• Philosophical problems can be a set of supported propositions; often the support forms inconsistencies within a philosophical view.
• Freedom of the will and skepticism about the external world take this form.
• It is useful to put philosophical questions in this format to solve problems .
• Consistency in views restores logical space of solutions.
• The mind-body problem can be posed this way. Positions on mental to physical relation can be classified by rejected propositions.

Theses

• The problem arises from four theses:
  • Realism: Some things have mental properties.
  • Conceptual autonomy: Mental properties are not conceptually reducible, and no non-mental proposition entails any mental proposition.
  • Constituent explanatory sufficiency: A thing's description in terms of constituents entails a complete description
  • Constituent non-mentalism: Basic constituents do not have mental properties.
• Theses 2–4 entail the negation of 1.
• Correct fundamental physics invokes no mental properties (4) and every natural phenomenon is deducible from description of its constituents (3).
• No non-mental propositions entail mental propositions (2).
• Therefore, no things have mental properties.
• The logical difficulty would be easy to resolve if not for appeal in 1–4.

Explore the fundamental questions of the mind-body problem in philosophy. Examine the primary goal of science and philosophy, the challenge of defining consciousness, and the conflict between different philosophical theses. Delve into reconciling mental properties and the explanatory power of constituents.