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Does nobody do AQA A Level Philosophy of Mind and J.S.Mill?!!

I've had a look through previous messages and cant find anything on this! Please let me know if you're out there!! I need serious revision help with P.O.M theories and desperate for criticisms of Mill! You have until Friday afternoon guys dont let me down!!

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Reply 1

BBJai

od i seriously need help too lol.. aint even READ mill yet and thers only 3 days left T_T.. help..

Reply 2

arrgh

BBJai

od i seriously need help too lol.. aint even READ mill yet and thers only 3 days left T_T.. help..

yeh i havent read it either. go on www.classicnotes.com and read the summaries on there! im not gonna bother reading it its a load of rubbish. Havent done any revision yet cos of all my other exams!

Reply 3

BBJai

arrgh

yeh i havent read it either. go on www.classicnotes.com and read the summaries on there! im not gonna bother reading it its a load of rubbish. Havent done any revision yet cos of all my other exams!

cheers for dat link then ^_^.. wot u get in philo last year..??

Reply 4

arrgh

BBJai

cheers for dat link then ^_^.. wot u get in philo last year..??

i got a B but it was quite a low one. Kicked ass on theory of knowledge though i got 87 or something. then got cs on plato and moral philosophy but re-sat moral philos this year. Think iv screwed up on synoptic though id be very lucky to get a C on that and im rubbish at analysing texts - i might do ok in theory of mind if i start revising! You?

Reply 5

Grifter

any predictions for the Mind question on Friday? I reckon Dualism in some form- hasn't come up in a while.

Reply 6

arrgh

Grifter

any predictions for the Mind question on Friday? I reckon Dualism in some form- hasn't come up in a while.

Yeh iv written a list of whats come up every year and i think Dualism as the (b) question is likely or perhaps Behaviourism? Are they likely to ask a main question on functionalism or anything? I dont think personal identity will come up as a (b) q as it came up last time and probs not identity theory which is a shame cos i like that one! I hope they dont confuse me and ask us to assess more than one theory - 'Assess Dualism' would be nice!

Reply 7

randomcharlotte

arrgh

I'm thinking its probably going to be along the lines of assess dualism/behaviourism... my teacher said that mind has a really forgiving mark scheme and they just want you to show that you can apply the theories, so its quite easy to do well.

Reply 8

Wise One

I'm doing Mill's 'On Liberty'

Check out this website: http://www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/liberty/about.html

Reply 9

arrgh

yeh i've printed the notes off that already!! Can someone PLEASE explain to me what functionalism/computer analogies is but in real english not philosophy babble?! Im so confused and the general theme hasnt come up for ages!! I know dualism quite well though (well, substance dualism not property!) Would you say on a (b) question write about 2 arguments for then 2 problems ish? Cos there's not much time?
ta x

Reply 10

Grifter

looking through the past papers, it seems to me that 1 question is always on the main theories: Functionalism, Dualism, Mind/Brain and Behaviourism (ie part A will be 2 criticisms/strengths, B an assessment), whilst the other question is sort of miscellaneous "everything else"- for example: the problem of other minds, personal identity, mental causation, solipsism etc...

Am I right here- this always the case? They won't 'mix' a theory with the other stuff? I've only learnt the 4 main theories, and can't be bothered with that other crap.

Reply 11

arrgh

Grifter

Yeh i know what you mean, none of the other stuff really makes sense to me. So do you think if we learn those four main theories we'll be ok? What about eliminative materialism, biological naturalism etc?? I'm scared!!

Reply 12

Neitzhschezehcz

Thought I might copy/paste my notes on Dualism. Hope they help. Bear in mind these are not definitive and there may be errors.

Theories of Mind: Dualism

Monism – the universe is composed of one substance (either only mind or matter)
Materialism – monists that hold there is only matter
Hard/Reductive Materialism – the mind is entirely explicable in terms of physical
Soft Materialism – the mind is a biological bi-product but not entirely explicable in physical terms
Immaterialism – monists that hold there is only mind
Dualism – the universe is composed of two substances (both mind and matter)

What is Mind?

• Mind is a term used often in conversation – “never mind”, “in the back of my mind”, “he’s dirty minded” but it’s not clear what is being referred to. Are we referring to minds or behaviour, or something else?
• We cannot see, taste, touch, smell or hear mind – it is intangible – but it is the base of all things tangible. In it we sense sight, taste, touch and the rest, but the mind cannot perceive itself. We may introspect, but not examine in the same way we might the empirical world.
• Some models of introspection erroneously refer to the mind as something to be examined empirically, but we must always take into account that the mind is not objective in observing itself.
• If one defines the mind as the self then how does one define the self?
• Some may define the self as ‘something to which belongs a number of physical and mental properties but is distinct from these properties’. E.G. ‘my hand’, ‘my pain’. No one else may have these properties.
• But if I give my kidney away for a transplant is the kidney still mine in another’s body? Or is it now his? It could be argued one working kidney is a necessary condition for continued selfhood but not a sufficient one – it is my kidney but the kidney is not me, just a part of a package of physical requirements that add up to sustain selfhood.
• Mind/Brain identity theory argues the mind is the brain and the self is a summative concept of a personal history.
• While we can’t define mind we can highlight some criteria for distinguishing between mind and matter. These criteria are: ‘Access’, ‘Qualitative features’ and ‘Mental acts’.

Access
• There is the private world of sensation and world of publicly observable phenomena. We have privileged access to this private world. The only way others will gain access to your private world is by you telling them what you are feeling, but this is incomplete.
• It is logically impossible, therefore, to be mistaken about ones own feelings as they are immediate. This is in contrast to other people’s pain which is purely behaviouristic.

Qualitative features
• Sensations, feelings, mental images – qualia. Examples are the taste of an orange, the feeling of sand wood.
• This also refers to pictorial representations – if I close my eyes and imagine a banana I am seeing a banana quale.
• Only conscious agents have qualia and without conscious agents there would be no qualia.

Mental acts
• The mind can commit cognitive acts – reason, speculation, recollection, decision.
• They can also have propositional attitudes – desiring that, intending that, hoping for, etc. A proposition attitude is someone’s attitude towards a proposition. A proposition may be either true or false, but a person may have whatever attitude towards a proposition. For example, ‘the car is blue’ is a factual description but ‘he hoped the car would be blue’ is a propositional attitude.
• In justifying our own behaviour and understanding the behaviour of others, we cite propositional attitudes. This ability leads to empathy. By itself, behaviour is meaningless.
• Another feature of minds is that their contents (thoughts) are always about an external state of affairs. In other words, they are intentional. This intentionality is part of what makes mental states unique from physical states. The difference between a limestone and us is that we are capable of mental states and the limestone is not, not so much our biological makeup.

• In summation, if every conscious being was emptied off the world then the above qualities would cease.

Dualism

• It is argued there are three key reasons for dualism’s widespread popularity;
1. The idea of immortality is attractive, which dualism offers – if the mind continues after the material ends then we have less to fear in death.
2. The religious notion of disembodied survival, and the afterlife – culture and socialization are religious and thus dualism has this backing.
3. It backs a way of understanding the self rooted deep in language – we refer to inanimate materials on one hand and ourselves on a whole other. This is similar to the concept of two substances as found in substance dualism.
• There is also the intuitive feeling that beyond the body lies something that, while reliant on the physical body for existence, is separate from it in some way. Distinct, though intermingled.

Substance Dualism

• Descartes sharply divides mind and body. The mind is functionally independent from the body, and is a non-physical, perhaps spiritual substance.
• Physical events are caused mechanically by the world and mental events are usually self-generated by free choice.
• Even when there is casual interaction between mind and body we might feel mental causation is informed by an intervening uncaused reason.

Assessing substance dualism
• Defence of substance dualism usually consists of picking out features in the world that could not exist were there no mental substance. An example of such a feature is values – there could be no aesthetic, moral or religious values if there was only the physical.
• Substance dualists need to show first the irreducibility of the physical and second that irreducibility entails

The many substances problem
• Dualism’s popularity partly stems for its inclusion of the soul and free will as contained by the self. The argument goes that merely a single substance of matter could not account for the huge diversity of mental phenomena.
• But the claim that the physical can’t account for the mental doesn’t equate to the mental being a single, immaterial substance. Even a working argument for a mental substance wouldn’t alone prove its immortality.
• Can it not be argued that the difference between mental phenomena are also incredibly different – mental anguish and physical pain for example – so that containing them within the definition of one mental substance is too limiting also? Why should there only be one mental substance?
• This undermines the dualist claim of a unique self by highlighting the possibility of a multitude of selves.
• If dualists respond that a single substance (the mental) is capable of a complex variety of operations then why do they deny the physical can do the same thing?

The problem of the negative account of mental substance and its explanatory emptiness
• The possible existence of an immaterial substance doesn’t explain anything.
• The dualist model of mind does not allow empirical scrutiny.
• The dualist model is the remnants of saying what mind isn’t – it isn’t divisible, spatial, subject to laws of physics, mortal etc.
• So what is mind? Featureless, according to dualists. We can’t define something by saying what it is not, and dualists do not define mind.
• Dualists might respond that the mind is pure energy, but energy itself is physical. So to posit such is a physicalist account, not a dualist one.
• There are physical accounts for mental activity – low blood sugar correlates with tiredness, physical injury with the sensation of pain. But substance dualists deny this, saying thought is underpinned by a featureless mental substance that defies positive description and does not demonstrate a believable account of casual interaction between the mental and the brain.

Argument from neural dependence
• If dualists deny thought’s reliance on the physical brain they must account for a variety of facts that suggest thoughts are dependant on the brain’s chemistry.
• Mood altering drugs – alcohol, pain killers, coffee, hallucinogenic, LSD. Such drugs change our mood sand effect how we behave.
• Brain damage – dementia effects the ability to reason, ‘corpus callosum’ being damaged (that connects the 2 hemispheres of the brain) causes split personality.
• If thoughts and feelings occur independently of the brain then none of these things should happen.

Property Dualism

• Property Dualism agrees that neuroscience gives a better account of thought as electrochemical activity in the brain than the substance dualist, but insists that mental phenomena cannot be reduced to the physical. It argues that there are properties of the brain that cannot be understood as physical, and thus is dualist.
• Property Dualism can be seen as conceptual rather than ontological – it is a way of understanding mind rather than the positing of two entities.
• The properties this model refers to are those exclusive to the mental – intentionality, thoughts, feelings, qualia, etc. There are two views on their irreducibility – epistemological thesis and ontological thesis.
1. Epistemological – stems from privileged access. My immediate private sensory experience is irreducible. My point of view exists and can be labelled. A robin has an experiential world too, and this world can be labelled as what it is like to be that robin.
2. Irreducibility – obtains when considering the physical processes of the brain. The brain has weight and dimension, but thoughts are non-dimensional. Introspection does not seem to reveal a material of the brain.

Criticisms
• Problem of Causation - that which is independent from the world of physics cannot have a casual effect on it. The view that consciousness is dependent on neurology but experientially independent is puzzling if we try to state reasons cause actions.
• Physical to mental causation is compatible with property dualism in that it talks of the mind’s dependence on the brain, but how about mental causing the physical?
• 2 problems with this – how does the physical give rise to and casually effect the mental, and how does the mental have an effect on the physical?
• Two property dualist positions respond to these problems – Emergentism & Epiphenomenalism.
• Epiphenomenalism and Emergentism often form a general account of property dualism – Emergentism pays regard to scientific naturalism and epiphenomenalism tries to reconcile irreducibility with casual interaction.

Emergentism (Emergent property dualism)
• A usually naturalistic view that takes into consideration the evidence for evolutionary development of brains.
• Consciousness emerges from unconsciousness as the brain evolves – at some point in evolution consciousness and the mental appeared as complexity grew, from material to ‘self’. Dualism springs from monism.
• Emergentism is a general evolutionary doctrine not confined to consciousness – it also used to explain things such as liquidity as an emergent property of hydrogen and oxygen molecules, or plasticy as an emergent property of oil, itself an emergent property of botanic decay.

Criticisms of Emergentism
• It seems incoherent to claim a physical origin of the mental in the past and deny it in the present. At what point does something which is a property of brains and is entirely dependant upon them take on itself the property of irreducibility?
• The premise that consciousness is dependant on neural activity does not support the conclusion that it is independent of brains. Why not abandon dualism from that premise?
• How many dualisms? Why not one for each consciousness? The dualist doesn’t believe one may share subjectivity so how can he know that all consciousness is similar?

Epiphenomenalism
• Epiphenomena are conscious properties of brains that are above physical states of brains.
• They are the same sorts of things as qualia, but not identical – qualia refers to the qualitative feel of inner states, epiphenomenalism is an account of how these inner states arise.
• Epiphenomenalism holds the brain has a casual input on the mental, but that the mental has no casual input on the brain. The mental is the by-product of brain activity. What we regard as a casual chain of thought that leads to action is simply an accompaniment to a physical causation that operates for brains. The mental is like leaves being blown in the wind, physical being the wind itself.

Criticisms of Epiphenomenalism
• It loses what it feels like to act upon emotions and desires and makes redundant a plethora of mental terminology. Thoughts are just as much determined as brains are. Freedom of choice is eliminated, that seems to go against Descartes’ original intentions in the structuring of dualism.
• Part of the main thrust of dualism is that the self is completely independent of matter, but epiphenomenalism concedes so much to neuroscience it seems to be no longer dualistic.

Reply 13

arrgh

oh my god thank youuuuuuuuuuuu!! Dont want to sound rude but....do you have anything on functionalism/computational theories of mind or behaviourism??! THANK YOU!

Reply 14

arrgh

we dont need to know about reductive and non-reductive materialism do we??
I've looked at the syllabus and the sections are:

1) Approaches to mentality and the Nature of Mind (biggest section)
- Dualism* (substance and property) -[so do we need to know epiphenomenalism?]
- Behaviourism*
- Identity theory*
- Eliminative Materialism*
- Functionalism*
- Biological Naturalism*
2) The Mind and Body Problem
- relationship between mind and body
- mental causation
- consciousness
3) Knowledge of self and self-consciousness
- personal identity
- minds as computers*
4) Knowledge of others
- solipsism
- other minds*

* = what im going to bother looking at. Urghhghg this is so stressful! Why did i leave revision so late??!

Reply 15

Neitzhschezehcz

Functionalism holds that the only thing required to produce consciousness is the process that leads to it. Consciousness is the complex interactions between different functional proccessess, and mental states are precisely these complex interactions. Functionalists hold that as long as the functions are there, consciousness is also. The mind is not a thing or state, but a function or procedure - whatever does such and such is a mind. The contraversial side of this is that it means that theoretically consciousness could be acheived in non-biological systems, such as computers. This is all contrary to the materialist view that a brain is required for consciousness, and that consciousness could be traced back to a particular center of the biological brain.

So what is a function? A function is a state of an individual that transforms an outward or environmental input into an outward environmental output. The series of functions within this function are also involved - for example, someone says 'hello', you hear him, the words go to your brain and you understand them, your response is then chosen, goes to your speech centre and you reply 'Hi'.

See the Turing Test in reference to this.

Criticisms of Functionalism:
Twin Earth thought experiment.
Chinese Room thought experiment

For info about all of this stuff visit Wikipedia, an online encycopedia.

Eliminative Materialism
Functionalism
Dualism

etc

Reply 16

ChariK

Thank God I'm not alone! It dawned on me this morning I know NOTHING about Phil of Mind and Hume.. screw Personal Identity, I'm just gonna do the theories!!

Reply 17

Neitzhschezehcz

Heh, well if it helps I know little about mind and next to nothing about Russell's Problems of Philosophy which is arguably the hardest text at that level.

Reply 18

arrgh

yeh good plan. Ok lets stick together this is what we're learning:
- DUALISM (quite likely to come up)
- BEHAVIOURISM (ditto)
- FUNCTIONALISM
- and then briefly go over - identity theory (came up big time last yr), eliminative materialism and bio naturalism.

oh goddd i've done even less set text revision!

Reply 19

ChariK

Nice, nice.. hehe.

You doing revision today?

Exams last year didn't matter to me but they do now cos one bad grade could mean not getting into the university you want. :/

Le sigh..