Mind-Body Philosophy Lecture
Mind-Body Philosophy Lecture
Mind-Body Philosophy Lecture
Philosophy Understanding
& Intellectual History the Mind
Mind-Body
Philosophy
Course Guidebook
P
atrick Grim is the Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
at Stony Brook University. Having graduated with highest honors in both
Anthropology and Philosophy from the University of California, Santa Cruz,
Professor Grim was named a Fulbright Fellow to the University of St. Andrews,
Scotland, from which he received his B.Phil. He received his Ph.D. from Boston
University with a dissertation on ethical relativism and spent a year as an Andrew
W. Mellon Faculty Fellow at Washington University.
Professor Grim has received the president’s and chancellor’s awards for
excellence in teaching at Stony Brook University. He was named Marshall M.
Weinberg Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan in 2006
and visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of
Pittsburgh in 2007. He has also been a frequent visiting scholar and professor at
the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan.
PAT R I C K G R I M I
Professor Grim has published extensively in computational modeling and on such
topics as theoretical biology, linguistics, decision theory, and artificial intelligence.
His work spans ethics; philosophical logic; game theory; contemporary metaphysics;
and philosophy of science, law, mind, language, and religion.
Professor Grim has taught three other Great Courses: The Philosopher’s Toolkit: How
to Be the Most Rational Person in Any Room; Philosophy of Mind: Brains, Consciousness,
and Thinking Machines; and Questions of Value. ■
II M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Table of
Contents
Introduction
Professor Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi
Course Scope. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Lecture Guides
Lecture 1
Mind, Body, and Questions of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Lecture 2
Mind and Body in Greek Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Lecture 3
Eastern Perspectives on Mind and Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Lecture 4
Using the Body to Shape the Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
TA B L E O F C O N T E N TS III
Lecture 5
History of the Soul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Lecture 6
How Descartes Divided Mental from Physical. . . . . . . . . . . 57
Lecture 7
Mistakes about Our Own Consciousnesses. . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Lecture 8
Strange Cases of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Lecture 9
Altered States of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Lecture 10
Memory, Mind, and Brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Lecture 11
Self-Consciousness and the Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
Lecture 12
Rival Psychologies of the Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Lecture 13
The Enigma of Free Will . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
Lecture 14
Emotions: Where Mind and Body Meet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Lecture 15
Could a Machine Be Conscious? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Lecture 16
Computational Approaches to the Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
IV M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Lecture 17
A Guided Tour of the Brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Lecture 18
Thinking Body and Extended Mind. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
Lecture 19
Francis Crick and Binding in the Brain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
Lecture 20
Clues on Consciousness from Anesthesiology . . . . . . . . . . 201
Lecture 21
Of Mind, Materialism, and Zombies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
Lecture 22
Thought Experiments against Materialism . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
Lecture 23
Consciousness and the Explanatory Gap. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
Lecture 24
A Philosophical Science of Consciousness? . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
References
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
TA B L E O F C O N T E N TS V
Acknowledgments
vi M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Mind-Body
Philosophy
H
ow can three and a half pounds of gray matter in our skulls produce the
world of subjective experience? What is the relation between minds and
bodies—between the mental and the physical? How does the brain produce
the phenomena of consciousness in memory, emotion, perception, altered states,
and our sense of ourselves? Questions of bodies and minds have been topics of
intense concentration through the history of philosophy. We can now approach
those questions with new techniques and new findings in the brain sciences. In this
course, we’ll draw on both the resources of philosophical history and contemporary
psychology and neuroscience in order to explore the multifaceted relationships
between minds and bodies—between consciousness and the brain.
We’ll trace philosophical approaches to bodies and minds from the ancient
Greeks through the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and Renaissance to the
birth of psychology and 20 th-century debates. Materialism, idealism, dualism,
and a range of other positions are examined in contemporary forms as well as
historical contexts. Lectures include contributions from the Presocratics, Plato,
Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke,
Hume, Kant, Sigmund Freud, William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Alan
M. Turing, always with an eye to their importance from the perspective of the
21st century. Hinduism, Buddhism, meditation, and yoga are included as
alternative approaches from the East, together with a history of the soul from the
Orphic mysteries through the Judeo-Christian tradition.
COURSE SCOPE 1
How exactly does the brain produce the phenomena of consciousness? Drawing on
today’s neurosciences, we will explore the many ways that memory works;
the nature of emotion, self-consciousness, and our sense of self; the routes of
perception, dreams, hallucinations; and questions of free will. The course includes a
tour of the brain through strange forms of consciousness: blindsight, face blindness,
motion blindness, Tourette’s, left-side neglect, split brains, locked-in syndrome,
loss of ability to remember, and inability to forget.
2 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
3
4 M ind - B ody P hilosophy
Lecture 1
● Philosophers, on the other hand, have been dealing with the central issues
for centuries. Their tools have been different: the abstract tools of logic and
philosophical argument.
6 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Brain scientists focus on the empirical details as subjective experience emerges
from a physical substrate. Philosophers focus on how such a thing is even
logically possible.
The Field
● When starting a journey, it often helps to have a rough map of the territory.
A strategy from work by the philosopher John Haugeland is useful here:
envisioning the territory as a baseball field.
● In the ballpark of mind-body ideas, materialists are in right field. For them,
the only world we have is a physical world. Everything real must therefore be a
part of that world. To the extent that subjective phenomena are real, they must
ultimately be physical.
● The idealists are in left field. They say the only experience of the world we
have is subjective experience. To the extent that anything objective is real,
it must somehow be a construct from the subjective. Idealists are few and far
between these days.
● The dualists play center field. For them, the world is not purely physical,
as the materialists would have it. The world is not essentially subjective, as the
idealists would have it. The world is composed of two different realms, neither
of which can be denied: mind and body, objective and subjective. The dualists
try to cover both fields.
● Outfielders can play deep or shallow, and that is part of the baseball field
image too. Deep in right field are the reductive materialists. As they see it,
because the universe is ultimately the universe of physics, everything—both
people and their subjective lives—must reduce to elements of physics.
L E C T U R E 1 M I N D , B O DY, A N D Q U E ST I O N S O F C O N S C I O U S N E SS 7
● Not all materialists play deep. Some suggest that reality must be understood
on different levels. Maybe there are explanations appropriate at the level of
psychology that don’t deny the ultimately physical character of the universe,
but that don’t reduce to physics, either.
● Regarding the idealists in left field: Some play deep and some play shallow.
Deep in left field are those who think that there is no physical universe.
An objectively real world is an illusion. Somehow the whole thing is made
of subjectivity.
● Playing shallow or deep in center field means taking one or another approach
to the problem of interaction. Toward the infield are those who ultimately
think the two realms are really one, seen perhaps from two sides. Farther back
you find those who think there are two essentially different realms but that
there is some point at which they make contact.
● Deep in center field are those who think, if there is any contact at all, it is a
contact that will be conceptually impossible for us to see. These contemporary
philosophers, called mysterians, think that the connection between the
subjective and the objective will forever remain a mystery.
● If that baseball field map covers the conceptual possibilities, the truth must lie
in there somewhere. Somewhere in left, right, or center field, deep or shallow,
is the sweet spot that is the truth about brains and minds. But how do we
find it?
8 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Losing Limbs
● Today’s brain scientists are relative newcomers to the mind-body problem.
But they’ve become major players. It’s safe to say that we have learned more
about the brain in the last 30 years than in the previous 3,000. It may be time
to reshape our view of mind and body in light of new information.
● One example: When an arm or leg is lost, a person may continue to “feel” the
missing arm or leg. The British war hero Lord Horatio Nelson, whose right
arm was amputated after he took a musket ball in 1781, was a classic case.
He reported feeling his missing right hand as clenching uncontrollably,
the fingernails digging painfully into the palm.
● The term “phantom limb” was coined in the context of massive numbers of
amputations in the carnage of the American Civil War, when the phenomenon
became all too familiar.
● It’s interesting to note that Nelson himself took his experience with a phantom
limb as evidence for the existence of a sentient soul existing beyond death.
If the sensations of an arm can exist when it is no longer there, why not the
sensations of an entire body?
● There is a newer and very different theory of phantom limbs, which turns
crucially on brain anatomy. A canyon in the brain, the central sulcus,
separates the frontal lobe in front of it from the parietal lobe behind it.
Along the front side of it is the primary motor cortex, from which signals
output to the muscles of the body. Along the rear of the central sulcus is
the somatosensory cortex, in which sensations from the body are processed.
L E C T U R E 1 M I N D , B O DY, A N D Q U E ST I O N S O F C O N S C I O U S N E SS 9
● Sensations from particular areas of your body are processed in very specific
areas of the somatosensory cortex. The somatosensory body map can
reorganize when there are parts of the body from which stimulation is no
longer received.
● Ramachandran tested his theory with a young man who had lost an arm in
an automobile accident. The subject said he could still feel the missing hand.
Ramachandran stimulated other parts of the young man’s body to see what
produced a sensation in the phantom hand.
● He was able to map the phantom hand on two other body areas: the young
man’s face and his shoulder. Stimulation of those areas was read as sensation
from the missing hand.
● If that Ramachandran’s idea was right, some sensory input that will keep the
motor impulse under control would be required. Ramachandran developed
a technique to supply visual input using a simple mirror box. The amputee’s
remaining arm goes in a box, which creates a mirror image where the
phantom arm should be. Unclenching the good arm looks like relaxing
the phantom arm.
● The result of the therapy is that the phantom arm can feel that it has relaxed.
Thirty-five years after an accident that left her with a phantom hand,
a 57-year old woman’s phantom hand pain had become unendurable.
But 30-minute sessions with a mirror box over two weeks were sufficient to
relieve that pain.
● It seems that the mind can create the body. The lesson of phantom limbs is that
it can create a part of the body that isn’t there at all.
10 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Gaining Limbs
● The first part of the story of phantom limbs is the story of limbs lost.
The second part is about limbs gained.
In the first 10 years of the 21st century, there were nearly 6,000 amputations in
the U.S. Armed Forces. Developing replacement limbs is a huge need.
L E C T U R E 1 M I N D , B O DY, A N D Q U E ST I O N S O F C O N S C I O U S N E SS 11
● Brain-computer interfaces represent a major step toward that goal. A crucial
early achievement was muscle reinnervation, which routes severed nerves at
the site of an amputation to some living muscle that is still intact.
● Motor impulses along the original nerves then produce muscle contractions
somewhere else. In arm replacements, the nerves are often routed to the
pectoral muscles. We can build a device that reads those muscle contractions
and produces computer-controlled movements in a robotic arm.
● This process requires extensive training. But the amazing takeaway is that the
brain can learn to control a prosthetic limb as its own. The mind can build a
new body.
● In both quadriplegia and ALS, the brain is still fully functional. People can
still imagine moving their hands or legs. The goal is therefore to
use microelectrode arrays planted directly into the skull to record
electrical activity. That electrical activity is translated through complex
algorithms in the computer interface to guide an artificial limb.
● Developmental obstacles are daunting, but all evidence is that the mind
can learn to use an artificial body even in cases as extreme as these.
DARPA reports that an individual can learn to produce a few movements
of a robotic limb within two weeks and many more within five.
● Very recently, the technique has been extended even further. Brain-controlled
electrical impulses have been sent to a quadriplegic’s own arm and hand,
activating their own muscles with electrical impulses. Bypassing the damaged
neural pathway with a very indirect route, the mind has found its own
body again.
12 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Suggested Reading
Gutenplan, ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind.
Questions to Consider
1 If the baseball diamond is a map of all conceptual possibilities, a fly ball hit just
right would land on the truth. If you had to make a guess right now, where do
you think it would land? What position would you play?
L E C T U R E 1 M I N D , B O DY, A N D Q U E ST I O N S O F C O N S C I O U S N E SS 13
The Greek
philosopher
Aristotle
The Beginning
● The origins of what we think of as Greek philosophy lie not in Greece but in
what was known as Ionia, on the west coast of present-day Turkey. In order to
find the city of origin for Western philosophy, you have to travel 200 miles east
of Athens, across the Aegean sea, to the city of Miletus. Ionia was the cradle of
Greek philosophy, and Miletus was the cradle of Ionian thought.
16 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● The Presocratics were materialists. For them, the universe was fundamentally
a material universe. With a few qualifications, Greek philosophy begins by
exploring various forms of materialism.
● The central question for the Presocratics was the ultimate nature of the
cosmos. The Ionians were cosmologists, asking: What is the world made of?
They wanted a unified answer: a single substance of which everything else
is composed.
● Around 550 B.C., Anaximenes proposed that air was the fundamental
substance. In Heraclitus, about 500 B.C., it was fire. Whichever matter is
chosen as ultimate, we still have a firmly materialistic universe.
● Another angle came from the Pythagoreans, who flourished from the time
of Pythagoras himself in the 500s B.C. through intellectual descendants into
the 300s. The Pythagoreans rejected a cosmos made of water, air, fire, or any
other material thing. For them, the cosmos is made of numbers.
● In sum, the major message of the Presocratics is materialism. But you can also
find mentions of the transmigration of souls and hints of panpsychism
L E C T U R E 2 M I N D A N D B O DY I N G R E E K P H I LO S O P H Y 17
The Greek
philosopher
Socrates
● Plato’s clearest outline of dualism is in the Phaedo. In that work, Socrates has
been found guilty of impiety and corrupting the youth. He is sentenced to
death by drinking hemlock. Socrates speaks of the soul as trapped in the body,
liberated to fuller wisdom after death.
● For Plato, the real world is the world of ideas. In that regard, he is something
of an idealist. Over the door to Plato’s Academy was a sign that read “Let no-
one ignorant of geometry enter here.”
● A triangle drawn on a blackboard has with imperfect angles and bending lines.
Geometry is about the ideal triangle represented by that imperfect sketch.
The ideal triangle is defined in terms of three perfect angles and three
perfect lines.
● That ideal triangle is the real one for Plato. The perfect triangle is too good
for this world. It exists only in the realm of forms, of ideas. For Plato,
what goes for triangles goes for all concepts: Any act of goodness only
imperfectly represents goodness itself. Plato’s world is a world divided
between the realm of the ideal and its imperfect physical imitation. Plato says
that when we really know something, it is the ideal that we grasp.
L E C T U R E 2 M I N D A N D B O DY I N G R E E K P H I LO S O P H Y 19
Immortality
● In the Phaedo, Plato portrays Socrates as offering four arguments for the
immortality of the soul. The central argument turns on this: For Socrates,
knowing demands contact with the ideal world of forms. He maintains that
“learning” is actually remembering from our previous existence among the
forms. He concludes that there must therefore be a life beyond the present one:
a life among the forms.
● He also argues from opposites: If death comes from life, then life must come
from death. Like Pythagoras before him, he too invokes the transmigration
of souls.
Modularity
● Modularity is a theme from Plato that is echoed in contemporary scientific
work on mind and body. Our contemporary understanding of both mind
and brain is in terms of modules: Parts of your brain do different things,
corresponding to different aspects of your mental life. Some parts handle
visual data, others handle audio data, and so on.
20 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● The idea that both mind and brain function in terms of distinct modules has
been a guiding principle throughout the history of the brain sciences. But the
core idea of distinct mental modules is a legacy of Greek philosophy, appearing
with particular strength in Plato.
The Mind
● There is another image of mind and body anticipated in Plato that appears
in contemporary research as well. This theme is captured in the title of a
book by Marvin Minsky: The Society of Mind, in which he tries to explain how
minds work.
● Minsky says the mind is what the brain does. But how? Minsky tries to show
how the mind can emerge from the collaborative organization of smaller
and essentially mindless bits—what he calls agents. A mind is an emergent
phenomenon from the interaction of bits and pieces, just as society is an
emergent phenomenon from the interaction of people.
● The analogy between minds and societies the core of another of Plato’s
dialogues, the Republic. In Plato, the analogy functions in the other direction:
It is societies that are compared to minds, rather than minds that are compared
to societies. In particular, Plato is interested in leveraging an understanding of
how a mind works well in order to understand how a society will work well.
● Plato’s soul modules come into play: The producers in his ideal society form
the economic base of the state, which he identifies with the mental module
of desire. Those who protect the state—the warrior class—correspond to the
module of thumos. But the state must be under the charge of a rational ruling
class: Plato’s rational guardians.
L E C T U R E 2 M I N D A N D B O DY I N G R E E K P H I LO S O P H Y 21
Functionalism
● Functionalism is a view that attempts to go beyond materialism and dualism.
It too is anticipated in Greek philosophy, in the work of Aristotle.
● The functionalist says that is the wrong question. Functionalists believe that
we won’t understand mental phenomena by looking for some specific stuff
they’re made of. It’s a pattern and dynamics of organization that we should be
looking for, not some “stuff” that the mind is made of.
● Aristotle can easily be seen as the first functionalist. Plato’s forms existed
in an ideal world apart: the abstract realm of “Plato’s heaven.” Aristotle was
a devoted student of Plato for 20 years. But after Plato’s death, Aristotle
began to bring Plato’s forms down to earth. The forms of things,
Aristotle says, don’t exist separately in some idealistic realm. They are the
forms of real material things.
● In his De Anima—On the Soul—Aristotle says that the soul is the form of a
natural, organized human body. If you want to find the soul, you have to look
at the living organism as a whole. The soul is the form—the organization—of
that living, acting, perceiving, and reasoning animal.
● Plato looked at the body and saw a cage that traps the soul. Aristotle looked at
the body and saw the soul in how it thrives and how it functions.
22 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● One implication of the shift from Plato to Aristotle is that Plato’s arguments
for life after death disappear. Aristotle compares the relation between matter
and form, between body and soul, to the relation between a candle and
its shape. When the candle is gone, its shape is gone too. When the body dies,
its Aristotelian form—its Aristotelian soul—will go with it. For Aristotle,
there is no life after death.
Suggested Reading
Kirk and Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers.
Plato, Phaedo.
———, Republic.
Questions to Consider
1 Plato says that we really understand geometry only when we grasp the ideal
form of a triangle. Do you think that is right? Do you think it generalizes to
knowledge in general?
2 Imagine that you were a philosopher in ancient Greece. You find yourself
pressed between the materialism of the Presocratics, the dualism of Plato, or
the functionalism of Aristotle. Which would you choose?
L E C T U R E 2 M I N D A N D B O DY I N G R E E K P H I LO S O P H Y 23
24 M ind - B ody P hilosophy
Lecture 3
Eastern
Perspectives on
Mind and Body
A
t the core of Western philosophy is the mind-body problem: If the world is
composed of two radically different kinds of things—the mental and the
physical—how can they possibly interact? The problem doesn’t appear in
the same way in Eastern philosophy at all. It’s not merely that Eastern philosophy
offers a different answer. In important ways, Eastern philosophy doesn’t even ask
the same question. Hinduism, the focus of the first half of this lecture, comes
the closest. The lecture also discusses Buddhism, which is farther away from the
Western tradition.
Hinduism
● The sacred texts of Hinduism are the ancient Indian Vedas, dating from
1500 to 500 B.C. There are many schools in the philosophical development
of Hinduism. This lecture will concentrate on the Samkhya and Yoga schools
of thought.
● Both are explicitly dualist. The world is seen as dividing into two
major components. As in Western philosophy, that division is crucial to the
role of mind.
● Yogic and Samkhya Hinduism cut their dualism at a different place than the
Western tradition does. Although the Hindu universe is composed of two basic
26 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
realms, they aren’t what we think of as the realms of mind and body, or the
physical and the mental.
● On one side of the Hindu divide is prakriti. Prakriti is the realm of the natural
world. Prakriti includes observable inner psychological processes—like
hunger and touch—as well.
● Atman is on the other side of the divide. If prakriti is the known, atman is the
knower. Prakriti includes the subjective experience, precisely because we can
experience it. Atman is not the experience, but the experiencer.
● The fundamental mystery for the Western dualist is the existence of conscious
experience in a physical world. The fundamental mystery for a Hindu dualist
is the existence of Atman in the natural world of prakriti: the existence of an
observer in a world that shows only the observed.
● Western philosophers typically try to figure out how things stand, going
from there to an inference as to how we ought to live. For example, one can
figure out whether the ethical thing to do is to create the greatest good for the
greatest number, and then put that theoretical principle into practice in one’s
own life.
L E C T U R E 3 E AST E R N P E R S P E C T I V E S O N M I N D A N D B O DY 27
28 M ind - B ody P hilosophy
● By contrast, Eastern philosophers tend to speak of truth as something that
one should approach through practice rather than theory. Understanding is
something one finds through practice: A bicycle rider doesn’t study the physics
of balance first; they understand balance by getting on and riding.
Suffering
● The practical problem of suffering is the focus of Eastern philosophy.
Here, it helps to contrast Western thoughts on suffering with Eastern ones.
An example from Western philosophy: In David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning
Natural Religion, the character Philo lists life’s horrors as part of a theoretical
argument—an argument that there can be no omnipotent, omniscient, and
morally perfect God.
● The Western philosopher wants to know how evil can fit into a universe with an
omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect creator. By contrast, the Eastern
philosopher’s concern with suffering is not first and foremost theoretical.
The Eastern philosopher’s concern with suffering is practical: How can we live
with it? How can we perhaps alleviate it?
Buddhism
● The major Eastern philosophy is Buddhism. Buddhism and Hinduism share an
emphasis on a practical rather than theoretical problem. The problem is the
same: the problem of suffering. But Buddhism offers a very different path,
a path that is not dualistic. In that sense, Buddhism offers a path even farther
from the Western tradition.
L E C T U R E 3 E AST E R N P E R S P E C T I V E S O N M I N D A N D B O DY 29
● Buddhism traces back to the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, who was born
in what is now Nepal. Though the exact dates of his life are controversial,
it appears that he died a few decades before or after 400 B.C. As a point of
reference, Socrates died by drinking hemlock at almost precisely the same
time: 399 B.C.
● Our earliest biographies of Siddhartha come from a much later period, in the
2nd century A.D. They are probably most important not as historical accounts
but as representations of central values. With variations, the story is the same
in many of those texts. Siddhartha is born as a prince, the son of a wealthy
warrior nobleman.
● At his birth, it is foretold that he will be a great man, but that he will develop in
one of two directions. Either he will become a great king or he will renounce
the material world to become a holy man. The latter will occur only if he
learns about old age, sickness, death, and the example of asceticism.
● Desiring that his son become a great king, his father hides him from life’s
harsh realities within the palace walls. No old or sick are allowed within.
Siddhartha is shielded both from the fact of death and from exposure
to religion. Into his 20s, through marriage and the birth of a son, Siddhartha
leads a sanitized life of artificial perfection, cloistered within the palace walls.
● In his late 20s, Siddhartha journeys outside the palace walls for the first time.
He is exposed to the realities of human suffering for the first time. When he
first sees a very old man, his charioteer explains that all people grow old.
● Then he sees a diseased man and a decaying corpse and learns of sickness
and death. He also sees an ascetic. His charioteer explains that the ascetic has
renounced the world in order to escape the fear of sickness, age, and death.
30 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Just as in Hinduism, the problem Buddhism attempts to resolve is the problem
of suffering. But the attempt to solve that problem is very different, as is the
worldview that results.
Buddhism on Suffering
● A major theme in modern Buddhism is the denial of any central self.
Indeed, the concept of such a self is held to be a major source of suffering.
For that reason, much of modern Buddhism is anatman—without atman.
L E C T U R E 3 E AST E R N P E R S P E C T I V E S O N M I N D A N D B O DY 31
● Although experience is vivid and various, there is no observer distinct from
that experience. There is no self. Underneath is merely soullessness and
emptiness, or sunyata. Buddha did believe in reincarnation, but where
Hinduism has many gods, Buddhism has none.
● At the core of Buddhism are the Four Noble Truths, reputed to come from the
Buddha’s first teaching:
1 Suffering is everywhere, permeating not only human existence but
existence in general.
2 All forms of suffering stem from craving: thirst, greed, and desire.
● It is because of this empiricism that the Buddhist sees the self as an illusion.
In Hinduism, atman must be something different—something dualistically
apart—because it is by definition found nowhere in experience.
In Buddhism, what is real is what is experienced, so there is no atman. With the
disappearance of self, we gain the disappearance of self-centered craving.
With the disappearance of craving comes the release from suffering.
● In one Buddhist parable, a house is on fire; this is the Buddha’s metaphor for
the suffering that surrounds us. The important thing is not to analyze the
ongoing damage. The important thing is to get out of the house. Release from
suffering—the practical issue—is more important than metaphysics.
32 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
L ecture 3 — E astern P erspectives on M ind and B ody 33
● What does the world look like if we follow the Buddhist path? The result is
not a dualist world. A dualism of mind and body, the mental and the physical,
lies deep within Western philosophy. A different dualism—of prakriti and
atman—is essential to Hinduism. But the forms of Buddhism described
in this lecture deny the existence of atman. With one stroke they leave
Dualism behind.
● The empire established by Alexander the Great extended far beyond the
Mediterranean, far to the east. It brought Greek influences to India and
Bactria, east of the Caspian Sea, and to Buddhism in the 300s B.C.
● Bidirectional influence wasn’t just through Alexander’s empire. The Silk Road
began in the 200s B.C. as a 4,000-mile trade route from China through India
to the Mediterranean. Greek philosophy, Hinduism, and Buddhism would
have met and mingled along the Silk Road as well, each influencing the other.
34 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Suggested Reading
Levine, The Positive Psychology of Buddhism and Yoga.
Nauriyal, Drummond, and Lal, Buddhist Thought and Applied Psychological Research.
Questions to Consider
1 Western philosophers typically try to figure out the theoretical truth, going
from there to practical applications. Eastern philosophers tend to speak
of truth as something you approach through practice rather than theory.
Are there moments in your life in which you’ve taken the Western approach?
The Eastern approach?
2 The core of anatman Buddhism is a denial that there is a self. But even
proponents admit that is a hard mental state to sustain. How close can
you come? Can you conceive of your experience without a you?
L E C T U R E 3 E AST E R N P E R S P E C T I V E S O N M I N D A N D B O DY 35
36 M ind - B ody P hilosophy
Lecture 4
Yoga
● Because of its myriad blended elements, creating a tidy intellectual history of
Eastern philosophy is difficult. The blended history is nowhere more evident
than in trying to track Eastern traditions of yoga and meditation.
● The origins of yoga are lost in time. The term is found in the oldest text
in any Indo-European language, the Rigveda, composed in India in perhaps
1200 B.C. It is also prominent in the Upanishads, from perhaps 500 B.C. We
tend to think of yoga as a physical practice, but in the historical texts, the
term often represents spiritual claims as well.
● The yoga with which most of us are familiar is Hatha yoga. It is a yoga of
postures and relaxation. Another form is Raja Yoga, which stresses meditation.
But there is no sharp distinction between yoga as a physical practice and yoga
as meditation.
38 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● In a classic image, the mind is compared to a lake. When the surface of the lake
is agitated, it becomes opaque. One cannot see within. Yogic postures, with
simple movements from one posture to another, are intended to help calm the
surface of the lake. The postures are called asanas. Muscle relaxation and the
coordination of breath and movement are important.
● A good yoga instructor will repeatedly tell their charges to stretch the body
taut in a pose but not beyond. The goal is not ego-driven achievement of some
demonstrated pose. The goal is a state in which one is calmly immersed, mind
and body, in breath and movement.
Meditation
● Some aspects of Buddhist meditation are only a shade away from yoga.
Anapanasati is a meditation technique common to a wide range of Buddhist
traditions. It’s sometimes called mindfulness of breathing.
● Meditation has many forms, but it gained a major foothold in the West through
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the Transcendental Meditation movement, also
known as TM.
● That’s the core of meditative practice in all its forms: The idea is to let go
of the thoughts, emotions, and anxieties that agitate the surface of the mind.
Calm the lake by letting go of distracting and disturbing influences. Notice that
the idea isn’t to push or force those influences away. The idea is to let them go.
L E C T U R E 4 U S I N G T H E B O DY TO S H A P E T H E M I N D 39
Positive Effects?
● The psychologist Martin Levine has reported his own experience with yoga.
His doctor had told him that his heart palpitations and aches and pains were
inevitable aspects of aging. But after a month of yoga, he writes, “all my
ailments—the aches and sudden pains, the heart palpitations—disappeared.
I felt as if the movements had oiled my joints, so that I now moved smoothly
and easily.” The doctor had been wrong. As Levine puts it, “I hadn’t been
aging; I had been rusting.”
● We have good scientific evidence that yoga does increase flexibility and balance
in both young people and seniors. The physical effect for which we have the
best positive evidence is relief of chronic low back pain, in both the short and
long term.
● What of mental effects? Can yoga and meditation be used to shape the mind?
Yoga and meditation certainly seem to produce an altered mental state. But it’s
not clear precisely what that altered mental state is.
● Later studies with Japanese Zen practitioners showed brain waves slowing
to 6 or 7 hertz, but with different results regarding external sensation.
Normally the brain pays reduced attention as a sound is repeated many times.
Zen practitioners responded to every repetition of the same sound as if it
were new.
40 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● The claims made for positive effects of meditation and yoga range from
the very plausible to the more extreme. It is widely accepted that yoga and
meditation reduce stress. Other aspects of mind can quite plausibly come with
stress reduction: lower levels of anxiety and improved mood, for example.
● Claims that yoga and meditation lower blood pressure and reduce the
risk of heart disease and stroke are more extreme, but those might occur
as a byproduct of stress reduction as well. Still more extreme are claims
regarding control of chronic pain, strengthening of the immune system, and
decreasing inflammation and symptoms of arthritis and fibromyalgia. It has
even been claimed the meditation can cure diabetes and cancer.
● The effects claimed at the stress-reduction end seem very plausible. Those at
the cancer-curing end seem dubious. In truth, all such claims turn out to be
amazingly difficult to test.
L E C T U R E 4 U S I N G T H E B O DY TO S H A P E T H E M I N D 41
● Here is an example that makes clear both the tantalizing possibility of positive
results from meditation and the need for solid research: Tonya Jacobs, at the
UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain, led a team that studied the impact of
meditation on telomerase, which is something like an anti-aging enzyme that
protects telomeres—sequences at the end of each strand of DNA.
Western Thought
● Using the body to shape the mind also appears frequently in Western thought,
primarily in recommendations for physical exercise.
○ Plato claimed that movement and methodical physical exercise save and
preserve the good condition of every human being.
42 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Using mice as test subjects, researchers at the Salk Institute at the University of
California in San Diego found compelling results regarding the growth of new
neurons in the brain as a result of exercise. Mice raised in an environment that
includes exercise wheels, toys, and opportunities for play grow about twice as
many new brain cells as do mice in an impoverished environment.
● Charles Hillman, at the University of Illinois, has devoted much of his research
career to the effects of exercise in children. He and his colleagues asked a
group of children to visit their lab on two occasions.
○ On one visit the kids did 20 minutes of treadmill walking before the visit.
On another visit, they rested for 20 minutes before entering the lab.
● In adults, short bouts of physical exercise have been found to enhance attention
and short-term memory. Working with Ben Sibley, a colleague in physical
education, the psychologist Sian Beilock found that those with poorer working
memory benefited most from those short workouts.
● Exercise also seems of value later in life. One of the effects of age is a shrinking
of the hippocampus. That is the module deep in the brain, important for
converting short-term to long-term memory, which showed the greatest
growth in exercising mice.
L E C T U R E 4 U S I N G T H E B O DY TO S H A P E T H E M I N D 43
QWERTY
● An example of a more subtle form of body-mind influence comes from the
standard QWERTY keyboard, so named because the first six letters on the
upper left are QWERTY.
● When asked which they like better, a majority of people pick the column on
the right, starting with CJ, GK, and KT. They have no idea why.
● The interesting fact about that column is that those letter pairs are easier to
type on the familiar QWERTY keyboard. People use a different hand for each
letter of the pair. The other column of letter pairs is harder, requiring a person
to type two letters with the same hand. This is an example of the body shaping
the mind.
44 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Suggested Reading
Beilock, How the Body Shapes the Mind.
Desikachar, The Heart of Yoga.
Questions to Consider
1 In a classic image used in both yoga and meditation, the mind is compared to
a lake. When it is agitated, it becomes opaque: You cannot see within. Try the
simple breathing exercise outlined in the video or audio lecture. Does that help
to calm the surface of the lake?
L E C T U R E 4 U S I N G T H E B O DY TO S H A P E T H E M I N D 45
46 M ind - B ody P hilosophy
Lecture 5
History
of the Soul
D
espite its immense importance over the millennia, there is one concept not
found in contemporary science or philosophy of mind: the concept of the
soul. That’s interesting because the concept of the soul is of great importance
in the history of Western philosophy, from its earliest origins to the medieval
period. Why would it vanish? What happened to it? Why are problems of mind
and body still with us, both philosophically and scientifically, while contemporary
scientists and philosophers have nothing to say about souls? This lecture considers
the history of that vanished concept.
● The word soul traces to related terms in Saxon and Old High German, Norse,
and Lithuanian. It appears in Old English in the epic Anglo-Saxon poem
Beowulf, written sometime between 700 and 1000.
48 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Platonic dialogue of 350 B.C. means something quite different than it does
350 years earlier in Homer’s epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey. In Homer,
psyche means “breath.” It’s something that leaves a person when they die,
but isn’t that person.
● In the Phaedo, Plato’s Socrates speaks of the immortality of the soul. He speaks
of the soul as trapped in the body. Both of those sound far more familiar to a
modern Western mind than did Homer’s concept.
● Regarding another source, the Bible: Surprisingly, our concept of the soul
doesn’t appear in the Old Testament any more clearly than it does in Homer.
The term in the Old Testament that gets translated as “soul” is nephesh. But
according to scholars, the word nephesh is never used to mean a spiritual part of
a person. Nephesh identifies a whole living being, not a part of the living being
that is somehow distinct from the body.
● In translating the first five books of the Old Testament into Greek, the Jewish
scholars had to translate the Hebrew term nephesh into Greek. They used the
closest Greek term they could find. That’s where the conceptual histories join:
nephesh was translated as psyche. It is in the New Testament psyche rather than
the Old Testament nephesh that we start to see familiar elements of the modern
Western concept of soul.
● Importantly, the promise of eternal life is a central idea in the New Testament.
Surprisingly, though, even with the New Testament promise of eternal life,
it’s difficult to find explicit mention of a soul that leaves the body and continues
at death.
L E C T U R E 5 H I STO RY O F T H E S O U L 49
Eastern Influences
● The point in history where we first found a concept of the soul that was close
to ours was in Plato’s dialogues of 350–400 B.C. Plato’s conception owes a
debt to the Presocratics, particularly the Pythagoreans.
● If the history of our concept of soul stretches from Plato back to the
Pythagoreans, where did they get their concept of soul, reincarnated from one
body to another? The possibility of an Eastern influence by way of Egypt is
extremely tempting. Perhaps our concept of soul traces back to Plato, from
Plato back to the Pythagoreans, and from the Pythagoreans back to influences
from the East.
50 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● What were those influences? Among the prime candidates are the
Orphic mysteries. There is much that we don’t know about the cult of
Orpheus, but it seems to have come into Greece around 600 B.C. At the
core of the Orphic mysteries is the myth of the god Dionysus, who like the
Egyptian god Osiris was dismembered and then reborn.
After Plato
● How does the conceptual history of the soul develop after Plato? The soul in its
contemporary sense really came into its own as Greek philosophy was joined
with the Judeo-Christian tradition.
● In the spring of 1947, so the story goes, a Bedouin boy searching for a lost goat
discovered a cave in the cliffs above the Dead Sea. Those caves contained jars
filled with manuscripts now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
● They are attributed to a separatist Jewish sect known as the Essenes, who
would have been contemporaries of Jesus. A Greek influence is already evident
in the writings of the Essenes, including elements reminiscent of both the
Orphic mysteries and Pythagoreanism.
L E C T U R E 5 H I STO RY O F T H E S O U L 51
Saint Augustine
Medieval Philosophy
● The further development of the concept of the soul offers a clear insight
into the two major figures in medieval philosophy: Augustine of Hippo
and Thomas Aquinas. Their views correspond with those of Plato and
Aristotle, respectively.
● Writing in 400 A.D., Augustine professes, “The question of the soul troubles
many people, and I confess that I am among them.” The soul, he says is “a special
substance, endowed with reason, adapted to rule the body.” Augustine explicitly
says, “I myself am my soul.”
● Writing eight centuries later in 1250 A.D., Aquinas says equally explicitly,
“I am not my soul.” His view is Aristotelian, rather than Platonic. The soul is
not something trapped inside a body. The soul is the form of a living being,
just as the body is the matter of a living being.
● Eventually, it was Augustine’s approach that won out. It’s not the Aristotelian
but the Platonic view that gets braided with the Judeo-Christian tradition to
give us the contemporary Western concept of the soul.
L E C T U R E 5 H I STO RY O F T H E S O U L 53
The Soul Today
● That history gives us a clearer sense of where our idea of the soul comes from.
But why isn’t it discussed in the contemporary field of psychology? There are
two major figures responsible for the disappearance of the soul, one writing
in the philosophy of the 17th century and one in the birth of a science of
psychology as the 19th century gave way to the 20 th.
● The crucial figure in exiling the soul from the science of psychology is William
James. In his major work, 1890’s The Principles of Psychology, James makes it
clear that this is to be a science of the mind. James says that the science of
psychology doesn’t need the soul. His main objection is that it is superfluous.
What the science of psychology seeks to understand is the actual subjective
phenomena of consciousness—an empirical realm open and obvious before us.
● But James was also a pragmatist, who thought that we ultimately have to
understand truth in terms of belief. He adds that anyone “who finds any
comfort in the idea of the Soul is, however, perfectly free to continue to believe
in it; for our reasonings have not established the non-existence of the Soul;
they have only proved its superfluity for scientific purposes.”
54 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Unfortunately for those seeking scientific confirmation of a soul, the
experiment and its reporting were badly flawed. As his fellow physician
Augustus Clarke pointed out, at death the lungs no longer cool the blood and
so there is a sudden rise in body temperature.
● The resulting water loss due to a rise in sweating could easily explain the 21-
gram weight loss in humans. Why doesn’t that happen with dogs? Dogs have no
sweat glands.
Suggested Reading
Goeetz and Taliaferro, A Brief History of the Soul.
Plato, Phaedo.
Questions to Consider
1 What would you give as a definition of the term soul? On that definition, do
people have souls?
2 James doesn’t say there aren’t souls. He says the hypothesis isn’t necessary for
scientific purposes. Are there different contexts in which the concept might
be important?
L E C T U R E 5 H I STO RY O F T H E S O U L 55
René Descartes
How Descartes
Divided Mental
from Physical
C
oncepts of mind and soul evolved from the Greeks through the Middle
Ages, with many classical thinkers reflecting on the nature and relation of
body and mind. What isn’t obvious in those reflections is the contemporary
form of the mind-body problem. This lecture will focus on the development of
thought from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.
A clear case can be made that it is during this period in the 1600 and 1700s that the
mind-body problem as we know it first appears with full force.
58 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● A second big split arises as a reaction to Descartes: If the mental and the
physical are two such different realms, how could one arise from the other?
There are two radically different ways to try to answer that part of the question.
Those very different reactions to Descartes echo through the Enlightenment
and continue today.
Descartes’s Goal
● Descartes is famous for the phrase “I think, therefore I am.” Here’s the context:
Descartes was looking for absolute certainty. What can we really know?
● Our senses and sensations within the body can deceive us as well. Take, for
instance, phantom limbs, which we discussed in Lecture 1.
● Can anything survive such a test? Descartes thinks the answer is yes. He thinks
he has found a rock of sheer certainty: Cogito ergo sum, or, “I think, therefore
I am.”
L E C T U R E 6 H OW D E S C A R T E S D I V I D E D M E N TA L F R O M P H YS I C A L 59
● Here is part of the passage in Augustine: “if I am deceived, by this same token
I am. … I am not deceived in this knowledge that I am.” The argument is the
same: I cannot doubt that I exist; if I doubt, I must exist.
The Division
● In his Discourse on the Method, Descartes argues, “I think, therefore I am”
and concludes, “the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from
body.” Descartes is quite explicit about identifying the mind with the
thinking soul.
● Descartes was a major contributor to the science of his time. The metaphor
of human physiology throughout the period in which Descartes lived, and the
metaphor explicit in his work in anatomy, is the metaphor of the machine.
● For Descartes and his contemporaries, the idea wasn’t merely that machines
could imitate animals. The idea was that animals were a kind of machine.
It wasn’t merely that machines could imitate bodily processes, but that bodies
were essentially mechanical.
● What Descartes draws from the cogito (“I think”) concept is not just a kernel of
certainty but a big split: a portrait of a universe split between the physical on
one side and the mental on the other.
The Bridge
● Despite their differences, it seems clear common sense that the mental and
the physical realm do interact. Take, for example, someone mentally deciding
they want a cup of coffee and then physically drinking it. Or someone
physically drinking Scotch and feeling a mental effect from the alcohol.
● Descartes didn’t write in an intellectual vacuum. His readers and critics were
quick to see the interaction problem. They asked: If what you say is true, how
could these two essentially distinct realms possibly interact?
60 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Descartes’s dualism seems to tell us that the interaction is impossible.
The interaction problem isn’t just a gap in the theory. It’s a built-in refutation
of the theory. Fortunately, Descartes gives a response to the interaction
problem in a later work.
● Near the center of the brain at the top of the spinal cord, tucked in a groove
between the two hemispheres, is a tiny gland, known today as the pineal gland.
Descartes proposed that mind and body interact precisely there, in the
pineal gland.
● Descartes also thought, mistakenly, that the pineal gland was unique
to humans. Since he thought only humans had a mind—that animals were
mere machines—he had a second mark in favor of the pineal gland as the
interaction point of mind and body.
L E C T U R E 6 H OW D E S C A R T E S D I V I D E D M E N TA L F R O M P H YS I C A L 61
● Moreover, as a piece of philosophy, the hypothesis was doomed to failure
from the start. After all, the question isn’t where mind and body interact.
The question is how they possibly can. Given dualism, the problem isn’t
what or where the point of contact is between the mental and the physical.
The problem is rather that any point of contact looks like a simple impossibility.
● On one side were those who accepted Descartes’s arguments, but confronted
the interaction problem more directly. Two attempts on that side of the
split are the occasionalism of Nicolas Malebranche and the pre-established
harmony of Gottfried Leibniz. Both philosophers are full-blown dualists.
There are physical and mental realms, which do not interact.
● Forty years later, Leibniz offered an even more creative theory. The mental
and the physical are indeed two essentially different realms. There is no real
causal interaction between them.
○ But at the beginning of the creation, God wound up a physical clock that
would carry forward the entire physical history of the universe. Beside it
he wound up a clock of mental events to carry forward the mental history
of the universe.
○ In his wisdom, God designed the clocks so that they would run perfectly
in parallel, side by side, despite the lack of any real link between them.
It is known as Leibniz’s doctrine of pre-established harmony.
62 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Both of these are attempts to live with the implications implicit in
Cartesian dualism. If Malebranche and Leibniz’s theories seem like desperate
measures, they’re an indication of the desperate measures that a full-blown
dualism seems to require.
● The fact that spirit pervades the whole universe marks Spinoza as a pantheist.
He also thinks that all aspects of the reality are logically necessary. That’s why
he thinks he can deduce all of reality from basic axioms by logic alone.
L E C T U R E 6 H OW D E S C A R T E S D I V I D E D M E N TA L F R O M P H YS I C A L 63
● Spinoza’s monism is probably the high point of rationalism: the view that
the key to knowledge is not experience based, on the model of scientific
experiment, but pure reason based, on the model of mathematics.
● Like dualism, monism faces a basic problem: If there is just one universe, why
does it seem to have such different sides? How can the objective somehow be
the subjective? How can the physical somehow be mental?
● A similar point arises in Hume’s work and in Buddhism. The experiencer isn’t
itself evident to experience, and isn’t evident to Descartes.
● The reactive split between dualism and monism continues. The dominant view
in the development of the brain sciences through the 20 th and 21st centuries
has clearly been materialistic monism: Everything mental must be grounded
in a thoroughly physical brain. Everything that is mentally real must be
physically real. Much of 20 th- and 21st-century philosophy of mind follows
that same approach.
64 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Alternative forms of monism have found recent philosophical defenders.
One line of thought goes like this: Perhaps the world itself isn’t ultimately
physical, or isn’t ultimately physical alone. Perhaps we have to recognize the
realm of subjectivity not as something that is produced by the physical, but
something built into it.
● There are also increasingly strong voices arguing for dualism. Perhaps our
science inevitably leaves out the subjective half of the universe. Perhaps consci-
ousness cannot be understood in those terms. Perhaps an understanding
of consciousness demands a different kind of science—or something other
than science.
Suggested Reading
Copleston, History of Philosophy, Vol. IV.
Questions to Consider
1 Both Descartes and Augustine think there is one thing that no one and nothing
could deceive you about: That you are thinking, and therefore that you exist.
But where does that get us? Is there any way we can build to a more complete
knowledge from that?
2 The second big split in this lecture is in reaction to Descartes: the split
between monists and dualists. Are you a monist—do you think the universe is
composed of just one kind of fundamental stuff? Or are you a dualist—do you
think the universe is divided between two basic realms?
L E C T U R E 6 H OW D E S C A R T E S D I V I D E D M E N TA L F R O M P H YS I C A L 65
66 M ind - B ody P hilosophy
Lecture 7
Mistakes about
Our Own
Consciousnesses
N
othing is more intimate and immediate to us than our own consciousness.
Surely we can’t be wrong about what we see, hear, taste, and feel
in consciousness. It is immediately before us. We can be wrong about
the external things that we think we hear: the music was live, rather than a
broadcast recording. But in none of those cases are we wrong about the contents
of consciousness per se. In none of those cases are we wrong about how things
seem to us. Surely the core of that idea is right. Or is it? The focus of this
lecture will be the ways we can be wrong, surprisingly wrong, even about our
own consciousness.
An Incomplete Picture
● Consciousness is somewhat like watching a movie in a theater. There is a visual
image, like the image on the screen. There is auditory input, like input from
the speakers. All of our sensations come together at a point of consciousness
there in the inner theater.
68 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● There’s also a deeper conceptual problem with the metaphor of the inner
theater: It only makes sense if there is a spectator. If we do have a spectator,
we’re doing something like hypothesizing a person in our heads, viewing the
ongoing show.
● There again, we haven’t explained anything: How does that inner person see
the screen—with another inner screen in their own head? However easy and
tempting the inner-theater metaphor for consciousness, it can’t be right on
its own.
● But the picture comparison doesn’t fit consciousness all that well. For instance,
try to remember what a penny looks like. The general image is easy, but it’s
difficult to remember details like which way Lincoln’s head is facing and what
is written above his head. A true picture would make those details easy to
pull up.
● People do remember in general what pennies look like. But they don’t
remember precise images, so remembering isn’t much like a picture.
L E C T U R E 7 M I STA K E S A B O U T O U R OW N C O N S C I O U S N E SS E S 69
● What color was the chair? Did he put the newspaper to the left or right?
What color was the cape he threw across his shoulders? Did it have a red
silk lining? There’s no firm answer to those questions.
● When we really consider our own consciousness, at the very least the idea of a
picture may not always be a very good fit for the experiential facts.
Color Blindness
● Color blindness can teach us something regarding our own consciousness and
the mistakes we make regarding our own consciousnesses. The physiological
basis of the most common type of color vision is well understood. Receptor cells
in the retina include rods and three types of cones.
● Rods are active in low light, sensitive to brightness; they are associated with vision
in black and white. There are three varieties of cones, with peak sensitivities at
short, medium, and long wavelengths. These correspond to something like the
blue, green and yellow-green regions of the spectrum.
● Normal color vision is keyed not merely to the individual activation of these
but the balance between them. For example, there are no true red cones:
Red light is perceived because of strong stimulation of the long wavelength
cones relative to the other two.
● Most color blindness is genetic. The three different types of cones operate with
three different photopigments, which are encoded on the X chromosome; if
something goes wrong there, color blindness can result.
● There are 6.5 to 7 million cones in each eye, concentrated toward the center
of the retina. But there are 120 to 130 million rods in each eye. Cones thin
out toward the edges, leaving practically nothing but rods at the edges of the
retinal field. That’s where everyone is color-blind: In peripheral vision, people
can see dark and light, but are terrible on color.
70 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Here’s the lesson regarding consciousness: If a person were asked to paint a
picture of what their visual field looked like, knowing only what we’ve just
learned, they might be tempted to paint a picture that was rich in color in the
center, but bleached out to black and white at the edges.
● Yet in consciousness, the visual field doesn’t seem to be colored in the center
and black and white at the edges. How are we to explain the discrepancy
between how things seem to us and how our visual field actually works?
● “Filling in” is one explanation: Our consciousness fills in colors where they
don’t exist, giving the impression that what we see is a full-color image all the
way to the edges. Our visual field doesn’t look like it’s black and white at the
edges because we fill in color there.
● Here’s an alternative explanation: That part of the visual field just doesn’t
operate in terms of color. The brain doesn’t expect to see colors out there.
The philosopher Daniel Dennett has been particularly prominent in arguing
for this approach. We don’t have a brain that’s busy painting in missing colors
in the big picture. We have a brain that pays attention to color in central vision
and ignores the lack of it at the edges.
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The Blind Spot
● Blind spots are another case in which we use a picture metaphor
for consciousness. Here’s how to “see” the blind spot: Draw an X and a
solid black dot about two inches apart on a three-by-five-inch index card.
○ Turn the card so that the X is on the right and the solid black dot on
the left. Now put your hand over your right eye and hold the card at arm’s
length with the X straight in front of your left eye.
○ Keep focusing on that X, without moving your eye, as you bring the card
slowly toward your nose. When the card is about one foot away, the dot
disappears. Bring the card still closer and the dot reappears.
○ Now flip the card so that the X is on the left and the solid dot is on
the right. Cover your left eye and do the same experiment again. When you
get the card about a foot away, the dot will disappear again.
● The basic physiological explanation for the blind spot is as simple as the
physiological explanation for color blindness. We don’t have to go deeper than
the retina. In order for an eye to work, impulses from the retinal cells have to
transfer to the brain. The feat is accomplished by binding over a million nerve
fibers into a single optic nerve.
● The bundle leaves the eye right where a blind spot is detected. The blind spot
is there because the exiting optic nerve makes things too crowded for light-
detecting photoreceptors. There are no rods or cones; people are totally
blind in that part of the visual field. In a literal picture of what the retina
actually receives, the image would have a gap in it where the blind spot is.
● Now let’s take the disappearing-spot trick one step further. Take the three-by-
five card and draw some cross-hatching across the side with the dot on it.
● Now repeat the experiment: Bring that card progressively closer to your eye.
Here’s what you’ll find: The dot disappears, just as before. But it doesn’t look
like the cross-hatching does. The same trick works with wavy lines. The dot
disappears, but the rest of the pattern remains.
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● The brain has to compensate for the fact that it has no information from a
certain area in the visual field. It fills it in with what it thinks is there: cross-
hatching, or wavy lines, or whatever the brain has—so the explanation goes.
In another respect, the brain is terrible at filling in blind spots: After all,
there is a dot there.
Suggested Reading
Dennett, “Quining Qualia.”
Questions to Consider
Imagine a duck dressed as a pirate. Which of these questions can you answer,
without adding to what you’ve imagined? Is it wearing a sword? Does it have scars?
What color are its feet?
2 One explanation for what you see in your peripheral vision is that your brain
fills in color at the edges. Another explanation is that your brain simply ignores
the fact that you don’t see color at the edges. Which theory do you think
is right?
3 One explanation for what you see in your blind spot is that your brain fills in
a visual background there. Another explanation is that your brain simply tells
you that there is more of the same there. Which theory do you think is right?
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74 M ind - B ody P hilosophy
Lecture 8
Strange Cases of
Consciousness
W
e can learn quite a lot about the mind and the brain by exploring our
own normal consciousness. But we can also learn a great deal by looking
further afield at some very strange cases of consciousness. Some strange
cases of subjective experience offer important lessons as to how the brain functions.
The first set of lessons from consciousness tells us about modularity in the brain.
The second set of lessons tells us about multiple routes in the brain. The third set
carries lessons about differentiation and separation between parts of the brain,
particularly between different sides of the brain. And the fourth set of lessons
concerns strange effects of blending, intersection, and union between different
parts of the brain.
Modularity
● Different areas of the visual cortex have been found to process different aspects
of the stream of information from the retinas, with quite different effects.
The first area of information arrival is known as V1, short for visual processing
area 1. The representation that appears on V1 is laid out like the image in a
fish-eye mirror.
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● The celebrated neurologist Oliver Sacks tells the story of a successful artist,
known for abstract color canvases, who suffered damage to the V4 area in an
automobile accident. He lost color entirely. He spoke of the world as going not
only into shades of gray, but going indescribably “wrong.” What had appeared
“flesh-colored” now appeared “rat-colored.”
Multiple Routes
● The brain routes information through multiple paths. There is an area of the
brain toward the bottom of the temporal lobes known as the fusiform gyrus.
With damage to the fusiform gyrus, a person is unable to recognize faces.
It’s called prosopagnosia, or face-blindness.
● Normal recognition of people actually involves two routes. From the fusiform
gyrus—where faces are recognized—visual recognition information
normally is routed to the amygdala, a very old and central part of the brain
that is tied to emotion.
● But it is possible for the first route to be operative while the second is not. It is
possible to have facial recognition with no accompanying emotional overtone.
That strange form of consciousness is called Capgras syndrome. It results in
the belief that one is surrounded by imposters; someone might think their wife
is actually an imitator.
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The thalamus
78 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● The current theory is that it is that second route—the emotional one—has
been interrupted. The facial recognition of the fusiform gyrus remains intact
but the emotional response isn’t there.
● If the V1 on one side of the brain is knocked out, one loses half the visual field.
Knock out V1 on the right side and a person loses the left side of their
visual field. Knock out the V2 on the left side and a person loses the right side
of their visual field.
● A person whose V1 has been impacted on the right side will be unable to tell
where a spot of light is on a screen to their left. They can’t see over there.
Their eyes may still be functional, but they are cognitively blind to the left.
Strangely, however, if asked to point to where the point of light is, they may
point to the spot with astounding accuracy.
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● It is that route—a route that is not revealed to consciousness—that allows
accurate guesses as to the location of a spot of light. It is that route that allows
blindsight navigation of a room one cannot consciously see. The brain is
modular, but is also redundant.
Differentiation
● The third set of lessons about how the brain functions concerns differentiation
in consciousness and the brain. The brain has two hemispheres. The right
hemisphere receives sensory input from the left side of the body and controls
movement on that side. The left hemisphere receives sensory input from the
right side of your body and controls that side.
● The exception is the eyes. The right hemisphere receives input not from the
left eye but from the left side of the visual field, taken from both eyes. The left
hemisphere receives input from the right side of the visual field—again, from
both eyes.
● What happens when one specific side of the brain is impacted? An example
case is the neuroscientist Barbara Lipska. One day, as she stretched out her
arm to turn on a computer, she realized that her right hand had disappeared.
A brain tumor had knocked out her right visual field.
● A person with parietal neglect will only eat food placed on the right side of
the plate, ignoring even a particular treat to the left. The person may be able
to see that food, and indeed may eat it once someone calls attention to it.
But unprompted, they won’t pay any attention to it.
80 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Neglect applies not only to what is seen but what is imagined. When patients
in Milan were asked to imagine that they were walking through a familiar
cathedral square in a particular direction, they described only what they would
have seen on the right side.
● Ramachandran found that with the mirror in place, a person with parietal
neglect clearly sees the person and the pen reflected in the mirror. But when
asked to reach out and take the pen, she doesn’t identify the person as to
her left. Despite the fact that she has dealt with mirror images her entire life,
she cannot reach out to the left, to the real person reflected, in order to grasp
the pen reflected from the left. She says that the mirror is in front of the pen.
● In parietal neglect it is indeed like the left side of the world ceases to exist.
When reflected in a mirror to the right, it has come into existence on the right
side, but trapped behind the mirror.
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82 M ind - B ody P hilosophy
The Split
● The strongest lesson regarding differentiation between different hemispheres
of the brain appears in split-brain patients. Running between the hemispheres
is a broad tissue of nerves called the corpus callosum. In extreme cases of
epilepsy, as a last-ditch effort, there are cases in which the corpus callosum has
been surgically cut. With the exception of an overlap of functioning in the face
and neck, cutting the corpus callosum effectively isolates the two hemispheres
of the brain.
● The Myers and Sperry work began with cats and monkeys. With the corpus
callosum of their animal subjects cut, they were able to train each of the
hemispheres independently. What they found was that what was learned on
one side of the brain did not transfer to the other side. The corpus callosum
was necessary for information transfer between the hemispheres.
● Linguistic processing is almost always in the left brain. Input to the right half
of the visual field—processed in the left brain—can therefore be reported
verbally: If someone sees a pipe, they can say, “I see a pipe.” Because linguistic
processing is standardly restricted to the left brain, input to the left half of the
visual field—processed in the right brain—cannot be reported verbally.
● One of the most dramatic cases involved a young man who had undergone
split-brain surgery but who did retain a limited linguistic capability in his
right hemisphere. Under control of his right hemisphere, this patient was able
to use movable letters to spell out words with his left hand.
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● He was asked what he wanted to do with his life. He responded verbally
with his verbal left hemisphere that he wanted to be a draftsman. But his left
hand, expressing his right brain, spelled out “automobile race.” His right brain
wanted to be a racecar driver.
● From his investigations, Sperry concluded that each hemisphere does seem
to have its own separate and private sensations, with the right hemisphere
constituting a second conscious entity running along in parallel with a
dominant stream of consciousness in the left.
Synesthesia
● Synesthesia is a blending of different sensory modalities. In one form of
synesthesia, music comes in colors. One note might be red, another blue. It has
been estimated that synesthesia of one form or another is evident in as many as
2 people in 100.
● The two symbols are so similar that most people just see a field of black and
white S- and Z-shapes. But for those with synesthesia who see numerals in
color, patches of 2s and 5s stand out because of their different colors.
84 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Suggested Reading
Genova, Left Neglected.
Questions to Consider
1 People with achromatopsia live in a world without color. They can neither see
nor even imagine color. Can you imagine living a month in a world without
color? Can you imagine not being able to imagine color?
9 1 4 7 6 2 3 5 8
In a week or so, ask them to do it again, giving them the same numbers in a
different order:
7 5 2 6 3 9 1 8 4
Compare the two lists. For most people, the colors assigned the two times
won’t match up. If your friend has number synesthesia, they will assign the
same color to the same number each time.
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Lecture 9
Altered States of
Consciousness
T
his lecture will look at altered states of consciousness from two directions:
What can the brain sciences tell us about altered states? And what can altered
states tell us about the brain? The lecture begins with the altered state
of dreams. Then the lecture moves on the hallucinations before entering a
discussion on altered states caused by drugs. Finally, the lecture looks at near-
death and out-of-body experiences. As we will see, altered states offer a wealth of
information about the brain.
Sleep
● There are two kinds of sleep, REM (rapid eye movement) and NREM (non-
rapid eye movement). There is a standard sleep cycle that can be tracked in
terms of brain waves. Waking life is characterized by beta waves, at 12 to 40
cycles per second. As we doze off into stage 1 NREM sleep, there is a shift to
slower alpha and theta waves, 8–12 and 4–8 cycles per second.
88 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Then the surprise: a rapid ascent through stages 4, 3, and 2 NREM into REM.
The EEG for REM sleep actually looks a lot like waking, dominated by
beta waves. But during REM sleep all input is internal, stimulated from the
brain stem, rather than reaching us from outside. REM sleep lasts 20 to
30 minutes. It is followed by another descent into NREM. The entire cycle
takes about 90 minutes. Eight hours of sleep represents about five cycles.
● It was long thought that dreaming was the sole province of REM sleep
and that NREM sleep was empty of mental content. It now appears that
there are two kinds of dreaming, one characteristic of REM and the other of
NREM sleep. If you wake someone during REM sleep, they typically relate
the vivid, sensation-rich, complex and bizarre dreams we are all familiar with.
● The philosopher Owen Flanagan thinks they have no real purpose all.
He claims that dreams came along as a side effect as we evolved mechanisms for
things that really do matter: sleep and waking consciousness.
L E C T U R E 9 A LT E R E D STAT E S O F C O N S C I O U S N E SS 89
● Do dreams reveal something deep about our psyches? Freud thought dreams
were wish fulfillments. His colleague Carl Jung made a list of dream archetypes
with standard meanings. Both theories have been roundly debunked.
● Have you ever had a dream in which you knew you were dreaming, and
found you could manipulate the story in your sleep? That’s a lucid dream.
Fifty percent of people questioned say they’ve had a lucid dream at least once in
their lives. Twenty percent say they have a lucid dream at least once a month.
● Sleep researchers have confirmed that lucid dreams do occur. In fact, the
psychologist Stephen LaBerge runs the Lucidity Institute, and one of its aims
is to teach people how to produce and control their lucid dreams.
Hallucinations
● A hallucination is defined as a sensation of something that isn’t there.
Although we normally think of hallucinations as visual, auditory hallu-
cinations are the most common. There are also smell hallucinations, taste
hallucinations, and touch hallucinations. Auditory hallucinations can be as
simple as a hissing sound or a constant tone, and they can be teasingly soft or
disruptively loud.
● The most common time for hallucinations to occur is just as one is falling
asleep (hypnagogic) or waking up (hypnopompic). These hallucinations
are considered normal. Hallucinations can also come with migraines,
Parkinson’s disease, temporal lobe seizures, lesions in the brain stem, and, of
course, hallucinogenic drugs.
90 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● What causes hallucinations? Two basic mechanisms have been proposed,
though they might in fact function together.
○ The first theory emphasizes higher brain function. A person’s sense
of reality has slipped: The sounds and images are entirely internal,
misinterpreted as coming from the outside.
○ The second theory says we are asking the wrong question. Instead of
asking why we sense something that isn’t there, we should be asking why
we don’t hear those internal sounds and see those internal images all
the time. This theory says that we actually do; it’s just that those internal
impressions are usually swamped by input from the outside.
● If this second theory is true, hallucination should occur when input from
the outside is cut. Indeed, one of the most reliable ways to produce
hallucinations is by sensory deprivation. You don’t need to block all the
senses: Put someone in darkness for extended periods of time, and they
will have visual hallucinations. Block their hearing and they will have
auditory hallucinations.
L E C T U R E 9 A LT E R E D STAT E S O F C O N S C I O U S N E SS 91
Drug-Induced States
● Nicotine and caffeine are stimulants. So are cocaine and amphetamines.
Both cocaine and amphetamines require larger and larger doses to
produce their effects. Long-term use of amphetamines can lead to para-
noid hallucinations. Long-term use of cocaine can produce a very specific
hallucination: bugs crawling under one’s skin.
● Hofmann mentioned circles and spirals as part of that first acid trip.
Complex hallucinations may include cartoon characters, scenes from
childhood, or beautiful landscapes. But simple and specific geometric
patterns show up repeatedly in visual hallucinations, whether natural
or drug-induced.
● These simple patterns include wavy lines, circles, spirals, and con-
centric patterns.Similar patterns can be found in ancient art from around
the world, some of which may be tied to rituals incorporating hallucination.
92 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Out of Body
● Out-of-body experiences are a state in which someone seems to see the
world from a location outside their body. These may occur as an effect of
hallucinogenic drugs, in association with epilepsy and migraines, or under
conditions of stress. Some 15 to 20 percent of people claim to have had at least
one out-of-body experience.
● The first question, of course, is whether what is perceived is real: Has some
part of a person—their consciousness, perhaps—really exited their body?
That would certainly have important consequences for the mind-body problem.
● Was she able to see that number in an out-of-body experience? Tart’s experi-
mental controls were bad, and it seems equally plausible that she got up
and peeked. Later experiments with 100 subjects who thought they could read
remote messages in out-of-body experiences showed a success rate of zero.
The alternative explanation is that out-of-body experiences are “as-if”
experiences: the experience is merely as if you were viewing your body from
the outside.
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94 M ind - B ody P hilosophy
Near Death
● A composite picture of commonly reported near-death experiences would
include an out-of-body experience, travel through a tunnel toward bright light,
the presence of a central figure or lost loved ones, and immersion in positive
and loving emotions.
● Interestingly, and not implausibly, many of those who have had near-death
experiences regard them as life changing, and report stronger belief in an
after-life and a reduced fear of death.
● Reports of near-death experiences are also consistent with the dying brain
hypothesis: Loss of oxygen to the brain can produce what researchers at the
University of Michigan’s Center for Consciousness Science call a “brainstorm”
of increased electrical activity and a massive release of neurotransmitters.
Visions of tunnels and lights appear with disinhibition of the visual cortex.
L E C T U R E 9 A LT E R E D STAT E S O F C O N S C I O U S N E SS 95
● Out-of-body experiences may be linked to activity in the temporal lobe.
Positive and loving emotions may correlate with endorphins and enkephalins,
released under stress.
96 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Suggested Reading
Flanagan, Dreaming Souls.
Sacks, Musicophilia.
Questions to Consider
1 The lecture mentioned three theories of dreams:
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Lecture 10
Memory, Mind,
and Brain
T
his lecture will begin to trace the link between memory and self, starting
with a look at different types of memory and the functions they serve.
In thinking about memory and the self there is one central figure in the
history of philosophy: John Locke, one of the founders of British empiricism.
It is in his 1690 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding that the term consciousness
appears with its contemporary meaning for the first time. At the core of that work
is a connection he draws between memory and personal identity: a link between
memory and being the person who you are. This lecture takes a look at just what
memories are and then circles back to Locke’s and others’ views on memory.
Types of Memory
● There are many types of memory. One is short-term memory, also called
working memory, which we use all the time. For example, people can
remember a telephone number long enough to dial it. But at any given time,
short-term memory is limited to only 15 to 30 seconds in length. Additionally,
according to work by George A. Miller, we can only hold about seven pieces of
short-term information, give or take a couple.
100 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Short-term memory occurs behind the forehead, at the front of the
frontal lobe.
● In order to operate for more than 15 to 30 seconds, or with more than seven
items, we need long-term memory. Examples are remembering an appointment
next Tuesday or that Bill owes John 10 dollars from a lost bet last week.
● Other examples are how to shuffle a deck of cards or how to ride a bike.
Remembering how to do something is called procedural memory.
Procedural memory happens in a very different part of the brain, indeed, in
different parts of the brain.
● When someone is first practicing a new motor skill, the frontal cortex lights
up with activity. Five or six hours later, the motor skill operates more easily,
much more smoothly. At that point, it’s the motor cortex (looped in an arc
over the center of the brain) and the cerebellum (at the back just over the spinal
cord) that light up as the person goes through the routine.
● We also know that sleep can play a role. The hippocampus is active during
sleep. Damage to or removal of the hippocampus impacts memory in a specific
way. You can still use short-term memory and may retain some long-term
memories, but you become unable to lay down new long-term memories.
L E C T U R E 10 M E M O RY, M I N D , A N D B R A I N 101
● In addition to facilitating the conversion of short- to long-term memories,
the hippocampus codes basic spatial memory. Brain scans on humans show
spatial navigation as a function of the hippocampus.
● Where are the neural cell assemblies stored? All evidence indicates that
the patterns are stored precisely where they first appeared: Visual data is
processed in the visual center, audio data in the auditory center, and so on.
Perceiving those things together involved a pattern of neurons coordinated
in different parts of the brain. That pattern of precisely those neurons is
codified as the memory of the event in the same place or linked places as in the
original perception.
102 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Cell assemblies serve more than one purpose. An individual neuron may fire
when a person sees a picture of the Eiffel Tower. The same neuron fires—
and by supposition the entire cell assembly is activated—when a patient
remembers the Eiffel Tower. That’s our evidence that the neural pattern of
initial perception and of later memory are the same.
● But the neuron may also fire when the person is asked merely to imagine the
Eiffel Tower. The same cell assembly, in other words, may do the work of
perception, memory, and imagination as well.
L E C T U R E 10 M E M O RY, M I N D , A N D B R A I N 103
● That doesn’t help distinguish memories from imaginings, and not many
people have been convinced. One can have a vivid memory and a tenuous
piece of imagination. But one can also imagine something vividly while
remembering it only vaguely.
● The truth is that Locke’s problem is a problem that we all face: There may
not be any internal difference between the products of memory and the
products of imagination that allows us to tell them apart just by looking at
them from the inside.
● Each time you bring up a memory you bring it up in a different context, and
when you put it back it may not be precisely the same cell assembly. Every time
you remember something your memory is liable to change. This leads to
the problem of false memories: things we think we are recalling as accurate
memories—accurate records of a past event or a past experience—
but which are not.
● Elizabeth Loftus is an expert in the field who has done some wonderful
experiments in false memory. In one, she asked parents of an advanced age
to recount some events that had happened during the childhood of their
adult children.
○ She then interviewed the adult children, asking them whether they
remembered the events their parents had told her. In doing so, she used
three episodes their parents had related.
○ But she also slipped in a fourth event that hadn’t been mentioned by the
parents and hadn’t ever happened. About 25 percent of the adult children
also insisted that the fourth fictional event had occurred to them. In some
cases, they would even elaborate on remembered details of the event that
never happened. They were merely imagining it.
● It turns out that our memories are extremely malleable, extremely vulnerable
to suggestion. A suggested detail that is merely imagined may be incorporated
as if it were part of a memory. We may later be unable to tell the genuinely
remembered parts from those that were merely suggested or imagined.
104 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● One of the gut-wrenching places this shows up is in what are termed
recovered memories under therapy, including memories of being the victim of
child abuse. In the 1980s, under therapy and hypnosis, cases began arising
of adults who remembered being sexually abused as children.
● The debate regarding recovered memories continues. On the one side, child
abuse is a horrible crime, and we do indeed want perpetrators to face justice.
On the other side, there are cases in which the recovered memories have
turned out to be false memories.
Aging
● Age does affect memory, but not as much as you might think. Perhaps
because of news coverage, a large proportion of the aging population swears
that they are starting to suffer from Alzheimer’s or dementia. The truth
is that only about 10 percent of people between 65 and 100 suffer from
anything so clinical.
● The typical and normal kind of memory loss that comes with aging is the “tip-
of-the-tongue” memory problem; for instance, trying to recall a name but
having it remain just out of grasp. Misplacing the occasional name happens
to everyone, even if it does become more frequent with age. In Alzheimer’s,
one loses concepts of common objects and familiarity with common places.
L E C T U R E 10 M E M O RY, M I N D , A N D B R A I N 105
● True short-term memory is not much affected by normal aging. What appears
to suffer most with age is the conversion of short-term memories into long-
term memories. That is a function of the hippocampus, which shrinks
with age. That may be why, with age, people may find it easier to remember
what happened 10 years ago than what happened two months ago.
● The good news is that memory, like other mental functions, can be preserved
and extended through life-long use. Studies of people beyond the age of 70
show that those with more education have more efficient memories, with less
change in memory ability. The theory is that they have learned, practiced,
and can apply more flexible strategies for establishing and managing memory.
Remembering Everything
● The Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges has a story called “Funes
the Memorius,” in which the title character remembers everything.
Everything Funes has ever seen—every nuance of every shadow of every leaf
of ivy on a wall—is etched indelibly in his memory.
106 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Funes is what we all would be if Locke had been right about memory: If every
experience we had made an impression that was filed away in a storehouse
of memory. Locke forgot forgetting. Forgetting is probably just as important
for effective thinking and living as memory.
● An important point of the story is that Funes regards his prodigious memory
not as a blessing but as a curse. He hides himself away in a dark room. He says,
“My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap.”
● The real though rare condition that Funes has is called hyperthymesia.
Jill Price is credited as the first established case, with about 25 confirmed
cases since.
● Price can remember every day of her life from when she was 14.
Interestingly, her recall is almost entirely autobiographical: She actually
performs poorly on standardized memory tests. Like Funes, she describes
it as a burden: “non-stop, uncontrollable, and totally exhausting.”
Suggested Reading
Borges, “Funes the Memorious.”
Questions to Consider
1 Give three examples from your own experience of each kind of memory:
An episodic memory (of a scene), a semantic memory (of a fact), and a
procedural memory (of how to do something).
2 What is the first thing you remember in your life? How confident are you that
that is a genuine memory?
L E C T U R E 10 M E M O RY, M I N D , A N D B R A I N 107
Lecture 11
Self-Consciousness
and the Self
H
ow is memory tied to our concept of the self? That’s the topic this
lecture explores, using John Locke as our point of reference in the
history of philosophy. For Locke, it is the continuity of conscious memory
that defines someone’s identity as a person. But there are two distinct questions
that Locke runs together as if they were the same question. Distinguishing between
those two questions offers a clearer understanding. The first question: What
precisely is the sense of self—is it an element added to experience, or is it built into
the structure of our experience? The second question: What counts as the “same
person” over time?
● Locke says that “when we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will
anything we know that we do so.” Emphasizing a sense of continuous self, he
says that it is beyond doubt that “I that write this am the same myself now
whilst I write that I was Yesterday.”
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● Immanuel Kant, writing a little less than 100 years later, says that the “I
think” accompanies all experiences, which would be impossible without it.
William James says that within the stream of consciousness there is a sense
of self, “felt by all men as a sort of innermost citadel within the circle, of
sanctuary within the.”
● The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio echoes all of these: “Besides the images
of what we perceive externally,” there is also “this other presence that signifies
you, as observer of the things imaged, potential actor on the things imagined.
If there were no such presence, how would your thoughts belong to you?”
● Let’s distinguish qualitative from numerical identity. Two things are numerically
identical if they’re literally the same entity. If two people have Subaru Outbacks,
they have qualitatively similar vehicles, but not numerically identical.
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Dissociative Fugue and Multiple Personalities
● On January 17, 1887, Reverend Ansel Bourne withdrew $551 from his bank in
Providence, Rhode Island, and disappeared, only to reappear in Norristown,
Pennsylvania, believing he was a man named A. J. Brown. Later, he eventually
awoke one morning as a very confused Ansel Bourne.
● The pioneering psychologist William James suggested they could explore the
case by putting Bourne under hypnosis. Indeed, under hypnosis, A. J. Brown
reappeared and was able to describe his travels to Norristown. But even the
Brown that appeared under hypnosis claimed to know nothing about Reverend
Ansel Bourne.
● We’ve previously discussed cases in which the hemispheres of the brain are
separated by surgically cutting the corpus callosum: A man might say he
wants to be a draftsman but spell out that he wants to be a racecar driver
with his hand. That certainly sounds like William James’ conclusion:
“Mr. Bourne’s skull … covers two distinct personal selves.”
112 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Because of the overarching role of the interpreter, Gazzinga ultimately decided
that even in split-brain cases, there is only one dominant hemisphere, only one
high-level consciousness, and in that sense only one self.
● But beneath that self, James insists, there is also an “I.” That is the self we feel
as the focus of all our experience—the lasting core self.
● The other self is what he terms the “autobiographical self.” That self includes
lasting characteristics like your name, your history, whether you tend to avoid
conflict, and how you approach a problem. The autobiographical self has the
properties of long-term memory.
Animals
● Are animals self-conscious? Do they have a sense of self? The standard test
for sense of self in animals is the mirror test, developed by the psychologist
Gordon Gallup in the 1970s. The test is this: We show the animal a mirror for
the first time.
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114 M ind - B ody P hilosophy
● Then, in some way the animal isn’t aware of—under anesthesia, for example—
we put a colored mark on its ear, or its forehead. We then watch how it then
behaves in front of the mirror. Does it look at the image and then investigate
the mark by reaching to that spot on its own body? If so, it must realize that
the image it sees in the mirror is an image of itself. It must, therefore, have a
sense of self.
● The test isn’t without flaws: Many species view staring as a threat, which
makes using a mirror problematic. That may complicate results. If the test
does reveal a sense of self, it’s unclear what specific self it reveals.
The Teletranslator
● Derek Parfit is a contemporary philosopher who has explored questions
of memory and personal identity in great depth, using some strange and
wonderful thought experiments.
● Parfit borrows the idea of a teletransporter from science fiction. Take this
thought experiment: Let’s say a teletransporter can take a complete map
of your brain and body. Then it can disassemble your atoms and send them
to a teletransporter receiver on. There, identical atoms and molecules are
assembled to recreate you.
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● When you step into the teletransporter, are you suddenly whisked across
the universe, or do you die? An atom-by-atom replica of you appears on
Alpha Centauri. But maybe it’s just a Xerox copy. It’s not you. You ceased
to exist when your atoms were disassembled here in the teletransporter
on Earth.
● Raising further doubts: What if the teletransporter sends the same set of
signals to two different places in the universe, making two Xerox copies?
Split-brain cases are hard enough. Parfit hands us a split-person case.
What happened to the one numerical self-identical you in the process?
● Parfit thinks the thought experiments show that being the same person
isn’t always a matter of yes or no. Our concept gets gray and fuzzy at the
hypothetical edges. Parfit calls someone who thinks that selves come in
discrete yes-or-no packages an ego theorist. Parfit rejects ego theory.
There just aren’t individual selves in the way we intuitively think there are.
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Suggested Reading
Dennett, “Where Am I?”
Questions to Consider
1 Were Reverend Ansel Browne and A. J. Bourne the same person or not?
2 What is it that makes you numerically the same person as your past self as
a child?
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Lecture 12
Rival Psychologies
of the Mind
I
n this course, we’ve been tracing the history of thought on bodies and minds,
always with an eye to contemporary scientific results. Psychology, as the science
of the mind, is clearly a major part of that history. There are three claimants
to the title of father of psychology: William James, Sigmund Freud, and Wilhelm
Wundt. All three developed their theories in the infancy of psychology as a discipline
in the latter part of the 19th and early part of the 20 th century. All three have
influenced the trajectory of psychological theory and research to the present day.
This lecture contrasts the work of James against that of Freud, and then compares
both to Wundt’s work.
William James
● William James’s foundational work, The Principles of Psychology, was
published in 1890. It had taken 12 years to write and was about 1,200
pages long. The publisher encouraged him to publish a shorter version, which
was released in 1892 as Psychology: the Briefer Course.
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● According to the empiricists, the mind acquires individual ideas, sensations,
or impressions from sensory experience and then combines them into higher
units in consciousness. For example, if we combine the idea of a horn with the
idea of a horse, we come up with a unicorn.
Sigmund Freud
● In an early work, Freud says that any psychological theory must meet the
demands of natural science. But he also says it must explain the puzzling things
that we know in consciousness.
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● This is a break: James tracks consciousness as the fundamental fact, relying
on introspection as the primary tool. Freud attempts to explain the puzzling
things about consciousness. According to Freud, the mental is divided into
three realms: the conscious, the preconscious—that which can be retrieved
from memory—and the unconscious.
● Freud used his theory in the treatment of patients. His writing is framed in
terms of cases or generalizations from cases in which he attempts to treat
hysteria, paranoia, and neuroses. The treatment protocol develops into
psychoanalysis, a combination of talk therapy, free association, and dream
analysis. The conceptual framework proliferates to include Oedipal complexes,
Electra complexes, and so on.
● Despite Freud’s insistence throughout his career that his goal was a science
of psychology, his approach is closer to the therapeutic model of medicine.
Freud himself resisted the use of controlled experiment. He seemed happy to
see perceived success in individual cases as a vindication of broad theories.
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● James totally rejects the concept of an unconscious mental state. The existence
of an unconscious flies in the face of any attempt to build a science of
mentality grounded first and foremost in conscious introspective experience.
● James says the attempt to introduce unconscious mental states “is the
sovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology, and of turning
what might become a science into a tumbling-ground for whimsies.” That is a
strong rejection of Freudian theory.
● For his part, Freud minces no words in condemning the other side: “Whereas
the psychology of consciousness never went beyond this broken sequence
of events … the view that held that what is mental is itself unconscious
enabled psychology to take its place as a natural science like any other.”
Attacks
● Freudian psychology, in particular, came under increasing attack
as pseudoscientific. A prime mover in that attack was Karl Popper.
Popper wasn’t primarily concerned with when a theory is true because he
knew that even the best scientific theories might turn out to be wrong.
He wanted to know what made a theory scientific to begin with, whether true
or not.
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● Popper’s falsifiability criterion has left a lasting impression. In a critique of
Freud, author Richard Webster suggests that psychoanalysis may be the most
complex and successful pseudoscience in history.
● James’s reputation has not done much better. The psychologist Gregory
Kimble took a critical look at James’ major work, The Principles of Psychology,
on the 100 th anniversary of its publication. He concluded that he couldn’t
find a single principle in it.
Wilhelm Wundt
● Although Freud and James have both been named as fathers of psychology,
their theories have not fared particularly well. It is the third figure—Wilhelm
Wundt, also spoken of as a father of psychology—who is a far clearer precursor
of academic psychology as it developed through the 20 th century.
124 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Because of that, Wundt didn’t rely on verbal introspective reports but on a
subject’s simple signals regarding subjective experience—the pressing of
a key when a sound was heard, or when a light reached a particular point
on the screen. He tested reaction times and discrimination thresholds.
His experimental contexts called for stimuli that could be strictly controlled
and strictly repeated with a number of subjects.
● In Wundt’s work, unlike that of James and Freud, one has real psychological
experiments, many of which are indistinguishable in format from psychological
experiments performed today.
Behaviorism
● In Wundt’s wake developed the most powerful movement in 20 th-century
psychology: behaviorism. With behaviorism, the shift is clearly away from
both Freud and James and toward the experimental psychology of Wundt.
● If science demands that we stick to what is strictly observable in the lab, and
only behavior is strictly observable, the scientific psychology we seek will
be a science of behavior. With the rise of behaviorism, consciousness loses
its central place. With the rise of behaviorism, consciousness seems to lose
any place.
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● Experimental psychology guided by behaviorism ruled most of the 20 th
century, with John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner as major figures.
● As the 20 th century began to shift to the 21st, still another revolution occurred:
the neuroscience revolution. With the explosion of new techniques for brain
imaging and brain intervention, cognitive science has joined forces with
biology, medicine, and genetics.
126 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Suggested Reading
Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychoanalysis.”
Questions to Consider
1 Freud says that a memory, a thought, a realization, or a fear can slip from
consciousness to unconsciousness, but still continue to guide your behavior.
Give an example from your own experience.
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Lecture 13
The Enigma of
Free Will
A
sense of being able to choose different courses of action is a clear
characteristic of our subjective experience. But is it a sense of a freedom
that is itself real? Or is our sense of free will merely an illusion? This lecture
will focus on both the classic philosophical problem of free will and the way in
which questions of free will arise in contemporary scientific research. There is
much that the philosophical and scientific approaches have in common. But there
are also important ways in which they differ.
The Problem
● The universe is governed by cause and effect. What happens at noon Monday
is determined by everything that happened before noon Monday. If what
happens at any step is entirely a result of what happens at the step before,
everything at every step is determined by what happened before. All history
is determined. That’s the determinism side of the so-called problem of free
will and determinism.
● The other side of the problem is the free will part. Our lives—all lives—
involve a series of choices. If you trace back the course of your life, you can
map it out like a branching tree diagram of choices faced and decisions made,
followed by further choices faced and decisions made.
● The problem is that the two pictures we’ve painted don’t fit together. We think
of our lives using the second picture: free will. But the way we think of the
universe seems to have the first picture built in: determinism.
130 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● One option when faced with this dilemma is to buy the deterministic picture
and to kiss free will goodbye. The universe operates by physical laws written
in terms of natural forces and fundamental particles. Free human choice isn’t
part of the picture. It is at best an illusion.
● Another option is to clutch onto free will, denying the deterministic picture
in order to maintain the picture we’ve painted of free decisions, free choices,
genuine responsibility, and sometimes grounded regret.
Scientific Confirmation?
● One of the best-confirmed scientific theories of all time is quantum
mechanics, the physics of the very small. We have mathematical formulations
of the theory that give us, solidly and reliably, the right quantitative results—
often strange and unexpected.
● Things become very confusing when we ask not merely how the formulas
operate and what they predict but what they are telling us about how the
universe works at a fundamental level. For instance, quantum mechanics
doesn’t merely tell us that we don’t know why a particular atom decays at a
particular time. It tells us there is nothing to know. There is no reason why
a particular atom decays at a particular time.
● The implication of this scientific picture is that the universe isn’t deterministic.
Not every event is determined by earlier events: The decay of a particular
uranium nucleus isn’t so determined. While the 19th-century physics of
Newton outlined a deterministic universe, 20 th-century quantum mechanics
tells us that picture is wrong.
● So perhaps that settles it: Our best science tells us that the universe isn’t
deterministic after all. There is space for free choice, responsible decisions,
and free will after all.
● Some thinkers have made precisely that argument, claiming that quantum
randomness allows for free will. But that is a step too far and too fast: If some
events happen for no reason, how precisely does that give you free will?
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Ancient Debates
● Much of the debate over free will, determinism, and randomness played out
long before quantum mechanics arose. Stoicism and Epicureanism were two
schools of Greek philosophy that continued into the Hellenistic or Roman
period. Although Stoics and Epicureans were both materialists, the two
schools had a very different take on free will.
● The Epicureans took something like the quantum line. The Latin poet
and philosopher Lucretius gives one of the most complete outlines of
Epicureanism we have. Everything is material, including the mind, but the
atoms of which things are made occasionally “swerve.” Lucretius tempers his
determinism with randomness in order to carve space for free will.
● The Stoics, on the other hand, were strict determinists. In full acceptance of
an unbreakable chain of cause and effect, everyone’s fate is sealed. The best
one could do, the Stoics said, was to bear it stoically. That has problems too:
If everything is determined, it will be determined whether you suffer your
fate or freely accept it. Even there you wouldn’t be free.
132 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Compatibilism
● An alternative approach is to reject the dilemma itself: Maybe, once we
really understand the philosophical issues involved, we will see that free
will and determinism are compatible. Not surprisingly, this is known as a
compatibilist approach.
● The basic idea is well captured in a quote from the American philosopher John
Dewey: “What men have esteemed and fought for in the name of liberty is
varied and complex—but certainly it has never been a metaphysical freedom
of will.”
● Grey Walter’s hypothesis was that those bursts of activity in the brain didn’t
merely precede voluntary action. They were the initiation of the causal chain of
voluntary action, from brain to hand. In order to test the hypothesis, electrodes
were implanted in the area of the brain associated with finger movement.
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He then asked his patients to control the movement of an old-fashioned
carousel slide projector: When a patient wanted to see the next slide, they’d
press the button.
● Grey Walter rigged the slide projector so that what actually triggered
the slide change wasn’t the press of the patient’s finger, but the readiness
potential in the motor cortex. There was a direct brain-to-slide projector
connection instead of the normal finger-to-slide projector connection.
● The decision to change the slide was still up to the patient. The patient would
then reach to press the button in order to change the slide.
● The results seem to mean that we had the timing of events wrong. This order
is incorrect: First, we have that moment of conscious decision; that activates
the readiness potential; and that produces the movement. Instead, the order
seems to be: First, the readiness potential starts the chain of events; then we
have that moment of conscious decision; and then the finger moves.
● Libet’s method was to ask subjects about when they decided to move not at the
time of the decision, but later. He asked his subjects to move their right hand
any time they felt like it, but to watch a spot of light revolving in a circle as they
did so, something like a rotating hand on a clock. Subjects were to remember
where the spot of light was when they decided to move their hands. The light
served as a timekeeping measure: Each person could report where the light was
when they decided.
134 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● The experiment also recorded the timing of the readiness potential in their
brains and the moment at which their hands actually move. The findings: The
subjective intention or decision to move comes about 200 milliseconds—a
fifth of a second—before the movement itself.
● But the readiness potential comes about 535 milliseconds before the
movement itself. That’s over half a second before. That means the readiness
potential that makes your finger move comes before you are aware of a
decision or intention to move.
Interpreting
● Do those experiments show that we don’t have free will? When we ask that,
we’re not asking merely what happened in the experiments. We’re asking
how to interpret what they really mean.
● Libet himself seems uncomfortable with the conclusion that free will is
an illusion. Although the readiness potential starts the chain to movement,
Libet claims that some of his data show that it is possible for that chain to be
consciously interrupted before the movement actually happens. Libet speaks of
this as a veto function.
● For a time, the reigning champion in the 100-meter was Linford Christie.
In the 1996 Olympics, Christie was disqualified for twice jumping the gun.
Video replay clearly shows that the starter pistol was fired before Christie
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started to move. Nevertheless, the officials stood by their decision. A similar
outcome befell John Drummond in the 100-meter quarterfinal of the 2003
World Championships.
● How is that fair? Both Christie and Drummond moved only after the gun
had fired. The answer is that since the 1970s, false starts have been
determined with great precision, both electronically and with careful
attention to reaction times. Typical reaction time for top-level competitors
is something like 125 to 250 milliseconds. If a runner reacts significantly
faster than that, they can’t have heard or seen the signal and then started.
Drummond, for example, moved in less than 100 milliseconds after
the signal. He jumped the gun, said the officials.
The Takeaway
● The Walter and Libet experiments do seem to show that a particular picture
that we have of free will is often wrong. It’s not true that a moment of
decision precedes voluntary action in all cases.
● That doesn’t mean, however, that the picture is always wrong: A person can
decide to marry a spouse long before they pop the question. It is in terms of
milliseconds and instantaneous spontaneous action that the picture fails, not
in the minutes, hours, days and years of our deliberate action.
136 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Maybe the standard picture—deliberation first, decision initiating action—
is right for the kind of free will we really care about: freedom in major
choices, important decisions, even decisions about whether to do the
shopping now or later.
● If our picture of free will is one in which every movement in every context
has to be initiated by a moment of conscious decision in order to be free,
we’ll have to conclude that in that sense many of the simple movements we
make are not free. But that may not be the kind of freedom we really care
about, either.
Suggested Reading
Dennett and Kinsbourne, “Time and the Observer.”
Questions to Consider
1 Do you think you have free will? In your answer, specify precisely what you
mean by free will.
2 If you said yes in answer to question 1, what would convince you that you
didn’t in fact have free will?
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138 M ind - B ody P hilosophy
Lecture 14
Emotions:
Where Mind and
Body Meet
A
re emotions aspects of mind that produce a bodily reaction? Or are they
bodily phenomena that produce a mental reaction? The answer turns out to
be more complicated than either of those options. As a phenomenon where
mind and body meet, emotions allow us to trace some of the complex details of
mind-body interaction. That’s what we’ll examine in this lecture.
Defining Emotion
● What precisely do we mean by emotion? Or, what precisely do we mean
by emotions? Those two ways of phrasing the central question reflect a very
basic division of opinion in the field.
○ An alternative proposal is that there are not six but eight primary
emotions. This approach adds acceptance and expectancy to the other
six. Whatever the number, more complex emotions, such as pride or
disappointment, are seen as a mixture of the primaries.
140 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● On the other side of the fence are researchers who think of emotion in terms
of a single multi-dimensional psychological space. Emotions are points of a
single psychological space. It is the space as a whole that constitutes emotion.
● Just how universal are the primary emotions that we have outlined? Some critics
have claimed that even the basic emotions require a cultural context.
● Here’s the way James puts it in 1890: “Common sense says that we lose our
fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are
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insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. … [My theory is that the] sequence
is incorrect … we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid
because we tremble.”
● This is called the James-Lange theory of emotion. James and the Danish
physiologist Carl Lange didn’t work together, but they both developed a body-
based theory of emotion at about the same time. In all his writings, James is
scrupulous to give Lange equal billing.
● Here is how James puts it: “Can one fancy the state of rage and picture … no
flushing of the face, no dilation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no
impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles, calm breathing,
and a placid face?” According to James, the answer is no.
142 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● This argument is convincing, but doesn’t absolutely set in stone the idea
physical reactions have to come before emotions. In order to be fear, the
trembling may have to be there. But that doesn’t really mean it has to be the
instigating cause.
● At the same time, there is some evidence of a link. Moebius syndrome is a rare
genetic disorder in which people are born with facial paralysis and unable to
move their eyes. They can’t frown, smile, or raise their eyebrows in surprise.
Not only do those with Moebius syndrome have trouble conveying emotion to
others, it appears they have trouble feeling emotion as well.
● The idea that facial expression influences mental state has led to proposals
for the treatment of depression. There are clear facial signs of chronic
depression in the form of permanent frown lines and a furrowed brow. If we
could change those, might we be able to affect the depression itself?
● The answer seems to be yes, with a mounting chain of evidence. Plastic surgeons
have reported that individuals who had Botox treatment for frown lines seemed
to lighten their moods.
Criticism
● The James-Lange theory set the stage for later work on emotion. It has also
served as a lightning rod for criticism. A major challenge came with the work
of the Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon and graduate student Philip Bard
in the 1920s.
● Cannon and Bard’s first argument against the James-Lange theory was that
the same physiological changes are present in very different emotional states.
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Increased adrenalin, heart rate, levels of blood sugar, sweating, and pupil
dilation occur across many forms of excitement, for example, in both fear
and rage.
● Cannon and Bard surgically cut the connection from the sympathetic nervous
system to the brain in cats. In all parts of their bodies that could still express
it, these cats continued to show signs of rage when exposed to a barking dog.
They concluded that emotion is not simply a response to bodily input.
It remains even without that input.
144 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
handed the participants an ambiguous picture about which they were asked
to write a story. She also gave them her phone number in case they had any
further questions about the experiment.
● The men crossing the scary bridge made up stories that had a higher sexual
content than those by the men crossing the stable bridge, and the scary-bridge
crossers made more follow-up phone calls to the attractive experimenter.
● That result supports Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer’s two-factor theory
of the 1960s. Schachter and Singer claimed that our emotional response often
incorporates two elements. One part is physiological arousal. Another part is
the cognitive label that we assign to that arousal on the basis of context.
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● From the prefrontal cortex, signals are sent back to the amygdala. Those may
be reinforcing: “Run faster.” They may be corrective: “Wait, I can’t outrun
a bear. Should I freeze?”
● Although it’s not true that the body is the only source for feelings, James
was right that feelings can be a reflection of body-state changes. As an
example, patients with damage to the spinal cord often do report a damping
down of emotion. The higher the damage to the spinal cord, the more seems
to be lost.
146 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Without being able to register emotions, Elliot wasn’t able to evaluate
alternative courses of action; he couldn’t make up his mind regarding personal
and social matters. He lost his job, one marriage, and then a second marriage,
along with his sense of responsibility.
Suggested Reading
Damasio, Descartes’ Error.
Questions to Consider
1 Make a list of at least 25 emotions. Are some of these compounds of others?
Do some, like awe or pride, demand a particular kind of object or context?
2 Darwin says that bodily expression of an emotion amplifies and intensifies it,
whereas dampening the bodily expression can soften the felt emotion as well.
Give an example from your experience where that does fit, and perhaps an
example where it does not.
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148
Lecture 15
Could a Machine
Be Conscious?
I
n 1939, at the University of Cambridge, there were two courses offered on the
foundations of mathematics. One was a course on the foundations of mathematics
by the influential and charismatic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The other
was a course on the foundations of mathematics by the mathematician Alan M.
Turing, who in the previous 10 years had laid down some of the theoretical work
that led quite directly to computers. This lecture tracks some of the major ideas of
those two figures, Wittgenstein and Turing. Their ideas were central to the fields
of 20th-century philosophy of mind, computer science, and artificial intelligence.
150 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Turing was 23 years younger than Wittgenstein, born in London in 1912
as the second son of a British civil servant with a commission in India.
His parents traveled often between England and India, leaving the boys with an
older couple or in their private schools.
● In his lifetime, Wittgenstein published only the brief 75 pages that constitute
the Tractatus, one article, one book review, and a dictionary for children.
Despite that thin record of publication, his impact was enormous, based
largely on the force of a charismatic personality and a dramatic air of ascetic
philosophical intensity. By contrast, Turing was a stutterer, careless in dress
and cleanliness, and entirely undiplomatic in expressing his opinions.
● Wittgenstein uses the parable of the beetles in the boxes to illustrate his claim.
Imagine two people, each with a beetle in a box. Using their respective private
languages, one person might describe their beetle as “kufu kufu” and the other
might describe their beetle as “niki niki.” If they can’t see each other’s beetles,
those words will never acquire meaning.
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● The learning process is entirely public, and the correction required in learning
demands that it be public. For instance, a child who identifies a cat as a truck
has to be corrected. If our mental terms referred to something inherently
private and locked way, we couldn’t ever learn those terms.
● Behaviorism dictates that data is first and foremost behavioral data: Any science
of the mind must at base be a science of behavior. Wittgenstein’s students
in those 1939 sessions took the private language argument not merely as a
negative argument against Cartesian privacy but as a positive argument for
analytic behaviorism. Their view was that talk of the mind must ultimately
simply be talk of behavior.
Turing on Machines
● In 1939, Wittgenstein was emphasizing the role of language—including the
role of mental terms—as part of an essentially human way of life. By 1939,
Turing had developed something very different: a fascinating and fully
developed theoretical picture of machines and their prospects for computation.
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definition of these intuitive things: calculations, computations, algorithms,
and effective procedures. Turing realized that by formalizing the notion of a
symbol-manipulating machine he could get a rigorous handle on questions of
computability and its limits.
● Here’s how the machine works: At any point in time it sits on just one square of
the tape and operates in terms of just two things: the symbol beneath it on the
tape and the internal state it happens to be in.
● Today it’s hard to believe how revolutionary Turing’s model was. After all,
it sounds like “just” a computer. The point is there were no computers when
Turing developed his abstract model. The real machines came later, based on
Turing’s abstract vision of information processing.
● In World War II, Turing put his theory to practical use, developing computing
L E C T U R E 15 C O U L D A M AC H I N E B E C O N S C I O U S ? 153
machinery that managed to crack the Nazi Enigma code. After World War
II, Turing was instrumental in the construction of larger and all-purpose
computing machines. But his vision went even farther. In his notes, Turing
anticipated the next generation of computing: neural networks, inspired by
the way that neurons function in the brain. Neural networks show an amazing
ability to learn.
● The end of Turing’s story is not a happy one. Security in the development
of computers was tight after World War II. The Americans were wary of
two groups they thought of as security risks: communists and homosexuals.
Turing was homosexual. He was forthright and honest about his inclinations as
he was about everything else. In England at the time, homosexual conduct was
a crime. In 1952 he was arrested, tried, and convicted.
● Note that the Turing test is an entirely behavioral test. It is the behavior of a
properly programmed machine that Turing predicts will be indistinguishable
from that of a human.
154 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Turing’s article and the Turing test were a major instigation for the field of
artificial intelligence, a term that wasn’t invented until after Turing’s death in
1954.
● There were actually two branches of artificial intelligence that came out of
the conference. One involved straight programming, on the model of the
Turing machine. The other involved the first explorations in neural nets,
another line of thought that Turing had anticipated.
The Legacies
● In 1950, Turing predicted that by the year 2000 we would have machines that
passed the Turing test: machines good enough at simulating human intelligence
that an average interrogator wouldn’t have better than a 70 percent chance of
distinguishing mind from machine after a five-minute exchange. Turing was
wrong about that. We’re long past the year 2000 and still don’t have computers
that can pass the Turing test.
● But there was another thing Turing was certainly right about. He said that he
expected language to change: “I believe that by the end of the century the use
of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will
be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”
● He was absolutely right about that. Today we have no problem using a full
range of anthropomorphic concepts in order to characterize what our
computers do. We say “It can’t see items in that subdirectory,” and “It
thinks I put that document somewhere else.” Turing was right: We speak of
our machines as knowing things, thinking things, even forgetting things or
ignoring us.
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● Wittgenstein didn’t see that far ahead. Today it looks like Wittgenstein’s
refusal to speak of machines thinking, at least in today’s informal and
colloquial sense, represented an outlook appropriate to Cambridge in 1939.
● Then again, maybe Wittgenstein was right in saying that terms like thinking
are appropriate only for particular kinds of agents in a particular way of life.
What he wasn’t able to see was that our way of life would change in ways that
would give machines a much more important and integrated role.
156 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Suggested Reading
Casti, The Cambridge Quintet.
Questions to Consider
1 Which of these do you think is possible for a machine? In each case, specify
why or why not:
□ calculate
□ compute
□ respond
□ perceive
□ remember
□ think
□ reflect
□ understand
□ be conscious
2 Do you think it will be possible to build machines that pass the Turing test? If
so, by what date would you guess?
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Lecture 16
Computational
Approaches
to the Mind
T
his lecture explores two computational approaches to the mind. One is a
computational approach to the mind through artificial intelligence.
The other is a computational approach through the concept of information.
The first approach asks: Can we understand intelligence better by attempting
to build intelligent machines? The second approach asks: Can computational
approaches take us as far as really understanding intelligence?
The Beginning
● A key figure in the history of both approaches is Alan M. Turing, who died in
1954 by eating an apple dipped in cyanide. Two years later, the Dartmouth
conference was held. It was the first devoted to what they decided to call
artificial intelligence.
● There were actually two groups of people involved in early artificial intelligence.
One group wanted to pursue artificial intelligence in order to understand
intelligence. Intelligent machines were a means to an end.
160 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● As well as two different goals, there were two different methodologies.
Some of the participants at the Dartmouth conference intended to produce
intelligence using straightforward linear computer programming. The other
methodology was to copy the mechanisms of the brain.
● For many years, it looked like the route to modeling intelligence was
straightforward computer programming—known today colloquially as “good
old-fashioned artificial intelligence,” or GOFAI.
GOFAI
● Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon of Carnegie Mellon each had a background
that combined psychology with computer science. At the Dartmouth
conference, they showed off their brand new Logic Theorist program.
● Simon and Newell’s program would eventually prove 38 of the first 52 theorems
of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, a
landmark in 20 th-century logic.
● The next year Newell and Simon unveiled the General Problem Solver,
designed for a wider class of problems. Herbert Simon claimed that they had
“solved the venerable mind-body problem, explaining how a system composed
of matter can have the properties of mind.”
● With that first flush of success came bold predictions for the future.
In 1958, Newell and Simon predicted that “within ten years a digital
computer will discover and prove an important new mathematical theorem.”
And “within ten years a digital computer will be the world’s chess champion.”
Neither happened. In 1965, Simon predicted that “machines will be capable,
within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do.” That didn’t happen either.
● The real breakthrough was the fact that Rosenblatt’s neural networks could learn.
By repeating what answer was wanted from a set of sample inputs, a neural
network could make its own adjustments to produce the desired result.
Rosenblatt called his neural networks perceptrons.
162 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Perceptrons consisted of just two layers of nodes: a set of input nodes
connected to a set of output nodes. The training scheme that Rosenblatt used
demanded that simplicity. It only worked for two-layer networks.
● Precisely because of that simplicity, it turned out there was also something
that perceptrons couldn’t learn. It was impossible for a perceptron to learn
what is called an “exclusive or”: This is true, or that is true, but not both.
● The fact that perceptrons had that limitation was the key point in a devastating
critique of neural networks leveled by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert in
their book Perceptrons. Minsky was a proponent of the GOFAI approach.
● Minsky and Papert’s critique resulted in research funding and efforts being
directed almost exclusively to the GOFAI approach. It set back by decades
the attempt to build smart machines on the model of the human brain.
● Frank Rosenblatt died shortly after the book was published, on his 43rd
birthday, in what was reported as a boating accident on the Chesapeake Bay.
● In the long run, neural networks came back strong. In the 1980s, the physicist
John Hopfield introduced a form of neural nets that could learn in an entirely
new way. The psychologists David Rumelhart and James McClelland also
developed a new form of neural net learning that could be applied to more
than two layers. Neither “exclusive or” nor any other function of inputs were a
problem any longer.
Advances
● What have we learned in the process? Have machines taught us what
intelligence is? Can we build truly intelligent machines?
● In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue became the first computer to beat a reigning world
chess champion, Garry Kasparov. That was a good 30 years after Newell and
Simon’s prediction. In order to beat Kasparov, Deep Blue reportedly scanned
200 million possible moves every second. We know that human chess masters
don’t think that way.
● David Ferrucci, head of the Watson project, said that Watson didn’t
understand the idea of “anatomical oddity” in the original clue.
Intelligent Machines
● What of the future of intelligent machines? Consider Moore’s law, named for
Gordon Moore, the cofounder of Intel. Moore noted that the computing power
of available hardware doubles about every two years.
164 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Both predictions leave unanswered what intelligence is, in either people
or machines. Both predictions also rely on a simple extrapolation from a
few decades of progress in computer hardware. Moore himself said in 2015, “I
see Moore’s law dying in the next decade or so.”
Information
● Consider the brain as an information-processing machine. Can we get a better
take on how brains and minds work by understanding information?
● First, what exactly is information? Here again, Alan M. Turing may have played
a role. For several months in 1943, Turing was sent to Washington to share the
breakthroughs that the British had made in cracking the Nazi Enigma code.
He made contact with a young researcher named Claude Shannon at Bell Labs.
Turing and Shannon had long conversations over lunch. Information theory
may have begun in those conversations.
● The founding document of information theory came a few years later, in Claude
Shannon’s “Mathematical Theory of Communication.” He was still working
for Bell Labs. The application he had in mind was how much information you
could condense into a signal across a telephone wire.
● Consider a coin toss. A coin can only come up one of two ways: heads or tails.
If someone can reliably tell you which way it will land, they have eliminated
one option out of two.
● Now consider the roll of a die. If a person can reliably predict that, they have
eliminated five options out of six. They have given you more information.
Integrated Information
● There is a recent information-theoretic model of consciousness that builds
on both Baars’s global workspace and Shannon’s information theory.
Here the foundational document is a piece by Giulio Tononi at the University of
Wisconsin: “Consciousness as Integrated Information: A Provisional Manifesto.”
168 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● However, computer scientist Scott Aaronson points out that there are many
simple systems that come out high on Tononi’s phi-scale but that no sane
person would consider conscious. One of his examples is the operation of
error-correcting codes in compact discs.
● These codes work using a two-dimensional grid of very simple logic gates.
Despite that simplicity, the system is very highly integrated, so it scores high
on a measure of phi. If consciousness were merely integrated information, CDs
would be conscious.
Suggested Reading
Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near.
Questions to Consider
1 Moravec’s paradox is that aspects of what we think of as intellectually
challenging—construction of mathematical theorems, for example—turn out
to be relatively easy for computers. It is the easy things for us—recognizing
faces, for example—that turn out to be hard for computers. Why do you think
that is?
2 We talk about information all the time. We are in an information age, after all.
But what is information? If asked for a definition, what would you say?
A Guided Tour of
the Brain
T
hroughout this course so far, we’ve considered the brain in some detail, but
almost always in bits and pieces. To understand brain modularity, we’ve
explored areas in the visual system, examined the fusiform gyrus and its role
in prosopagnosia, discussed the role of the hippocampus in memory formation, and
talked about the two hemispheres in split brains. This lecture will take on a more
holistic and more ambitious project: a tour of the whole brain.
The Brain
● The human brain has been described as the size of a coconut, the shape of a
walnut, the color of uncooked liver, and the consistency of chilled butter. It has
also been described as the most complex three and a half pounds of matter in
the universe.
● Under the microscope, a cross-section of the brain reveals two kinds of cells.
The most common are glial cells. Glial means “glue.” The function of the
relatively simple glial cells has long been thought to be primarily structural.
172 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
However, like other long-held assumptions regarding the brain, we should be
prepared to be wrong. It has also been suggested that glial cells may play a
role in amplifying or synchronizing electrical activity within the brain.
● The other cell seen under the microscope is the neuron. The neuron
is designed to transfer electrical potential through complicated paths of
other neurons. There are about 100 billion neurons in the brain, as many
as there are stars in our galaxy. Each neuron has something like 10,000
connections to other neurons.
● The textbook picture of a neuron is of a cell body that receives input from
other neurons at a number of dendrites and sends a signal down an axon to
the dendrites of other neurons. Neurons don’t actually touch: Their contact
is across the tiny gap called the synapse. The process of information transfer
across a series of neurons goes from electrical to chemical to electrical.
● The picture we’ve painted so far is really one of excitatory neurons, which
stimulate the firing of further neurons at the ends of their axons. But there are
also inhibitory neurons, whose work is to impede the firing of those they come
in contact with. The ratio is about 80 excitatory to 20 inhibitory.
● Aside from 100 billion neurons, the brain also has synapses in the trillions.
Some 50 neurotransmitters are also part of the mix; examples include
serotonin, which affects mood and anxiety, and acetylcholine, which is
associated with learning, attention, and memory.
L E C T U R E 17 A G U I D E D TO U R O F T H E B R A I N 173
The Brain’s Organization and Evolution
● The brain is built on the end of the spinal cord and brain stem, a tube that
originally developed in fish in order to more centrally process nerve impulses
from various parts of the body. What was originally just a bulge on the top of
the spine developed more specialized modules, for instance, modules for smell,
sight, and the control of bodily movement—the cerebellum. Taken together,
the smell area, primitive visual processing, and the cerebellum constitute the
inner core of our brains, known as the reptilian brain.
174 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● The mammalian brain is thus clearly important to consciousness as we
know it. Like the reptilian brain, however, the mammalian brain is generally
thought as operating largely unconsciously. Although we sense our emotions in
consciousness, it’s rare that we’re able to consciously direct them.
The Neocortex
● The mammalian level of our brains is wrapped in a still larger structure: the
neocortex. It was originally a skin of cells over the mammalian brain and
developed into a massively larger enveloping structure. Roughly three-quarters
of your brain is neocortex.
● The neocortex has six layers. It is presumed that the layer structure reflects
some form of information processing, but no one knows quite how or why.
The neocortex also seems to be organized in terms of columns: particular
vertical patches six layers thick. Again, there is a notable lack of consistency
in the literature regarding the definition or function of those distinct columns.
L E C T U R E 17 A G U I D E D TO U R O F T H E B R A I N 175
● What do the parts of the neocortex do? The occipital lobe, at the back of the
head, is largely devoted to the progressive stages of visual processing.
● Between the two areas, running down and below the bottom of the canyon, is
a large bundle of fibers: the language loop between production and processing,
Broca’s and Wernicke’s.
● In the 1860s, a French surgeon named Paul Broca met a man called Tan.
Tan was called that because “Tan” was all he seemed able to say. When Tan
died, Broca dissected his brain and found a sizeable lesion in what we now
call Broca’s area. When the Broca’s area is impacted, people can understand
what is said to them, and know what they want to say, but are unable to say it.
The result is often telegraphic speech, individual words that lack the form of
grammatical sentences.
● If Wernicke’s area is impacted, the Broca’s area may still allow a person to
produce what sound like full and perfectly grammatical sentences. But because
the person cannot understand speech, they can’t understand their own.
176 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Sound processing is a major function of the temporal lobes, but not the only function.
The middle temporal gyrus area of the temporal lobes is crucial to
judging motion. Face recognition is a function of the fusiform gyrus at
the bottom of the temporal lobe. Aspects of memory live here as well.
● The ability to understand speech matures before the ability to produce speech.
There is therefore a period in which toddlers can understand much more
language than they can express. It has been speculated that that is part of the
problem with the “terrible twos.”
● The frontal lobes are associated with planning, logical reasoning, and problem
solving, particularly problem solving that demands creative flexibility rather
than standard solutions. Aspects of personality and memory are also credited
to the frontal lobes.
● But a core function is management and control of other aspects of the brain—
particularly emotion. Here the classic case is Phineas Gage, a railroad foreman
in the mid-1800s whose frontal lobes were massively impacted by a mistimed
explosion that sent a steel rod through his head.
L E C T U R E 17 A G U I D E D TO U R O F T H E B R A I N 177
178 M ind - B ody P hilosophy
Suggested Reading
Bear, Connors, and Paradiso, Neuroscience.
Questions to Consider
1 Have you ever wondered whether your brain might function differently than
other people’s? With the background covered in this lecture, what specific
parts of your brain do you think might be different?
2 In the search for how the brain produces consciousness, what do you think we
should look for in the evolutionary record? What should we look for in infant
and child development?
L E C T U R E 17 A G U I D E D TO U R O F T H E B R A I N 179
Lecture 18
Neglected Areas
● In the previous lecture, we took a tour of the brain. The brain functions only as
part of the larger nervous system. In our search for consciousness we neglected
a number of structures crucial to the autonomic nervous system, generally
thought of as unconscious.
● These include reflex structures within the spinal cord itself and the medulla,
pons, and hypothalamus in the brain stem. These structures register and
regulate blood sugar, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. They control blood
pressure, heart rate, and body temperature: all the elements of homeostasis.
182 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● It is the wider nervous system that leads people to seek food, water, sex,
shelter, and warmth. It is also that wider nervous system that regulates sleep,
dreaming, wakefulness, and attention.
● There are actually two subsystems of the autonomic nervous system: the
sympathetic nervous system, functioning from the middle stretch of your
spinal cord, and the parasympathetic, functioning from the upper spinal cord
and brain stem.
● There is also a third nervous system embedded in the gut, sometimes described
as a “second brain.” It’s the enteric system, a mesh of neurons that regulate
your gastrointestinal system. Although it normally communicates with the
sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, the enteric system is autonomous:
It will continue to function on its own even when those connections are cut.
The Mind
● The brain isn’t separated from the larger nervous system. So why think the
mind is separated from the body? After all, what would it be like if your mind
was separated from your body?
● You couldn’t feel pain, for one thing. That might sound wonderful, but it’s not.
A man named Steven Pete has a congenital inability to feel pain. His parents
realized the problem when their toddler chewed half of his tongue to ribbons.
Those with the disability are prone to bone fractures they don’t realize,
problems from eye irritations they don’t feel, cavity-caused toothaches that
don’t ache, and infections for which they can’t feel the symptoms.
L E C T U R E 18 T H I N K I N G B O DY A N D E X T E N D E D M I N D 183
● If your mind were separated from your body, you also wouldn’t be able to feel
the position or movement of your body. People have an internal sense of their
own body called proprioception; you can test yours by closing your eyes and
touching your knee. It should be no problem.
● But there are six people in the world known to have lost all proprioception.
Ian Waterman is the only one who has successfully compensated for it.
He makes up for the loss of proprioception by using vision. He has to monitor
his body visually, constantly, in order to move with anything like a semblance
of normality.
Thinking
● We tend to think of thinking—of cognitive processing—as something that
happens in the head. But maybe we use our bodies for at least some of our
cognitive processing. For instance, is a child counting on her fingers doing all
her thinking inside her head?
184 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● There are films of Walt Disney’s animators drawing sketches of characters
with strong emotions: anger, fear, surprise. The animators contort their faces
into those expressions in order to draw them.
Psychological Theory
● There is a tradition of psychological theory, widely applied in a number of
fields, that emphasizes both the mind in the body and the mind in the world.
● For Gibson, that was a picture of a mind separated from its world. The core
of Gibson’s theory of perception is that we don’t perceive objects and don’t
operate cognitively in terms of object representations. What we perceive—
what any animal perceives—are what Gibson terms affordances.
● Squirrels don’t see trees, represent them internally, and calculate how to
climb them. What they see is something more immediate and more action-
oriented than that. They see a way up. For Gibson, a mind in the world
operates in terms of those affordances: more immediate and more action-
oriented than mere representation of objects.
● The theory has had a wide impact. A range of thinkers in both philosophy and
psychology carry on the Gibson tradition, emphasizing an embodied mind
interactive with its environment. Called situated cognition, the theory is often
cited as background for “knowing by doing.” It forms the basis of participatory
learning strategies in educational psychology.
L E C T U R E 18 T H I N K I N G B O DY A N D E X T E N D E D M I N D 185
● Critiques of this approach warn against is overstating the conclusions. It may
be true that we learn by doing without it being true that it is the only way
we learn.
Evolutionary Pressures
● If we look at the issue from an evolutionary perspective, it shouldn’t be
surprising that we find important areas of integration between mind and body,
and between mind and world.
Robotics
● That evolutionary perspective on mind and body is reflected in robotics.
Rodney Brooks is a robotics professor at MIT. He is known for solving
problems by taking unusual approaches.
● Brooks proposes building robotic brains in layers, just like evolution seemed
to build our brain: Start with a basic navigational unit, then add different
perceptual units, then add something like a goal-directing unit, and so on.
186 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Mental Concepts
● Everyday experience, situated cognition and affordance theories, and even
robotics argue for paying attention to connections between mind and body.
Even our concepts of purely mental things have lots of the world built in.
● The philosopher Hilary Putnam argues that even meanings aren’t purely
contents of the head. The meanings of your words don’t depend merely on how
your linguistic community uses them. The meanings of your words can depend
on the world itself.
● But the stuff that fills the streams and rivers on Twin Earth, the stuff they
pour into glasses and drink, has a very different chemical composition. It has a
complicated formula abbreviated as XYZ.
● Suppose you have a doppelganger on Twin Earth, and suppose that you sit
down at a restaurant and ask for a glass of water. To you, water means H2O. But
on Twin Earth, your doppelganger asking for a glass of water would be asking
for XYZ.
L E C T U R E 18 T H I N K I N G B O DY A N D E X T E N D E D M I N D 187
● The question is how far to push the theory. A common response to externalism
is to concede that some psychological terms, in some uses, may indeed fit
Putnam’s story. Some uses of belief and meaning may have wide content,
meaning that they depend on the world around us. But that may not be true of
all our psychological or mental terms. Other psychological concepts may have
narrow content, limited more narrowly to just what’s in a person’s head.
Further Externalism
● The philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers argue for an extended-mind
thesis that they call active externalism. In cases in which we use the world
as part of our cognition, we should think of our minds as extending into the
world. Whatever you use to think is part of your mind.
● They use this comparison: Igna and Otto both want to go to a new exhibit at
the Museum of Modern Art. Igna recalls the museum’s location—it’s on 53rd
Street—from memory and starts walking there. Otto, who has Alzheimer’s,
consults the notebook he carries and brings up the museum’s location that way.
He also heads to the museum.
188 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Clark and Chalmers say that both Inga and Otto believe that the museum is
on 53rd street because both have that as accessible information. Where it is
accessible, whether in skull or notebook, shouldn’t make a difference.
● Clark and Chalmers concede that we don’t use mental terms that way. We say
Inga remembers where the museum is but Otto doesn’t. He has Alzheimer’s.
It’s because he can’t remember things that he has to consult his notebook.
Inga has a background belief that the museum is on 53rd street. Otto just has a
jotting in his notebook.
● But even if we don’t use mental terms that way, Clark and Chalmers claim
we should. In all important respects, the cases of Otto and Inga are relevantly
the same. If our mental concepts don’t yet recognize a mind extended into the
world around it, they should.
● Taken that way, they aren’t just giving us an analysis of our current concepts
of mind. They’re telling us to change them. Is that going too far?
Suggested Reading
Clark and Chalmers, “The Extended Mind.”
Questions to Consider
1 Give three examples from your own experience in which you use your body as
part of your thought process.
2 Give three examples in which you use something from the world as part of
your thought process.
L E C T U R E 18 T H I N K I N G B O DY A N D E X T E N D E D M I N D 189
Lecture 19
Francis Crick
● After their work together on DNA, Crick and Watson went on to important
later careers. Watson’s was the straighter line: He went to the biology faculty at
Harvard and from there to direct the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long
Island. By the 1990s, he was a major player in the Human Genome Project.
● By contrast, Crick left DNA behind and changed course again. He felt there
were two mysteries: the physical basis of life and the physical basis of mind.
His progress on the question of life had been astounding. So Crick turned to
the second question: What is the physical basis of mind? What is the underlying
structure of consciousness?
192 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Crick was a materialist, or physicalist, with regard to mind as he was with
regard to life. He was sure the underlying structure of consciousness was going
to be a physical understructure.
● Crick and Koch laid out the problem of consciousness as a genuinely scientific
project. They lay out a number of assumptions they’re going to make, as well
as a number of questions they’re going to put aside, at least at the beginning.
● Their first assumption is that it’s not just people who have consciousness.
Other animals, and clearly the higher mammals, do as well. They assume therefore
that language of the sort found in humans is not necessary for consciousness.
● One of the problems they put aside is how far down an evolutionary ladder
consciousness goes. They claim it’s unprofitable at an early stage to speculate as
to whether octopi, fruit flies, or nematodes are conscious. They also put aside,
for the moment, questions of what consciousness is for.
● There are two aspects that they put aside that may be particularly worrisome.
One is what they call the problem of qualia, focusing on the character of
subjective experience. The other issue they put to the side is actually defining
the phenomenon they are after.
● Those are some pretty significant factors to set aside, but it’s all in the name
of trying to convert the problem of consciousness into a genuinely scientific
research project. They recognize their first step as precisely that: a first step.
In that regard—jumpstarting a scientific study of consciousness—the Crick
and Koch paper was a dramatic success.
● That central aspect of consciousness is what they term the binding problem.
Although they don’t allude to it, the binding problem has a significant
philosophical history.
L E C T U R E 19 F R A N C I S C R I C K A N D B I N D I N G I N T H E B R A I N 193
The Binding Problem
● The binding problem is this: At the moment there are certain things you see.
There are certain things you hear. You may feel certain pressure on your
fingertips or a certain tension in your forehead. There are certain thoughts
going through your mind, and you might smell coffee.
● Those are all different sensations and conceptualizations. But they are
all happening at once, and they are all happening together. Yours is a
single consciousness in which many things are happening simultaneously.
How precisely is that possible, that all those things are bound in a single
consciousness?
● Crick and Koch approach it as a problem of the brain. We know that different
parts of the brain process vision, hearing, touch, smell, and thoughts. What binds
activity in those different parts of the brain together into a single consciousness?
● Crick and Koch weren’t the first theorists to ponder the binding problem. It is
raised in both Plato and Aristotle. And the Scottish philosopher David Hume,
writing in 1738, raised the binding problem in a particularly forceful way.
Hume was an empiricist. The basic idea of empiricism is that all knowledge
comes from experience.
● The mind operates using ideas from impressions as its basic material, but there
are important limitations as to what it can do with them. In Hume, association
of ideas operates solely in terms of similarity, whether things are next to each
other in time or space, and an association of cause and effect that arises purely
from habit.
● How are these impressions bound together? In the main section of Hume’s
Treatise of Human Nature in which he addresses the issue, he simply denies
that experience gives us any sense of self. If ideas come from impressions,
there is no genuine idea of self. What are people? All of mankind,
194 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Hume says, “are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which
succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux
and movement.”
● It’s called the bundle theory precisely because of that passage. The bundle
theory doesn’t so much solve the binding problem as refuse to recognize it.
Nothing brings experiences and sensations together. They remain separate.
They’re as loose as a bundle of twigs. But in a later appendix to the Treatise
of Human Nature, however, Hume confesses that he’s not satisfied with his
earlier analysis.
● Writing 40 years later, near the end of the 18th century, Immanuel Kant credits
Hume with awakening him from his dogmatic slumbers. One of the problems
in Hume that Kant tackled was the binding problem.
● For Kant, the mind has templates in advance that shape all the experience that
comes in. One of the templates for Kant is space. Another is time. Space and
time aren’t so much in the world as in how we come prepared to interpret
the world.
● The same goes for a concept of self and a binding of experience into a
single unity. Kant has a fancy name for it: the transcendental unity of
a perception.“Unity” signals it’s binding; “apperception” signals it’s a kind of per-
ception or representation; and “transcendental” signals it doesn’t come from
experience but is necessary for experience.
L E C T U R E 19 F R A N C I S C R I C K A N D B I N D I N G I N T H E B R A I N 195
neuron firing commonly called brain waves. EEG recordings show particular
firing patterns in particular areas of the brain. Sometimes these are slow—
alpha waves at 8–12 cycles per second, or 8–12 hertz. Sometimes these are
fast—gamma waves, at 40–70 hertz.
● Crick and Koch cite experimental research on cat brains showing that when
a cat is shown a moving bar, neurons some distance apart in its brain respond
with synchronized oscillations. They propose that is what all binding is, and
ultimately what consciousness is: “We suggest that one of the functions of
consciousness is to present the result of various underlying computations and
that this involves an attentional mechanism that temporarily binds the relevant
neurons together by synchronizing their spikes in 40Hz oscillation.”
● Summed up, the theory is that patterns of neurons firing synchronously in the
range of 40 hertz form part of the same conscious experience. Those firing
asynchronously, or out of that range, may well be functioning unconsciously,
but don’t break the surface of conscious awareness.
● How has Crick’s first hypothesis fared? A number of studies, in both animals
and humans, do indicate some forms of synchrony as important for binding
different perceptions. However, it does not appear that the importance of
synchrony is limited to the 40-hertz range, nor that it needs to have the form
of regular oscillation that Crick and Koch emphasize. On the other hand, there
are cases of 40-hertz synchrony that do not trigger conscious awareness.
196 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● But Crick didn’t give up. He was working on a paper that lays out a second
hypothesis regarding consciousness up to the day he died in 2004. In his second
hypothesis, Crick targets a particular anatomical area. Crick proposes that
there is a particular part of the brain that is responsible for the coordination
across various areas of the brain required for consciousness.
● The title of the piece Crick was working on when he died is “What Is the
Function of the Claustrum?” The hypothesis is that it is the claustrum that is
crucial to consciousness by binding the different areas of the brain.
● Claustrum literally means “hidden away,” and the term is apt. On each side
of the brain is a lateral sulcus, a deep canyon that separates the temporal
lobe from the parietal and frontal lobes. Deep in that canyon is a folded part
of the cortex called the insula. One step even deeper toward the center of
your brain is an extremely thin and irregular sheet of neurons, hidden away.
That’s the claustrum.
● Crick’s work suggests that the claustrum coordinates different areas of the
brain, binding them into consciousness. The brain may not have a spatial
theater where everything comes together. But Crick suggests that it does have
an anatomical feature, spatially located, that coordinates the temporal binding
of firing in different parts of the brain.
L E C T U R E 19 F R A N C I S C R I C K A N D B I N D I N G I N T H E B R A I N 197
● Crick proposed a test of his hypothesis: Knock out the claustrum and see what
happens. He also noted the extreme difficulty of performing any such test.
The claustrum is so thin that shutting it down, and only it, either
pharmaceutically or surgically seemed beyond the reach of current techniques.
● There is also some evidence against the claustrum hypothesis. The structure
of the claustrum seems too simple for any complex information processing.
Brain imaging doesn’t indicate that it is particularly active during consciousness.
198 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Suggested Reading
Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis.
Questions to Consider
1 Has the course of your life been a straight line between points A and B, or
something with more turns and twists than that? Which parts have been the
most interesting?
3 In what respects do you think those are the same question? In what ways are
they different questions?
L E C T U R E 19 F R A N C I S C R I C K A N D B I N D I N G I N T H E B R A I N 199
Lecture 20
Clues on
Consciousness
from
Anesthesiology
I
n the city of Boston stands a 40-foot-tall monument dedicated to the use of
ether as an anesthetic. At the top is a vaguely Moorish figure in robe and
turban holding the drooping body of a man over his knee and a cloth in one
hand—a cloth presumably soaked with ether. The innovation of anesthetic ether
was a major achievement in medicine. The American dentist William T. G.
Morton and the Harvard professor Dr. Charles Jackson squabbled over credit for
the invention. Whoever deserves the credit, the use of ether spread quickly, as
did other anesthetics, like chloroform and nitrous oxide. Their use has much to
teach us about consciousness.
On Anesthetics
● The initial hypothesis on different anesthetics was that they must have some
common mechanism. There must be some one thing that all these different
chemicals are doing in the brain.
● By the 1980s, the lipid hypothesis had been debunked. An even larger range
of anesthetics was available by that time. But how those different anesthetics
worked was still a mystery.
202 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● By then, attention had turned away from lipids to proteins and ion
channels instead. Theories also shifted away from a unitary hypothesis to a
diversity hypothesis: Maybe all anesthetics don’t work the same way.
● It is also possible that the effects aren’t even all that similar. Anesthesia is
a single term meaning “insensitivity to pain.” But there are more terms
beyond that.
○ Paralytics is the term used for chemicals employed as muscle relaxants,
which block patient movement.
○ Amnesiacs is the term for chemicals that block recall. What happened
to you for a period of time after you took an amnesiac won’t be
remembered afterward.
● The aim of general anesthesia is to wipe the awareness slate clean—to entirely
eliminate conscious awareness, eliminating pain in the process. A warning: If
you have a surgical procedure scheduled in the near future, you may want to
postpone this lecture until later.
The Effects
● It is common in anesthesiology to use a cocktail of chemicals that have a
spectrum of effects. The combination typically includes a paralytic for muscle
relaxation and smooth surgery. It also typically works as an amnesiac to block
memory of the event. Of course, the main intent is to block pain and awareness
under the knife.
L E C T U R E 20 C L U E S O N C O N S C I O U S N E SS F R O M A N E ST H E S I O LO G Y 203
● Indeed, the awful truth is that this apparently happens. In 1984, four national
newspapers in Great Britain carried the following short advertisement asking
if people had been conscious during surgery. They got all too many responses
recounting terrifying experiences from helpless patients.
● Moreover, the figure of one or two cases in a thousand represents only those
cases in which patients remember being awake and aware; an effective amnesiac
may simply erase the memory of the horror.
● What we need is a consciousness monitor. With that, we could tell that the
patient is really unconscious when under anesthetic, not merely paralyzed with
muscle relaxant and unable to recall the physical experience later.
● The second question should also be familiar: How does consciousness work?
If we could answer that, we would know the physical process we were trying
to turn off in trying to turn off consciousness.
204 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Research
● The last few years have seen a number of promising breakthroughs by a number
of different research teams. George Mashour, an anesthesiologist at the
University of Michigan, is one of the main players. He speaks of an explosion
of studies on how anesthetics interrupt consciousness and what they can teach
us about it.
● Before the 1980s, the idea was that different anesthetics must work in basically
the same way—the unitary hypothesis. In the 1980s, thinking shifted to a
realization that different anesthetics or different aspects of anesthetics may
work in different ways.
● In the past few decades, research has swung back toward a unitary hypothesis
of consciousness once again. With that shift has come new hope for answering
some of the questions we’ve highlighted.
● What made a unitary theory seem impossible was that different anesthetic
agents seemed to do very different things to very different parts of the brain.
Rather than a general theory of how anesthesia works, it appeared that the best
we could get was a bunch of theories of how a bunch of different anesthetic
agents work.
● This overlooks a simple distinction between what is done and the different
ways in which that thing is done. It is possible that the same thing can be
accomplished in a number of different ways.
● Maybe anesthetics have the same general function, producing the same
overall effect, although the details of how they accomplish that general
function are different. Our unitary theory of anesthesia will be a theory of
the general mechanism that produces the general effect.
L E C T U R E 20 C L U E S O N C O N S C I O U S N E SS F R O M A N E ST H E S I O LO G Y 205
● If we accept a binding hypothesis, we have provisional answers to the first two
of the four questions. And with those, we can propose a possible answer to the
third.
1 What is consciousness? The sense of consciousness that seems to be
important for studies of anesthesia is subjective awareness.
Studies
● A number of studies across the world seem to support the combination of a
binding hypothesis regarding consciousness and this unitary hypothesis of how
anesthetics work.
● A Belgian group has studied anesthesia with PET and functional MRI scans.
They found that when patients are unconscious, external stimulation causes
initial islands of activation to occur, but it doesn’t spread to other areas of the
brain like normal.
206 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● A German team has studied the process in slow motion by altering how
anesthetics are administered; they administer the drug Propofol so that
patients fall asleep in minutes instead of the normal 10 seconds. During the
administering, they observe what happens in EEG readings with a mild shock
to the volunteer’s wrist. When awake, the result is activation of the sensory
cortex, with further activation of frontal lobes associated with judgment and
temporal lobes associated with memory. When fully sedated, the activation
seems to stop at the sensory cortex.
● This study resonates with the unitary hypothesis. They support the idea that
what anesthetics do is block the process of binding across the brain.
Blocking
● How precisely is binding blocked? There are some intriguing research findings
here as well. When conscious, the brain shows active communication between
importantly different patterns of activity in different parts of the brain.
● As the patient slips into unconsciousness, that active exchange between areas
of differential activity is replaced with a strong, monotonously synchronized,
slow oscillation that washes across them all.
● Like all good science, these results are open to further testing, vulnerable to
falsification, subject to replication, and open to refinement. There are more,
both older and newer, that seem to track the same trajectory. They offer strong
evidence that anesthesia works by interfering with communication across
different areas of the brain.
● We know a great deal more about how anesthesia works than we did only a few
decades ago. That in turn gives us clues to at least some aspects of the neural
dynamics responsible for consciousness.
L E C T U R E 20 C L U E S O N C O N S C I O U S N E SS F R O M A N E ST H E S I O LO G Y 207
● Regarding the fourth question: Do these results give us what we need for a
consciousness monitor? If binding is a necessary condition for consciousness
in the sense we’re after, and if we know anesthesia operates by blocking that
binding in measurable ways, it looks like we might actually be able to build
such a device.
Philosophical Questions
● On the assumption of a binding theory of consciousness, we’ve sketched some
promising answers to the four practical and scientific questions. But major
philosophical questions remain.
● Even the most successful binding theory of consciousness would leave a crucial
question unanswered: Why is it that subjective experience emerges only with
binding across a brain?
● In the second case, pain and awareness are there during the operation, though
the patient is disabled from crying out and the memory of the event is entirely
wiped afterward.
● Neither an outsider’s observation nor any response from the patient at any time
would tell us if the patient felt sensation during the operation: We hear no
complaint when he is paralyzed during the operation, and hear no complaint
afterward because he has forgotten all about it.
● That philosophical possibility would remain even if we did have the kind of
consciousness monitor that we’ve outlined. We would know that when the
208 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
fMRI indicates that functioning is confined to specific areas of the brain,
or EEG readings signal the synchronous wave across the brain, the horror
stories stop. We would no longer hear patient reports of anesthetic awareness.
● Perhaps it’s merely a philosophical possibility. Perhaps it will join the wild
speculative possibility that Bertrand Russell envisages: the possibility that the
universe was created five seconds ago, complete with false memories. Or the
logical possibility that other people are merely clever robots. Those too are
philosophical nightmares. Luckily, blissfully, they prove unsustainable in the
normal course of everyday life. Maybe that’s where this possibility belongs
as well.
Suggested Reading
Mashour, “Integrating the Science of Consciousness and Anesthesia.”
Questions to Consider
1 A worry is raised in this lecture that there may be cases in which a patient
is fully conscious but paralyzed during an operation, but the horrors are not
reported later because the cocktail of drugs administered also includes an
amnesiac that wipes memory of the event. If the patient doesn’t remember the
event later, is it nonetheless something we should worry about? Why?
2 It has been suggested that anesthesia, vegetative coma, and certain stages of
sleep all show a pattern of unbinding in the brain. From your own experience
of sleep, what do you think the pattern of unbinding is? Is it gradual, or sudden?
L E C T U R E 20 C L U E S O N C O N S C I O U S N E SS F R O M A N E ST H E S I O LO G Y 209
Lecture 21
Of Mind,
Materialism,
and Zombies
T
his lecture discusses zombies—not the blood-dripping creatures of popular
portrayals on large and small screens, but denizens of philosophical
thought experiments. These zombies don’t eat brains. They’re meant to
stimulate brains: to test philosophical intuitions and theories about minds, brains,
and consciousness. A zombie is a creature just like a person: acting like a person
and saying the things a person does. The only difference is that a zombie does it
all without any consciousness. A zombie’s responses are identical but aren’t routed
through subjective experience the way a person’s are.
Materialism
● Materialism is the view that everything is ultimately physical. Typically, we
picture the physical universe as a hierarchy: one type of physical thing is
composed of another type of physical thing.
● For instance, you are composed of complex organs, which are composed of
tissues, which are composed of cells, which are built from proteins, and so on,
down to atoms and subatomic particles. Hierarchies can also be traced from
the bottom up.
212 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
and economics—a science of a particular dynamics within societies. Societies are
composed of people, the realm of social and individual psychology.
● Some might object, citing that chemistry and physics don’t even use the same
terms. Classical reductionism has an answer to this: Reduction consists of
deduction plus definition. We simply need to add bridge principles which
define the concepts of the higher theory in terms of the concepts of the lower.
L E C T U R E 21 O F M I N D , M AT E R I A L I S M , A N D ZO M B I E S 213
● The crucial point is that the abstract models we build to understand different
levels of phenomena are inevitably going to be different. The concepts we take
as basic, the relationships we choose to model, and the dynamics we put at the
center will be different.
● There is a strong argument that reduction at this point will prove impossible.
It’s called the multiple instantiation argument. It goes like this: Suppose we
found very different creatures on a distant planet—creatures based on silicon
rather than carbon, with brains that were distributed across their bodies in
ways we didn’t recognize.
● These creatures could conceivably feel pain But that means that the concept of
pain is multiply instantiable. There might be various kinds of creatures, with
various kinds of nervous systems—even nervous systems totally unlike any we
could imagine—who still feel pain.
● If so, we’re never going to be able to define pain as a particular type of carbon-
based brain function. It’s a concept of a very different kind—a concept at a very
different level of abstraction. If our mental concepts are multiply instantiable,
that kind of reduction of mind to brain will inevitably fail.
Elements of Value
● The full classical picture of reduction is now generally recognized as a failure.
However, if we let go of the full classical picture, there may be elements of
reductionism that are still of value.
● The classical picture called for what is sometimes called type-to-type reduction.
The idea was that types of mental states, like pain, would correspond to types
of brain state. The multiple instantiation idea dashes that hope.
214 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● But it might still be true that each particular instance of pain, in a
particular creature at a particular time, corresponds to a particular brain state
in that creature at that time. We can call that particular instance
of pain in that creature at that time a specific token instance rather than a
general type. Perhaps token-to-token reduction is possible even if we’ve
abandoned type-to-type.
● Another valuable thing that we might take from the reductionist program is
a simple research strategy. If you want to understand something, it’s often a
good idea to take it apart to see how it works.
Non-Reductive Materialism
● Reductionism is an epistemological theory: a theory about knowledge.
Materialism, on the other hand, is an ontological theory. It’s a theory of being:
Everything that exists is ultimately physical. Reductive materialism insisted on
putting those two things together. Another option is to pull them apart.
● If all the circumstances are the same, could one of those actions be ethically
right and the other be ethically wrong? No.
L E C T U R E 21 O F M I N D , M AT E R I A L I S M , A N D ZO M B I E S 215
Zombies
● Zombies offer a thought experiment to test, on reflection, whether dependence
materialism is plausible.
● Suppose that somewhere, in some faraway galaxy, you have a zombie twin.
There is only one difference between the two of you: You have a rich inner life
and are conscious.
● Being physically identical, your zombie twin does everything you do. But it’s
all merely a physical operation. Zombies have no subjective awareness and
lack consciousness.
● Is that kind of zombie possible? People who say yes are anti-materialist.
Even dependence materialism won’t do. Materialism says that if the two
of you are physically identical, the two of you must be mentally identical.
People who say yes fall more in the camp of dualism.
● People who say no, such a zombie is impossible, fall firmly in the materialist
camp. A physically identical but mentally different zombie would be impossible
if the mental must depend on the physical.
More Zombies
● To begin with, there are different ways in which we might think of you
and your zombie twin being “identical.” So far we thought of you and
your zombie twin being fully physically identical: identical atom for atom,
molecule for molecule.
216 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● We can use a different kind of thought experiment zombie to test whether
you’re this kind of behaviorist: Could you and your zombie twin be behaviorally
identical, but you be conscious and your zombie twin not be?
● If you think that kind of zombie is impossible, you’re not merely a materialist,
you’re a behaviorist as well. If you think that kind of zombie is possible, you’re
an anti-behaviorist.
Types of Possibility
● Possibility comes in different strengths. Something is logically possibly
if imagining it doesn’t involve some kind of contradiction. For instance,
imagining a horse with three horns would be weird, but doesn’t involve a
contradiction. A married bachelor, though, is a contradiction.
L E C T U R E 21 O F M I N D , M AT E R I A L I S M , A N D ZO M B I E S 217
● We can add one more type of zombie. The multiple instantiation argument
argued that any of various creatures, with all kinds of different anatomies,
silicon-based or carbon-based, might all feel pain. Pain isn’t something that can
be reduced to a particular physical state, because it seems that very different
creatures on other planets might all feel pain.
● To track your answers to questions like these, fill out a zombie scorecard. See
this lecture’s Questions to Consider below for a model.
Suggested Reading
Dennett, “The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies.”
218 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Questions to Consider
1 The multiple instantiation argument has us imagine very different creatures
that nonetheless have the same mental states—pain, for example. Are there
limits to that thought experiment for different mental states? What would a
creature have to be like in order for it to have beliefs? To have a sense of pride?
L E C T U R E 21 O F M I N D , M AT E R I A L I S M , A N D ZO M B I E S 219
Lecture 22
Thought
Experiments
against
Materialism
O
ne of the main tools employed in contemporary philosophy of mind is the
thought experiment. Virtually all of the contemporary arguments against
materialism and functionalism rely on appeals to thought experiments.
Many thought experiments, in philosophy as well as physics, are designed to show
that a particular theory will generate a clearly unacceptable conclusion under
clearly imaginable circumstances. In this lecture, we’ll look at thought experiments
in some detail.
● Einstein wasn’t a fan of quantum mechanics. He didn’t like the essential and
irreducible randomness at the core of the theory. It must be leaving out some
hidden variables behind that apparent randomness.
222 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● It’s now known as the EPR paradox—EPR for Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen.
Here’s the core: If the relevant interpretation of quantum mechanics were
right, separating two particles that had once been entangled in interaction
would allow information about a random event performed at one point in the
universe to reach us at a different point in the universe instantaneously.
● If the target theory were right, it would then be possible for information to
travel faster than the speed of light. But nothing can travel faster than the
speed of light. If the relevant interpretation of quantum mechanics were
right, we’d have “spooky action at a distance,” Einstein said. This was an
unacceptable conclusion.
● But the EPR thought experiment didn’t turn out to be the knockout punch
it was intended to be. There is ongoing work in physics attempting to
convert that thought experiment into a real experiment. The underlying
idea is maybe those unacceptable conclusions aren’t really so unacceptable:
Perhaps the universe doesn’t have a speed limit when information is
at stake. Perhaps information really could be transferred faster than the speed
of light.
Frank Jackson
● The Australian philosopher Frank Jackson offers what has become one of the
most famous thought experiments against materialism. The target theory is: If
the universe is entirely physical, all the facts of the universe are physical facts.
L E C T U R E 22 T H O U G H T E X P E R I M E N TS AG A I N ST M AT E R I A L I S M 223
● The clearly imaginable situation posits a brilliant neuroscientist named Mary.
Mary grows up in a black-and-white room. She’s educated through black-
and-white books with black-and-white illustrations and views lectures in
black and white.
● But since she’s brilliant, she learns everything there is to know about the
physical nature of the world, and in particular about the physical nature of
color vision. She’s trapped in a black-and-white world but becomes the world’s
expert on all the physical facts of color.
● One day, Mary is released from her black-and-white world, opens the door,
and sees color for the first time: azure rivers, green fields, and so on. “Oh,” she
says, “So that’s what color looks like.”
● That’s the clearly imaginable situation of the thought experiment. Here’s the
punchline: Hasn’t Mary learned something new when she opens the door?
We assumed that Mary knew all the physical facts of color before she opened
that door. If she knows something more about color now, there must be
something to know about color that isn’t a part of mere physical knowledge.
● Materialism would entail that Mary already knew all the facts, and so couldn’t
have learned anything new. That is an unacceptable conclusion, so materialism
must be wrong.
224 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
walk among them. If the machine is really producing thoughts, sensations, or
perceptions, it shouldn’t matter how big we make the machine: All the causal
interactions will be the same.
● Leibniz says inside the head, you’d see levers and gears and pulleys in motion.
But you wouldn’t see perceptions, or sensations, or thoughts. Leibniz argues
that thought, sensation, perception, and subjective experience must therefore
be something beyond the mechanism.
L E C T U R E 22 T H O U G H T E X P E R I M E N TS AG A I N ST M AT E R I A L I S M 225
● Suppose that a machine in Leibniz’s sense—he was thinking of metal
clockwork—could produce sensations and perceptions. Why think that
those would be additional things visible when we walked into it?
● Why not think that those things would be in the dynamics of the gears,
pulleys, and wheels? They may be understandable once we consider the
complexity of the system even if they’re not something additional that we’d
see on the tour. For instance, think of all the wonderful things a computer
can do—spell checking, mathematical calculations—that we wouldn’t be
able to directly observe if we looked inside.
● But why think that? Why think that how red looks isn’t a physical fact—a phy-
sical fact that, unfortunately, Mary couldn’t learn in a black and white room?
Why think that all facts can be expressed in black and white?
● That attacks the clearly imaginable part of the thought experiment. Maybe
it isn’t clearly imaginable that Mary learned all the facts about color vision
in a black-and-white room. If that picture doesn’t hold up, the thought
experiment fails at step one.
226 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● The first is John Searle’s Chinese room. Searle was a student of students
of Wittgenstein. He offers a thought experiment against forms of artificial
intelligence, part of Turing’s legacy.
● The book was so good that the Chinese questioners become convinced
there is a fluent (though slow) Chinese speaker on the other side of
the door. The Chinese speakers may be convinced, but that’s where Searle’s
argument starts.
● Searle’s experiment has had its own critics. Some of the critiques accept the
thought experiment, but attack the conclusions that Searle thinks we should
draw from it.
L E C T U R E 22 T H O U G H T E X P E R I M E N TS AG A I N ST M AT E R I A L I S M 227
● The philosopher Ned Block has pressed the question with a thought
experiment that’s even more far out: the China brain. Suppose we duplicated
the function of neurons in a brain, with people in a sufficiently large nation,
waving flags in specific ways.
● Would that nationwide complex of people with flags have thoughts? Would it
be conscious? None of those seem plausible. This thought experiment seems
to show that something more must be going on.
● Since the work of James Church Maxwell in 1865, we know that light
and electromagnetic waves are the same thing. Now for the thought
experiment: Imagine a Victorian gentleman in his parlor first reading that
fact in a scientific journal. Maxwell’s experiments show that light and
electromagnetic waves aren’t two different things. They’re the same thing.
● Our gentleman isn’t buying any of it. He states, “If light were a form of
electromagnetism, then if a magnet were to oscillate quickly enough, the
result would be visible light.” He’s right: That is an implication of the theory
we are talking about. In a darkened Victorian parlor, he waves a magnet up
and down as rapidly as he can. No light appears.
228 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
would produce visible light. The physical experiment we are imagining him
performing simply isn’t up to the task.
● Paul and Patricia Smith Churchland suggest that the same is true of Searle’s
Chinese room. We are no more able to imagine—really imagine—the
complexity that would be required in order for a program to mimic a Chinese
speaker than the Victorian gentleman is able to wave a magnet fast enough
to produce light. The Churchlands’ claim is that the clearly unacceptable
conclusion in this case might not be so clearly unacceptable.
● Thought experiments or the intuitions that guide them should not be dismissed
out of hand. They are a great tool for careful thinking. But they should not be a
substitute for thinking.
Suggested Reading
Churchland and Churchland, “Could a Machine Think?”
Questions to Consider
1 Does Mary learn something new when she leaves her black-and-white world?
Does that show that there are more facts than the physical facts?
2 John Searle offers the Chinese room as an argument against “strong AI”:
No program, however sophisticated, could allow a computer to understand
English. Paul and Patricia Smith Churchland think Searle is like the
Victorian gentleman waving a magnet in a darkened room as a refutation of
Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism. Where do your intuitions lie in that
battle between thought experiments?
L E C T U R E 22 T H O U G H T E X P E R I M E N TS AG A I N ST M AT E R I A L I S M 229
Lecture 23
Consciousness and
the Explanatory
Gap
T
his lecture faces a problem that has arisen a number of times in this course.
We keep running up against the hard problem of consciousness, which
has also been called the explanatory gap. The problem boils down to this:
Suppose in the year 2050 we have discovered that whenever the brain displays
a certain pattern and configuration, it produces consciousness. We’d still want
to know why that configuration produces consciousness. What is it about that
pattern that gives us subjective experience? Even when we know what produces
consciousness, we’ll still want to know how a physical brain function could
possibly produce it.
● In each of these cases, there’s a great deal we don’t know. But Chalmers says
all are questions of how a brain functions. We know that the brain does it.
We just have to figure out how. These are the so-called easy problems—easy
in the relative sense, of course.
232 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● The really hard problem is not a question of function but of experience.
Why does the brain in any particular state functioning in any particular way
result in conscious experience?
Unconscious Experience
● Another way of pressing the question is to emphasize all the ways that our
brains operate unconsciously, below the level of subjective experience.
Take the example of a person driving to the office and suddenly realizing they
have no memory of the trip: Despite avoiding pedestrians and stopping at red
lights, they did this trip on “automatic pilot.”
● Even the deepest and most complex thinking can occur unconsciously.
The great mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss spoke of a theorem he had
tried for years to solve, without success. But then, he reported, “Like a
sudden flash of lightning, the riddle was solved.” He himself couldn’t see
what the thread was from his previous thinking to the solution that suddenly
appeared before him.
Difficulty
● Just how hard is the hard problem of consciousness? Some thinkers claim
no real issue has been defined. Patricia Smith Churchland calls it the
“hornswoggle problem.” She points out that Chalmers’ “easy” problems aren’t
all that easy. Even there, we often don’t know what a solution is going to
look like. Why think that consciousness is any different? The clear road ahead
is to keep working on the neurobiology of mental phenomena in general.
L E C T U R E 23 C O N S C I O U S N E SS A N D T H E E X P L A N ATO RY G A P 233
● She and her husband Paul Churchland argue that our view of the issue at this
point may also be limited by our current ignorance and conceptual confusion.
The Churchlands predict that as scientific work proceeds we’ll find that there
is no explanatory gap after all.
Activities like playing the piano appear to require great coordination and
concentration, yet many people can read music essentially unconsciously.
234 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Another approach claims the hard problem isn’t ultimately all that hard.
It relies on the concept of emergence. How does subjective experience arise
from a purely physical brain? Consciousness is an emergent property of a
complex brain.
● The concept of emergence relies on the idea of levels. The idea is that
something emerges on a higher level as a result of the interaction of elements
on the lower level.
● The classical example of emergence comes from John Stuart Mill, using water.
A hydrogen atom is not wet. Neither is an oxygen atom. Nor does a single
molecule composed of two hydrogen atoms have that property. But put
lots of those molecules together, interacting at room temperature, and
you have something new: liquidity. Only now do you have something wet.
That’s emergence.
● How can consciousness be produced entirely by that lower level? That brings
up the hard problem all over again.
L E C T U R E 23 C O N S C I O U S N E SS A N D T H E E X P L A N ATO RY G A P 235
Another Take
● A number of people have suggested that it’s hard enough to demand radical
changes in our most fundamental approaches to the world. One of those
people is the distinguished physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose.
There are two parts to Penrose’s ideas about consciousness.
● The second part is a proposal for precisely how that could operate in the brain.
Penrose proposes that quantum mechanics might account for non-algorithmic
processing in the brain. And that it is non-algorithmic processing that is the
mark of consciousness.
● There are lots of questions here. One question is whether this interpretation
of Turing and Gödel’s results is right. The jury’s out on that one.
Another question is whether there is any quantum action in the microtubules
that has any effect on the brain. Many seem dubious.
236 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● Here again there is a range of questions. One question is what any new
physics of that sort would look like or how it would operate. A second
question is whether we really need a new physics: Our old physics has been
astoundingly effective in both understanding and manipulating the physical
world around us. A third question is whether even this would give us what
we want. Suppose we rebuilt our physics by adding a new particle, the
conscioutron, or a new force, the C-force, and surmised that those make
us conscious. Wouldn’t we still have the same problem? Why should
conscioutrons or the C-force make us conscious?
● Strawson argues that given those two premises, we have to recognize that
consciousness is an aspect of the physical world. He doesn’t take it to be merely
an aspect of some small and complex corner of the physical world, contained in
our skulls. For Strawson, experiential consciousness must be part of every part
of the physical world.
● Where else might we look for a solution to the hard problem? Dualism is always
there, lurking in the background, but dualism seems to be the route that no
one wants to take. The reasons are the same as those noted in earlier lectures.
Divide the universe conceptually into two distinct realms, as Descartes did,
and it looks like it will be conceptually impossible to put it back together.
L E C T U R E 23 C O N S C I O U S N E SS A N D T H E E X P L A N ATO RY G A P 237
A Hopeless Problem?
● The philosopher Colin McGinn is a mysterian. He asks whether we can solve
the mind-body problem, and firmly answers no. This is a problem we cannot
solve, ever and in principle.
● It’s not that there isn’t an answer. The universe knows the answer. But how
the physical brain creates conscious experience is forever and inevitably
closed to us. McGinn’s analogy is the blind spot. There are things that are
there to be seen, but you cannot see them because they are in your blind spot.
Somehow the physical does meet the mental in the operation of the universe,
but that meeting point lies where we could never see it: It lies in our
intellectual or conceptual blind spot.
● Is it possible that the answer we seek is one that we can’t in principle find?
The answer may be yes. There are scientific principles that are beyond the
conceptual reach of raccoons. There are aspects of mathematics that are
beyond the reach of chimpanzees. There seems no reason to think that there
aren’t also things that are beyond our reach.
● On the other hand, there are things that might be true but that it would be
intellectually wrong to accept. Why? Because that acceptance would block the
possibility of intellectual progress by shutting down further inquiry.
● If we decide there is no answer, we will no longer look for one. If we don’t look
for one, we won’t find one. That could be an intellectual loss beyond measure.
Suppose there really is an answer, lingering just beyond reach.
238 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Suggested Reading
Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.”
Questions to Consider
1 This lecture lists a number of things that we seem to be able to do without
consciousness. Is there something that we cannot do without consciousness?
L E C T U R E 23 C O N S C I O U S N E SS A N D T H E E X P L A N ATO RY G A P 239
Lecture 24
A Philosophical
Science of
Consciousness?
F
rom the start of this course, we’ve been grappling with the mind-
body problem. Much of the material we’ve covered suggests the need for
both better philosophy of consciousness and a better science of mind.
This lecture suggests that we also need an integration of the two: a
philosophical science of consciousness. How might we get there? What might
a philosophical science of consciousness look like? Those are the questions
this lecture tackles.
● Those working in the brain sciences are generally careful to specify what
they’re doing as a search for “neural correlates of consciousness.” They hope for
242 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
a map of brain dynamics that correlates with states of consciousness. The ideal
outcome would be an identifiable brain process—let’s call it brain process C—
that is precisely what a conscious brain is doing.
○ We would be able to say, “When C occurs in a brain, you have a conscious
brain. When C does not occur, you don’t.”
○ We are very far from that ideal. We don’t know the neural correlates of
consciousness. We can’t identify any such brain process C.
● There is a way of taking that line of reasoning that seems correct, but also
a way that might lead us astray. It might lead us astray if we think that we
could never do scientific experiments on neural correlates of consciousness.
A correlate would link something objective about the brain with an
aspect of consciousness or subjective experience. If we refuse an objective
approach to the subjective, we’d never be able to include that subjective side
in our scientific investigations.
L E C T U R E 24 A P H I LO S O P H I C A L S C I E N C E O F C O N S C I O U S N E SS ? 24 3
● It’s true that in any scientific experiment regarding consciousness, we have
to rely on first-person reports of consciousness. We know that those can
go wrong. We have seen that we can be wrong about characteristics of
our own consciousness. But there is no reason to doubt there is a genuine
phenomenon being reported.
● The real conclusion is simply that objective access to the subjective realm
is necessarily indirect. That’s not so different from much of the rest
of our science, which similarly relies on indirect objective indicators.
For instance, our knowledge of the distance and velocity of other galaxies is
based on inferences regarding the shift in the color of light that we receive
from those galaxies.
244 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● But when it comes to artificial intelligence, we continue to see areas
of progress and glimmers of hope. A major sign of progress is the shift
from linear programming to structures that imitate human neurons.
Machine learning constitutes a prolific and growing field, in large part because
it can be used to discern patterns in the torrents of data now available to us.
● But in practice, the whole path of investigation turns out to be a lot harder.
There are many more blind alleys than we ever thought, and we’ve learned
that our minds don’t function like computers.
L E C T U R E 24 A P H I LO S O P H I C A L S C I E N C E O F C O N S C I O U S N E SS ? 24 5
Philosophy
● Neither the brain sciences alone nor informational sciences alone seem
capable of giving us a real understanding of consciousness. Should the
question then be left to philosophers?
● This isn’t a good idea. Part of the argument is inductive. We’ve traced the
history of philosophy of mind over more than 2,500 years. Philosophical work
alone has taken us no further than we are now. Philosophers are great at
posing questions, but not so great at agreeing on answers.
● The philosopher’s strengths are logical, conceptual, and analytic. Those are
precisely what we need in order to figure out what the central questions are.
They are precisely what we need in order to get a handle on how one might be
able to answer those questions. But to go to a philosopher for a final answer
on a question is to make a mistake about philosophy’s role.
● Philosophers are going to be of most use when their logical methods and
conceptual talents are applied to concepts in use—concepts of interest and
importance for a science of mind and consciousness, for example.
Loops
● Taken alone, none of the disciplines we’ve looked at—philosophy, artificial
intelligence, or brain sciences—seem capable of giving us the understanding
of mind, body, and consciousness that we’re after. Could they do better
working together? It’s tough to definitely answer yes, but integration of the
three offers progress in a way that none of the three does alone.
● We are creatures that interact with the environment using “fast and
frugal” environmental detectors. We have a brain built to interact with our
246 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
environment in terms of fast and frugal detectors for color, sound, motion,
temperature and touch.
● Regarding the brain: Processing doesn’t proceed linearly from one area to
another in sequence. There is always backflow to the earlier areas. A theory
of cognitive loops might tell us why.
A Plan
● How might we work toward a philosophical science of mind, body,
and consciousness? The first step is to figure out what consciousness is by
figuring out what consciousness is for: What does it do that other cognitive
processing could not?
● The second step is to analyze the process in abstract terms. From input to
output, what function is needed to produce the process we’ve identified as
what consciousness is for?
● None of those steps will be easy, and they present some paradoxical
possibilities. For instance, regarding the first step, identifying what
consciousness is for: We are evolved creatures, shaped by natural selection,
but not everything about us was specifically selected for. Our blood is red,
but nature didn’t care about the color of our blood. Likewise, it is possible
consciousness just came along for the ride—a cosmic accident.
L E C T U R E 24 A P H I LO S O P H I C A L S C I E N C E O F C O N S C I O U S N E SS ? 247
● That aside, suppose there is something that consciousness does, and that we
can put our finger on what that is. The next step would be to specify that
functional something operationally. It must be a process that moves from
some range of inputs to some range of outputs.
● The reasoning that leads to that second paradox is not as tight as the first.
It only holds if the process outlined for consciousness is a machine-like
process: an algorithm in the sense of Turing and Penrose.
● There is also another possibility. It might turn out that the process we
specify abstractly can’t be built concretely into the kinds of machines we
have on hand. It might require a very different kind of machine. It might
require biological wetware.
● It is at the third stage that we need the brain sciences. If we can establish what
consciousness does, and if we can specify in the abstract the process required
to do that, we will want to know the concrete form that process takes in
the brain. What parts of the brain do the work of which parts of the formal
process? And precisely how do they do it?
The Link
● Were we able to complete each step in such a research program, we would
be far closer to the kinds of answers we’ve been looking for. What is the link
between the material brain and the world of subjective experience?
248 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
● The answer would go something like this: In the first step, we would be
able to see that consciousness has been evolutionarily selected for because
it does whatever it does. In the second step, the formal sciences would
give us a functional description of the process involved. In the third step,
work in the brain sciences would show us how the brain makes that abstract
function concrete. Might that not give us an answer to the hard problem?
● It is possible that the hypothesis that we’ll never know how conscious-
ness happens is correct. But if accepted, it would guarantee that we’ll
never know. We have an intellectual obligation to try to figure things out—
including consciousness.
Suggested Reading
Baumgartner and Payr, Speaking Minds.
Questions to Consider
1 This concluding lecture looks back on the resources we’ve drawn on from
the brain sciences, from information theory, and from philosophy. When you
think back on the lectures, which are the contributions you remember most?
L E C T U R E 24 A P H I LO S O P H I C A L S C I E N C E O F C O N S C I O U S N E SS ? 249
250 M ind - B ody P hilosophy
Bibliography
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———. City of God. Tr. Marcus Dods. New York: Modern Library, 1993. Available in
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 251
Baars, Bernard, William P. Banks, and James B. Newman, eds. Essential Sources
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collection of reprinted pieces, arranged by aspects and functions of consciousness.
Baumgartner, Peter and Sabine Payr. Speaking Minds: Interviews with Twenty Eminent
Cognitive Scientists. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. One of several
collections of anthologies with contemporary thinkers, always revealing of the full
human personalities behind the theories.
Beakley, Brian and Peter Ludlow, eds. The Philosophy of Mind: Classical Problems/
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Beilock, Sian. How the Body Knows Its Mind: The Surprising Power of the Physical
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252 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Block, Ned. “Troubles with Functionalism.” Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of
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reprinted pieces, arranged by philosophical issues.
Bloom, Deborah. Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life
After Death. New York: Penguin, 2007. Briefly mentioned in the lectures, James’s
involvement in psychical research proved both fascinating and frustrating. Bloom
writes the history like a novel.
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his theory of memory: forgetting.
Carter, Rita. Mapping the Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 253
Casti, John. The Cambridge Quintet. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998. A series
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University Press, 1996. Chalmer’s most complete development of panpsychism as
an answer to the hard problem of consciousness.
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254 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
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1279. Crick’s second hypothesis regarding consciousness, a piece he was working
on when he died.
Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York:
Penguin, 1994. Damasio says that Descartes’s error was to leave out emotion.
A developed theory of a body-based somatic marker hypothesis.
Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of
Consciousness. Orlando, FL: Harcourt 1999. Damasio sees his theory of emotion
as a descendant of the James-Lange theory and takes pains to defend it against
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 255
Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Anniversary edition.
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Dehaene, Stanislas. Consciousness and the Brain. New York: Penguin, 2014. A full-volume
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256 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
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other regards as a set of reflections worth rereading.
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Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Flanagan writes some of the
most scientifically informed philosophy of mind available today, and is known in
particular for his work on sleep and dreams. As outlined in the lectures, Flanagan
argues that dreams are spandrels: unselected side effects of the evolutionary process.
———. The Science of Mind. 2nd edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984.
An ambitious attempt at a contemporary philosophical overview of major move-
ments in psychology.
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zombie scorecard.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 257
Freud, Sigmund. “Project for a Scientific Psychoanalysis.” 1895. Available at
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Freud’s earliest outline for a science of psychology.
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revealing of the full human personalities behind the theories.
258 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Gutenplan, Samuel, ed. A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Blackwell,
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Gutenplan’s extensive introduction alone.
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many editions.
———. Odyssey. Tr. Robert Eagles. New York: Penguin, 1998. Circa 760 BC.
Valuable for innumerable reasons, including the early Greek view of the soul.
Available in many editions.
Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. David Fate Norton. Oxford: Oxford
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mind, a landmark in the history of philosophy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 259
Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. with an introduction
by Peter Millican. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Originally published 1748.
Available in many editions, and free online. The other and later of Hume’s two
major works on mind.
Jackson, Frank. “What Mary Didn’t Know.” Journal of Philosophy 83, no. 5 (1986):
291–295. Not the first appearance of Jackson’s black-and-white Mary, but the clearest.
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(1982), 127–136.
———. The Principles of Psychology. Two volumes. New York: Dover Publications,
1950. Originally published in 1890 by Henry Holt and Company. This is always
instructive and often inspiring to dip into.
———. Psychology: The Briefer Course. New York: Dover Publications, 1950.
Originally published in 1892 by Henry Holt and Company. This is James’s
abridgment of the longer work, with chapters covering stream of consciousness, the
self, attention, memory, imagination, reasoning, and emotion.
260 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
James, William. William James on Psychical Research. Eds. Garner Murphey and
Robert O. Ballou. New York: Viking Press, 1960. Briefly mentioned in the lectures,
James’s involvement in psychical research proved both fascinating and frustrating.
This volume collects his writings on the topic.
Kandel, Eric. In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind. New York:
W. W. Norton, 2006. A Nobel Prize winner’s charmingly autobiographical tour
through recent discoveries in memories and memory formation.
Keenan, Julian, Gordon Gallup, and Dean Falk. The Face in the Mirror: How We Know
Who We Are. New York: HarperCollins 2003. An accessible and entertaining review
of the Gallup mirror test and related work on self-consciousness.
Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York:
Penguin, 2006. Kurzweil’s futuristic predictions.
LeDoux, Joseph. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life.
New York: Simon & Schuster 2015. A major source for the contemporary view
outlined in the lecture on emotions.
———. The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. New York:
Penguin, 2002. With reflections on the concept of the self, the core of the book is
LeDoux’s important work on emotions.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays. Tr. Robert
Arlew and Daniel Garber. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991. Leibniz’s arguments
against mechanism and in defense of dualism in the Monadology (1714) and other
sources. Pieces available in many editions.
Levine, Marvin. The Positive Psychology of Buddhism and Yoga. Hove, East Sussex:
Routledge, 2009. A very personal and practical take on traditions from the East by
an eminent psychologist. Deep insights wrapped in a common touch.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 261
Libet, Benjamin. “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will
in Voluntary Action.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8, no. 4 (1985): 529–566. Libet’s
research indicating that conscious decision comes too late to be an act of initiating
free will.
Loftus, Elizabeth, and Katherine Ketcham. The Myth of Repressed Memory: False
Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994.
A psychologically deep examination of a wrenching issue by a world expert on
memory and eyewitness testimony.
Lucretius. The Nature of Things. Tr. Alicia Stallings. New York: Penguin, 2007.
Circa 50 B.C. The Epicurean take on determinism and free will, including atoms
that occasionally “swerve.”
McGinn, Colin. “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?” Mind 98, no. 391 (1989):
349–366. McGinn is a mysterian, arguing that the answer is no.
262 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Miller, George. “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on
Our Capacity for Processing Information.” Psychological Review 63, no. 2 (1956):
81–97. One of the most cited papers in psychology, a touchstone for the limitations
of short-term or working memory.
Minsky, Marvin. The Society of Mind. New York: Touchstone, 1985. The overall
aim of the book is a theory of intelligent minds built from nonintelligent agents.
Minsky’s one-page sections harbor a wealth of inventive ideas.
Minsky, Marvin and Seymour Papert. Perceptrons, Expanded Edition. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1987. Minsky and Papert’s devastating critique of Frank Rosenblatt’s
groundbreaking neural networks. A quotation from the introduction is used in
Lecture 16.
Moravec, Hans. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Moravec predicts that our real descendants
will be robotic rather than biological.
Nagel, Thomas. “Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness.” Synthese 22,
nos. 3–4 (1971): 396–413. Nagel’s attempt to make philosophical sense of split-
brain cases.
———. Mind & Cosmos. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Nagel’s extended
and developed attack on “neo-Darwinian” materialism.
———. The View From Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Classic Nagel, examining aspects of, in his words, “a single problem: how to
combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective
view of that same world, the person and his viewpoint included.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY 263
——— . “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974):
435–350. Reprinted in Brian Beakley and Peter Ludlow, The Philosophy of
Mind, 255–266. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2006. And in Douglas Hofstadter
and Daniel Dennett, The Mind’s I, 391–402. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
Nagel’s groundbreaking piece, historically important for refocusing philosophical
attention on the problem of subjective experience.
Neurath, Otto and Rudolf Carnap, eds. International Encyclopedia of Unified Science,
vol. 1, nos. 1–5. University of Chicago Press, 1955. The high-water mark of
materialistic reductionism.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Philosophy During the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Tr. Marianne
Cowan. Washington DC: Regnery, 1962. An incomplete work circa 1873.
Nietzsche’s reflections on the beginning of Greek philosophy in Thales’s
“preposterous fancy” are used in Lecture 2.
O’Connor, D. J., ed. A Critical History of Western Philosophy. New York: Free Press,
1964. A chronologically arranged set of essays on major figures in the history of
philosophy, both expository and critical.
Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. An enormously
impressive piece of sustained conceptual work with a primary emphasis on ethics,
but not ethics alone.
Penrose, Roger. The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws
of Physics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Penrose’s argument that
mathematical insight goes beyond the limits of algorithms.
264 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
———. Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996. Penrose’s proposal for quantum mechanical effects
in microtubules as a physical basis for consciousness.
Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Although the
book may not fully live up to its title, it does offer a voluminous and wide-ranging
set of speculations on evolution, language, and human nature.
Plato. Phaedo. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Circa 380 B.C. Crucial
for understanding both Plato and his later influence on Medieval philosophy.
Available in many editions. Downloadable at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/
phaedo.html.
———. Republic. New York: Dover, 2000. Circa 380 B.C. The core Platonic
dialogue on social and political philosophy, building from an analogy with mind.
Available in many editions. Downloadable at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/
republic.html.
Purves, Dale and R. Beau Lotto. Why We See What We Do. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer
Associates, 2003. A fascinating series of studies in psychology of perception.
Putnam, Hilary. “Meaning and Reference.” Journal of Philosophy 70, no. 19 (1973):
699–711. Putnam’s clearest presentation of his Twin Earth thought experiment.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 265
———. “Psychological Predicates.” In W. H. Capitan and D. D. Merill, Eds.
Art, Mind, and Religion, 37–48. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967.
One version of Putnam’s multiple instantiation argument.
Rahula, Walpola. What the Buddha Taught. New York: Grove Press, 1974. An easy
introduction to the essentials of Buddhism.
Ramachandran, V. S. and Sandra Blakeslee. Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries
of the Human Mind. New York: Quill, 1988. Includes Ramachandran’s work on
phantom limbs, but also a number of other chapters on mind and brain, both clinical
and speculative.
Ratey, John J. A User’s Guide to the Brain. New York: Vintage, 2001. Research rich
and wide-ranging but written with journalistic flair.
The Rig Veda. Ed. and tr. Wendy Doniger. New York: Penguin, 2005. The earliest of
the four Hindu Vedas, circa 1200–900 BC.
Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy. New York: Touchstone, 2008. First
published in 1945. This is a widely condemned for its personal philosophical biases,
and valuable for precisely that reason. Includes Russell’s vibrant and compelling
take on Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and more.
———. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. New York: Vintage, 2007.
As fascinating and accessible as all of Sacks’s volumes, particularly good on audi-
tory hallucination, synesthesia, and musical therapy.
266 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
———. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. New York: Touchstone, 1970.
These lectures try to go beyond Sacks because of his familiarity, but his cases and
reflections are well worth re-reading.
Searle, John. “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3,
no. 3 (1980): 417–457. Widely anthologized. Searle’s classic presentation of the
Chinese room thought experiment.
Skinner, B. F. Science and Human Behavior. New York: The Free Press, 1965.
The most complete source for Skinner on behaviorism.
Sperry, Roger W. “Cerebral Organization and Behavior: The split brain behaves
in many respects like two separate brains, providing new research possibilities.”
Science 133, issue 3466 (1961): 1749–1757. The classic source of split-brain studies.
Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics. Ed. Edwin Curley. New York: Penguin, 2005.
First published 1677. Bertrand Russell called Spinoza “the noblest and most
lovable of the great philosophers,” which also says a lot about Russell. Available in
many editions.
Strawson, Galen, et al. Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail
Panpsychism? Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic 2006. A collection in which Strawson
outlines and defends his panpsychism against a number of critics.
Stich, Steven and Ted A. Warfield, eds. The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of
Mind. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. A compendium of contributed pieces by
contemporary philosophers on topics in philosophy of mind.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 267
Tononi, Guilio. “Consciousness as Integrated Information: A Provisional Manifesto.”
Biological Bulletin 215, no. 3 (2008): 216–242. Tononi’s outline of consciousness as
integrated information.
Tononi, Guilio. Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul. New York: Pantheon, 2012.
A charmingly visual and literary tour through Tononi’s ideas on consciousness,
neurophysiology and information.
Turing, Alan M. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind, new series 59,
no. 236 (1950): 433–460. An edited version reprinted in Douglas Hofstadter and
Daniel Dennett, The Mind’s I, New York: Basic Books, 2000, 53–66. Turing’s classic
piece outlining the Turing test, excerpted without some of the technical details in
the Hofstadter and Dennett version.
Upanishads. Tr. Patrick Olivelle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Sacred Hindu
texts circa 800–200 B.C.
Velman, Max and Susan Schneider, eds. The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness.
Malden, MA: Blacwell, 2007. A valuable collection of contributed pieces, often
very technical.
Watson, James D. The Double Helix. New York: New American Library, 1968.
A wonderfully personal account of the race for the structure of DNA, with telling
reflections on the very human nature of scientific exploration.
Watson, John B. Behaviorism. New York: W. W. Norton 1970. First published 1924.
In his own words.
Wegner, Daniel. White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts: Suppression, Obsession,
and the Psychology of Mental Control. New York: Guilford Press, 1989. An accessible
psychological guide to the difficulty of thought suppression.
Whitman, Walt. “Manly Health and Training.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 33,
nos. 3–4 (2016): 184–310. Walt Whitman’s newly discovered 1858 writings on
exercise, in a special two-number issue of the journal.
268 M I N D B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
Wise, Michael O, Martin G. Abegg, & Edward M. Cook, eds. The Dead Sea Scrolls:
A New Translation. San Francisco: Harper, 2005. The definitive English translation of
the complete scrolls, with helpful glossary and introductions.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Blue and Brown Books. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.
Dictated to his students between 1933 and 1935, circulated among his followers in
blue and brown wrappers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 269
270 M I N D - B O DY P H I LO S O P H Y
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