Test Your Knowledge of Philosophy of Mind

Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature and ontology of the mind and its relationship with the body.

The mind-body problem is a central issue in philosophy of mind, which addresses the relationship between mental processes and bodily states or processes.

Dualism and monism are the two central schools of thought on the mind-body problem, although nuanced views have arisen that do not fit one or the other category neatly.

Most modern philosophers of mind adopt either a reductive physicalist or non-reductive physicalist position, maintaining in their different ways that the mind is not something separate from the body.

The mental and the physical seem to have quite different, and perhaps irreconcilable, properties.

Dualist solutions to the mind-body problem involve the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical.

Interactionist dualism is the particular form of dualism that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, causally interact with physical states.

Psychophysical parallelism is the view that mind and body, while having distinct ontological statuses, do not causally influence one another.

Occasionalism asserts that all supposedly causal relations between physical events, or between physical and mental events, are not really causal at all.

Property dualism is the view that the world is constituted of one kind of substance – the physical kind – and there exist two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties.

Experiential dualism is a philosophy of mind that regards the degrees of freedom between mental and physical well-being as not synonymous thus implying an experiential dualism between body and mind.The Mind-Body Problem: Philosophical Theories and Their Criticisms

• Madhyamaka Buddhism critiques dualism and physicalist philosophies of mind, rejecting the idea of a fundamental substance to reality.

• Physicalism, the idea that matter is the only fundamental substance of reality, is explicitly rejected by Buddhism.

• Monism, which does not accept any fundamental divisions, is integral to how experience is understood in Indian and Chinese philosophy.

• Physicalistic monism asserts that the only existing substance is physical, while idealism states that the only existing substance is mental.

• Phenomenalism, briefly adopted by Bertrand Russell and logical positivists, is the theory that representations of external objects are all that exist.

• Non-reductive physicalism holds that mental states supervene on physical states, but are not reducible to them.

• Weak emergentism involves a layered view of nature with emergent properties that supervene over lower levels without direct causal interaction.

• Eliminative materialism argues that our common-sense "folk psychology" badly misrepresents the nature of some aspect of cognition.

• Mysterianism holds that the mind-body problem is currently unsolvable, and perhaps will always remain unsolvable to human beings.

• Linguistic criticism, as proposed by Wittgenstein, rejects the mind-body problem as illusory and argues that human experience can be described in different ways.

• Behaviorism, which dominated philosophy of mind for much of the 20th century, eliminated the idea of an interior mental life altogether and focused on the description of observable behavior.

• Identity theory holds that mental states are identical to internal states of the brain, while functionalism characterizes mental states by their causal relations with other mental states and with sensory inputs and behavioral outputs.Philosophy of Mind: Explaining the Illusory Mind-Body Problem

• Physicalism faces the problem of how the mind's properties can emerge from a material thing, leading to the naturalization of the mental project.

• The existence of qualia, subjective experiential qualities, is impossible to explain through cerebral events alone, leading to the explanatory gap problem.

• Intentionality, the capacity of mental states to be directed towards something in the external world, creates a problem when reducing mental states to natural processes.

• Philosophy of perception concerns the nature of perceptual experience and its relation to appearances and beliefs about the world.

• Mental processes are related to bodily processes, so descriptions from natural sciences play an important role in the philosophy of mind.

• Neurobiology studies the relations between mental and physical states and processes, including sensory neurophysiology, cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychology, and evolutionary biology.

• Computer science explores the automatic processing of information through artificial intelligence, with a distinction between weak and strong AI.

• Psychology investigates mental states through empirical methods, such as the psychology of perception.

• Cognitive science studies the mind and its processes through multiple research disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology.

• Near-death research explores the phenomenon of patients reporting consciousness during brain operation deactivation or cardiac arrest, raising questions about the mind-body connection.

• Continental philosophy differs from analytic philosophy by focusing less on language and logical analysis alone, with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel's Philosophy of Mind as examples.

• Phenomenology and existentialism have developed in response or opposition to the Hegelian tradition, with a focus on the lived experience of consciousness.Philosophy of Mind: Free Will and Self

• Philosophy of mind deals with the nature of the mind and its relationship to the body, and is concerned with questions such as how we perceive things, how we think and reason, how we remember, and how we act.

• Existentialism, a school of thought founded upon the work of Søren Kierkegaard, focuses on human predicament and how people deal with the situation of being alive.

• Existential-phenomenology represents a major branch of continental philosophy, rooted in the work of Husserl but expressed in its fullest forms in the work of Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty.

• Questions about what a person is and what his or her identity have to do with the philosophy of mind.

• The problem of free will takes on renewed intensity in the context of philosophy of mind.

• According to materialistic determinists, natural laws completely determine the course of the material world. Mental states, and therefore the will as well, would be material states, which means human behavior and decisions would be completely determined by natural laws.

• Compatibilists reject this argument and suggest that a free act is one where the agent could have done otherwise if it had chosen otherwise.

• Incompatibilists reject the argument because they believe that the will is free in a stronger sense called libertarianism.

• The philosophy of mind also has important consequences for the concept of "self."

• Some modern philosophers of mind, such as Daniel Dennett, believe that the self is considered an illusion.

• The idea of a self as an immutable essential nucleus derives from the idea of an immaterial soul. Such an idea is unacceptable to modern philosophers with physicalist orientations.

• In the light of empirical results from developmental psychology, developmental biology, and neuroscience, the idea of an essential inconstant, material nucleus seems reasonable.