Tutorial #6. Consciousness. The Knowledge argument. Discussion Questions

After having read Churchland (1985) "Reduction, Qualia and the Direct Introspection of Brain States", and after having got through Jackson's Knowledge Argument, try to think about these questions.

• What are qualia?
• Is consciousness the mark of the mental?
• How could the sciences (e.g. neurosciences, psychology, anthropology, etc) help us understand consciousness?<
• When Mary leaves her black-and-white room, does she acquire knowledge (in any sense)?
• Does she acquire factual (propositional) knowledge?
• Does her new knowledge consist in learning new facts (facts she did not previously know)? Or does she merely represent old facts in a new way? Does the Ability Hypothesis provide a successful response to the knowledge argument?
• What are qualia?
• What is the Explanatory Gap, and is it possible to close it?
• 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 #6. The Knowledge Argument in Cartoons

What Mary Didn't Know

Mary lives in a black and white room. She has never seen any color.

She is educated through reading black and white books, and watching lectures on a black and white television screen.

Mary becomes a brilliant scientist: she has, in fact, complete physical knowledge of the world. She specializes in human vision and knows all the physical facts about color experience.

At some stage she leaves her black and white room. For the first time in her life she sees colors. She learns something new. She learns how colors look like. She learns what it's like to see in color.

Therefore, there are non-physical facts about color experiences.

Therefore, physicalism is false.

The original cartoon can be found HERE

Tutoriaal #6. There's something about Mary. The Knowledge argument

Frank Jackson argues that there's more to the world than what physics can explain:

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. [...] What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?

Jackson 1982, p. 130.

Tutorial #5. Intentionality Naturalised. Discussion Questions

After having read Millikan (1989) Biosemantics, try to think about the following questions.

• What are the main accounts of intentionality?
• What is a representation?
• Do images represent in the same way words do?
• How can our beliefs be about non-existent objects? For example, how can I believe that Santa Claus lives in Rovaniemi (Finland)? How can such a belief be about Santa Claus? How can it be true (or false)?
• How can two distinct beliefs be about the very same object? For example, I may believe at the same time that Catwoman is hot and that Selina Kyle is not hot. But Catwoman is Selina Kyle...
• Can non-mental things exhibit intentionality? Do compasses exhibit intentionality? In which sense?
• Can Deep Blue (the chess computer) perceive a knight fork as a knight fork?
• How do biological states come to have meanings?
• What is the difference, if any, between malfunctioning and getting things wrong by mistaking them? Think about the role of evolution in Millikan’s account.
• What’s the difference between ‘normal’ and ‘normative’? Think about how Millikan uses ‘normal’.
• What does the frog's brain represent when it sees a fly?
• What are the differences between human representations and bacterial representations? Consider Millikan's argument.
  

Tutorial #5. Intentionality. Black dot vs. Fly. A Classic Objection to Teleosemantics

From Mark Rowlands Teleosemantics A Field Guide

Frogs catch flies by way of a rapid strike with their tongue. Thus, it is plausible to suppose, mediating between the environmental presence of a fly and the motor response of a tongue strike is some sort of neural mechanism that registers the fly's presence in the vicinity and causes the strike of the frog's tongue… According to the teleofunctional account, the content of state S should be, roughly, `fly!', or `fly, there!', and it derives this content from the fact that the proper or Normal function of its underlying mechanism is to detect the presence of flies. The state is, thus about flies; it means that there are flies in the vicinity.

There is, however, an alternative construal of the function of the mechanism. On this construal, what the mechanism in question has been selected to respond to are little ambient black things (To avoid becoming entangled in a completely different issue, let me make it clear that the little ambient black things are environmental entities and not dots on a retinal image). The proper function of the mechanism, on this construal, is to mediate between little ambient black things and tokenings of a state that causes the frog's tongue to strike. This state will then be about little ambient black things and will, therefore, mean that there are little ambient black things in the vicinity.

The proper function of the mechanism is different in each case since, in the latter case but not the former, the frog's mechanism is functioning properly or Normally when the frog strikes at a little ambient black thing that is not, in fact, a fly (but, say, a lead pellet or ‘BB’). And the content underwritten by the function is different in each case since not all little ambient black things are flies.

VIDEO... Frogs catching flies

Tutorial #5. Intentionality. Nuts and Bolts

Ruth Millikan

- Beliefs, desires, intentions, perceptions are all examples of mental representations. Representations are interesting objects because they bear a semantic relation to the world.
They represent something, are about things, properties, states of affairs extrinsic to them.

- Intentionality is a philosophers’ word. It is 'aboutness': words, pictures, signs, beliefs, desires, and, indeed, intentions are all about things.

- The problem of intentionality: How do mental representations mean?

- One naturalistic way to tackle the problem

Teleosemantics
The satisfaction condition for a desire is the result it is selected to produce, the truth condition for a belief the condition that ensures that this result will ensue.
More generally (Millikan), an indicative representation stands for the condition that will enable the behaviour it prompts in its ‘consumer’ to achieve its end.

Tutorial # 4. The Intentional Stance. Discussion Questions

After having read Dennett's True Believers think about the following questions:

• Give some examples of intentional states.
• Can intentionality be naturalized?
• Paul Churchland once reported of this conversation he had with his wife Pat (in The New Yorker, February 2007): "[Pat] said, 'Paul, don’t speak to me, my serotonine levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren’t for my endogenous opiates I’d have driven the car into the tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me a Chardonnay, and I’ll be down in a minute'." Do you think that folk psychological talk can\will be replaced by neurobiological talk? Why?
• Does intentional talk (i.e. beliefs – desire talk) describe or explain any real phenomenon?
• If we knew the (physical) laws that govern the behaviour of a physical system, would intentional talk still be useful?
• Is belief-desire talk a good tool for prediction? Prediction of any system (think about the Heider-Simmel’s experiment)? What’s the role of rationality assumptions in such predictions?
• How can belief-desire talk enable us to make good predictions if it doesn’t describe or explain anything real?
• What is the intentional stance?
• In which sense Dennett’s intentional stance is a form of instrumentalism?
• How should we understand Dennett’s claim that propositional attitudes are abstracta comparable to centres of gravity and economic recessions?
• Do we really take attributions of centers of gravity to be a matter of interpretation in the same way we may take propositional attitudes to be a matter of interpretation?

Tuttorial #4. The Intentional Stance. Heider & Simmel's film

In the mid 1940s, Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel produced a short film animation.
They asked observers to describe what they saw in the film.
Most subjects spontaneously took the itnetnional stance...
They developed elaborate stories about the circle and the little triangle being in love, about the big-bad grey triangle trying to steal away the circle, about the blue triangle fighting back, yelling to his love to escape into the house, and following her inside where they embraced and lived happily ever after.

You can see the film on youtube. HERE
How would you describe what is going on there?

Tutorial # 4. The Intentional Stance. In a Nutshell

From The Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind

Picture from Dan Dennett's website

"intentional stance, the - A strategy, proposed and defended by Daniel Dennett, for understanding an entity's behavior. When adopting the intentional stance towards an entity, we attempt to explain and predict its behavior by treating it as if it were a rational agent whose actions are governed by its beliefs and desires. The intentional stance contrasts with two other strategies, the physical stance and the design stance."

Tutorial #3. Functionalism. Discussion Questions

After having read Ned Block's Troubles with Functionalism try to think about these questions:

Image from Geoff Draper's Cartoon Page

• Can pain turn out to be correlated with different brain processes in different creatures? If so, would that be the same “kind” of pain?
• Could a robot feel pain?
• Unlike the behaviorist, the functionalist believes that mental states are real internal states that cause our behavior. But the functionalist wants to retain the behaviorist's idea that there are close conceptual connections between our mental states and the types of behavior caused by them. How can the functionalist describe the connections between any one mental state (e.g. a belief) and behavior, until he has already defined lots of other mental states (e.g. desires, intentions, emotions, thoughts, hopes etc.)?
• Is the mind a computer?
  
• What is multiple realizability and how it motivates functionalism?
• From Bickle, J (2006). Multiple Realizabilityn In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
  

Consider what appears to be a genuine case of multiple realizability: two objects that “do the same thing” but in very different ways. Either the realizing kinds genuinely differ in their causally relevant properties or they do not. If they do not, then we don't really have a case of multiple realizability (like the corkscrews that differ only in color or composition). If they do, then they are different kinds. But then they are not the same kind and again we don't have an instance of multiple realizability—of a single kind with distinct realizations.

• Do you find this argument convincing? Can you give an example of a genuine case of multiple realizability?
• What is the "input-output" problem for functionalism?
• Can a functionalist account for what we take to be the causal efficacy of our mental states? For example, if pain is realized in me by some neural state-type, then insofar as there are purely physical law-like generalizations linking states of that type with pain behaviour, one can give a complete causal explanation of my behaviour by citing the occurrence of that neural state (and the properties by virtue of which it figures in those laws). Are functional properties causally irrelevant then?
• Functionalists attempt to characterize mental states exclusively in relational, causal, terms. A common and persistent objection, however, is that no such characterizations can capture the qualitative character, or “qualia”, of experiential states such as perceptions, emotions, and bodily sensations, since they would leave out certain of their essential properties, namely, “what it's like”. Do you agree?

Tutorial #3. Functionalism. In a Nutshell

In Nutshell

see also: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/functionalism/

Functionalism is the view that the mind is the “functional organization” of the brain, or any other system that is functionally equivalent to the brain.

Another formulation of functionalism is that what makes something a thought, desire, pain (or any other type of mental state) depends not on its internal constitution, but solely on its function, or the role it plays, in the cognitive system of which it is a part.

More precisely, functionalist theories take the identity of a mental state to be determined by its causal relations to sensory stimulations, other mental states, and behavior.

Example, a functionalist theory might characterize as a state that tends to be caused by bodily injury, to produce the belief that something is wrong with the body and the desire to be out of that state, to produce anxiety, and, in the absence of any stronger, conflicting desires, to cause wincing or moaning. According to this theory, all and only creatures with internal states that meet these conditions, or play these roles, are capable of being in pain.

Hilary Putnam’s main example of a description of functional organization is the machine table of a Turing Machine

On this view, functionalists about the mind thinks that all there is to being intelligent, having thoughts and other mental states, is implementing some very complicated program. In a slogan, our brain is the hardware and our minds are the software. In us, this software is implemented by a human brain, but it could also be implemented on other hardware, like a Martian brain or a digital computer.

On How to Improve your Essay...

The most common comments you are likely to receive on your essays - and that I also receive on my own essays, are the following:

- "The structure and the goal of yor paper are not stated" "They are not obvious to the reader";
- "Explain this claim";
- "Inaccurate in reconstructing Mr X's view" "Be charitable!";
- "What do you mean here?" "I don't get it";
- "This is unclear, or confused, too hard to follow";
- "This is a technical term, be precise!";
- "Why? Give reasons!";
- "What's the relation between this claim and that claim?";
- "What is the conclusion?"; "Does your conclusion follow from the premisses?"
- "This is irrelevant" "Stick to the topic"
- "Give an example!"

MORALS:
If you anticipate these comments, you can prevent me to make them!
Thus, your essay will improve.

If your essay does not received the mark you expected, don't be discouraged.
Writing philosophy is not an easy task. But working seriously and constantly, your writing will improve for sure.

On Referencing

Here is some examples for referencing:

For a book:
Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of Scientific Explanation, New York: Free Press.

For a joural article:
Thaler, R. H. (1988) "Anomalies: The Ultimatum Game", Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2, pp. 195–206.

For an article reprinted in a volume:
Cartwright, N. (1983) "Do the Laws of Physics State the Facts?", in Curd, M. & Cover, J. A. eds. (1998) Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues. London: W. W. Norton and Company, pp. 865-877.

For an online article:
Beyer, C. (2007). “Edmund Husserl”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2007 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2007/entries/husserl/.

For an "old" classic - there are a few ways:
Anselm, St., Proslogion, in St. Anselm's Proslogion, M. Charlesworth (ed.), Oxford: OUP, 1965

or

Kant, I., 1781, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781, vols. 3 and 4 of Gesammelte Schriften, de Gruyter & Co., 1969; page references are to the English translation, Critique of Pure Reason,
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

or

Kant, I., 1780 (1965), The Metaphysical Elements of Justice: Part I of the Metaphysics of Morals, J. Ladd, Trans., Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co.

- Finally, here is an example for brief quotations in the body of your essay:
"… thus we come to see that ‘”meanings” just ain’t in the head!" (Putnam 1977, p. 704).

Some Tips for your Essay

Here is Some Suggestions for your essay.

- First, Jim Pryor has an excellent website, where you can find some Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper.
They are very useful! Try to take a look.

- Second, make clear the structure of your paper right at the beginning.
State the goal of your paper: What is your aim? What are you going to do?
Give a brief outline of how you are going to proceed to make your point:
What are you going to do first?; What are you gonna do then? How are all the steps in your argument related?

- Third, try to "delimit your own territory".
Focus! Make small points; be "modest" in your claims.
Don't be afraid of using such expressions as "it seems", "it may be the case", "it might be".
Always give reasons! Motivate your claims -

- Fourth, polish, polish, polish!
Use short sentences, with very few adjectives, and connect the sentences logically with the right conjunctions.

- Fifth, use relevant references and the right referencing.