Introductory Notes on the Mind-Body Problem

The Mind-Body Problem

1. The problem can be introduced in three steps:

(a) Are there really minds and mental phenomena?
(b) If there are, are minds and mental phenomena wholly distinct from material bodies
(such as human brains)?
(c) How are minds and mental phenomena related to material bodies?
 In response to Question (a), the Eliminativist Theory is the only position that gives an
unambiguous NO answer.
 In response to Question (b), Substance Dualism is the only position that clearly says
YES.1 In general, the positions which give a NO answer to this question are divided into
two camps, idealism and materialism. Idealism states that what we take to be material
bodies and physical phenomena are just mental phenomena produced by minds.
Materialism (a.k.a. physicalism) states that minds and mental phenomena are just
physical phenomena produced by material bodies. Idealism is considered implausible by
most contemporary philosophers, but it has been held in the past by very smart
philosophers like Bishop George Berkeley. Most philosophers nowadays hold some
version of materialism.
 Question (c) poses a special problem only for dualists.2 According to idealists, material
bodies and physical phenomena are a special subclass of mental phenomena: hence
physical states are related to mental states in the same way that mental states are related
to other mental states. According to materialists,3 minds and mental phenomena are a
special subclass of physical phenomena: hence mental states are related to physical states
in the same way that physical states are related to other physical states. So, Question (c)
does not pose a challenge for idealists and materialists. Substance dualists have given
various different answers to Question (c), and we shall look at them just below.

2. If minds and mental phenomena really do exist and are wholly distinct from material bodies,
how are they related to material bodies? Substance dualists have given various different
answers, namely, Cartesian interactionism, occasionalism, and parallelism.
(a) Cartesian interactionism: Descartes says that there is mutual interaction between
body and mind. The body acts on the mind, causing it to have sensations of touch,
pain, etc., and to perceive objects such as tables and chairs. And the mind also acts
on the body: by an act of will I can raise my hand, take hold of this marker and start
1
There is another position known as Property Dualism: according to this theory, there are only material bodies, but
these material bodies (such as the human brain) can be the seat of mental properties which are distinct from
neurophysiological properties of the brain. Hence, the answer that property dualism gives to Question (b) is—minds
and mental phenomena are partly distinct from material bodies (such as the human brain). Property Dualism has
been gaining a lot of popularity among philosophers in recent decades. Some Functionalists adopt Property
Dualism as well (and this combination is often called nonreductive materialism).
2
Even for materialists who are property dualists, but we won’t get into that in our course.
3
More accurately, reductive materialists who are not property dualists.

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 writing on the board. According to Cartesian interactionism, physical events cause
mental events, and mental events cause physical events. A ray of light striking the
eye at a certain wavelength, and activating some impulses in the optic nerves which
travel up to the brain, is a physical event. This causes the sensation of seeing red,
which is a mental event. I wish to eat an apple, which is a mental event. This causes
my hand to reach out and hold the apple, which is a physical event.
But there is a very difficult problem for Cartesian interactionism. According to
substance dualism, mind and mental phenomena are entirely different in kind from
matter and physical phenomena. This makes it very mysterious how mind can cause
things to happen to the body, and vice versa. Thanks to this difficulty of explaining
interaction, philosophers soon came up with other positions to avoid this problem.
These positions insisted that there was no interaction between body and mind, that
body did not act on mind nor mind on body.
(b) Occasionalism: A prominent follower of Descartes, Malebranche, held that my
wishing to lift my arm is an occasion for God to move my arm, and my tripping on
that chair provides an occasion for God to make me feel pain. It’s not the case that
my wishing to lift my arm directly causes my arm to rise, nor that my tripping on the
chair directly causes me to feel pain.
(c) Parallelism: Leibniz held another interesting position, which is that there is no
interaction, but a pre-established harmony between the life-history of a mind and the
life-history of the body to which the mind is united. As an analogy, consider two
clocks which keep accurate time and are set to ring at the same time. So they might
ring together at 3 o’clock, and at 9:30, and again at midnight, and it might seem as if
the clocks are wired together so that when one starts ringing the other rings also at the
same time. But they are not wired together; it is simply that the alarm on both clocks
has been preset to ring at the same time.4

Two Types of Mental States: Representational and Qualitative

3. We can distinguish between two types of mental states, representational states (a.k.a.
intentional states) and qualitative states (a.k.a. qualia).5
4
Property dualists (see footnote 1 of these notes) also face difficulty with Question (c). One position that property
dualists have sometimes adopted is epiphenomenalism (see Armstrong, The Mind-Body Problem, Ch.4).
According to epiphenomenalism, mental properties and events, though distinct from physical properties and events,
are only the causally impotent byproducts of material bodies (i.e., brains). Though mental properties and events are
caused by physical (i.e., neurophysiological) properties and events, these mental properties and events cannot cause
anything to happen. Your mental experiences (such as your desires and intentions) are just as causally powerless as
your body’s shadow, or the steam-whistle of a steam locomotive, and so on. It’s your brain states, and not your
mental states, that bring about all your actions. Your mental experiences only passively register your bodily
activities, and do not actively cause them. (If you’ve seen the movie, Being John Malkovich, recall what happens to
John Cusack’s character right at the end of the movie, as the credits begin to roll. That’s exactly what
epiphenomenalism says our mental lives are always like.)
5
An equivalent way of making the distinction is to say that some mental states have representational content, and
other mental states have qualitative content. Armstrong calls representation states “representations”, and qualitative
states “qualia” or “sensible qualities”. In any case, please note that “intentionality” and “qualia” are technical terms
in the philosophy of mind. “Intentional” in the ordinary sense means “purposeful”, but that is not what “intentional”
means in the technical sense. In the technical sense, something X which is intentional is about something else Y: X

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4. Representational states are mental states which represent possible circumstances in the
world. Beliefs, desires, doubts, hopes, wishes, purposes, perceptions and so on are typical
representational states. For instance, take the possible circumstance that it will snow on
Christmas day this year. Your believing or hoping or fearing that it will be a white
Christmas, is for you to be in a mental state which represents a possible worldly
circumstance, just as a picture represents whatever the picture is about.
Armstrong rightly observes that a key feature of a representational state is that “it
points beyond itself, that it is ‘about’ something, but that something it is about need not
exist.” He goes on to explain:
A perception points to some state of affairs, but that state of affairs need not exist. If
it does not exist, then we have illusory or hallucinatory perception. A person’s desire
for a drink points beyond itself to that person drinking. But the desire need not be
fulfilled, that is, the drinking may not be forthcoming. And so for all
[representational] states.6

5. Qualitative states are mental states which have distinctive feels to them. Typical qualitative
states are pains, pleasures, itches, tastes, smells, sounds, color sensations, warm/cold
sensations, etc. For instance, seeing a ripe red tomato, smelling gasoline, or experiencing a
sharp pain in your arm feels a certain special way to you, which is different from seeing the
blue ocean, smelling a rose, or experiencing a dull pain in your head. These felt or sensed
qualities are often referred to as qualia (plural noun; the singular noun is “quale”).

What A Theory of Mind Needs to Explain, or Explain Away

6. A theory is an explanation of observable phenomena. Below I will mention four types of

phenomena that any theory of mind (i) needs to satisfactorily explain (in which case the
theory would “save the phenomena”), or (ii) needs to explain away, if the theory denies that
such phenomena exist (in which case the account in question needs to provide an “error
theory”7). How well or poorly different theories of mind explain (away) these four types of
phenomena can serve as our benchmarks for testing these theories.

7. Here are the four types of phenomena:

(a) Private / Privileged access. Conscious experiences seem private, in the sense that
they are not publicly observable from the third-person point of view. Each person has
direct private access to his or her own conscious mental experiences, which other
people cannot directly access. Similarly, each person has privileged epistemic access
to his or her own conscious thoughts. If you are thinking of a random number
between 1 and 10 without expressing your thoughts to others, the only person who
knows what you are thinking of is you, and other people can only take random
guesses as to which number you are thinking of.

represents Y, or X means Y, etc.

6
Armstrong, The Mind-Body Problem, §12.2, p.139
7
An error theory of X is a theory which explains why we falsely believe that X exists.

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 (b) Knowledge of other minds. It seems that we know other people have minds, or at
least we are pretty sure others go through similar sorts of conscious experience as we
do. Also, many of us are pretty sure too that many animals, all plants, and computers
can’t have minds. (Descartes, in fact, was sure that other people have minds, and also
that no animals have minds.) So how do we know all these things, or how is it that
we are pretty sure about these things?
(c) Qualia. See Note 5 above. There is something it feels like for you to be in pain, or
to see a ripe red tomato, or to smell gasoline. Such distinctive feels, or qualia, seem
to add an essential qualitative dimension to our conscious experiences, a dimension
which seems to be missing in purely physical phenomena.
(d) Mind-body interaction. It seems that there is causal interaction between mind and
body. Perceptions are mental experiences caused by the body acting on the mind, and
intentions are mental acts by which the mind influences the body.8

8. Descartes’s substance dualism does a good job of explaining private/privileged access and
qualia, but has a difficult time explaining our beliefs about other minds and how interaction
between mind and body is possible. Materialism,9 in general, does a good job of explaining
mind-body interaction and how we know other people have minds, but faces difficulty in
explaining private/privileged access, qualia, and how we seem to know computers can’t have
conscious experiences like we do.

Summary of Different Theories of Mind (Using Diagrams)

9. Let’s begin with some background. Hume’s Fork shows that we cannot have a priori
knowledge about matters of fact. A priori knowledge only tells us how our ideas are related,
and matters of fact can be discovered only by means of a posteriori knowledge. Another
way of putting the same point that Hume’s Fork makes is this: the only reliable information
that conceptual analysis can give us is about our concepts and not about the world, and we
must use scientific investigation to find out whether and how our concepts match up with the
world. There is a gap between what our concepts tell us about the world and what the world
is actually like, and as long as there is this gap our concepts might be mistaken.
Descartes thought he bridged this gap by proving the existence of a non-deceiving God
who guarantees that our clear and distinct concepts cannot be mistaken. Most contemporary
materialists, however, try to bridge the gap between our concepts and the world by
developing careful conceptual analyses (on the side of our concepts), and adopting the results
of scientific investigations (on the side of the world). So, the summary of each materialist
theory of mind, from the Identity Theory on, will bifurcate into (i) a conceptual analysis of
mental concepts, and (ii) a scientific hypothesis about the mental based on a scientific model.

10. In each diagram, inside the box represents the internal states of a person (e.g., pain, c-fiber
stimulation), the arrows on the left side of the box represent causal input (e.g., various types
8
There is also the issue of intentionality, of how representational states can be about worldly circumstances that
need not exist. But this issue brings us into difficult philosophical terrain that is more appropriate for an upper-level
undergraduate course in philosophy.
9
I mean reductive materialism (i.e., I don’t mean nonreductive materialism which is consistent with property
dualism, see footnote 1 of these notes).

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of tissue damage), and the arrows on the right side of the box represent causal output (e.g.,
winces, groans, avoidance of source of pain, etc.). Question mark indicates topic neutrality.

(1) Substance Dualism:

Mind ≠ Body

(2) Analytical Behaviorism:

(3) Identity Theory:

CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS SCIENTIFIC HYPOTHESIS

? mental states = brain states

(4) Causal Theory:

CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS SCIENTIFIC HYPOTHESIS

? mental states = brain states

(5) Functionalism:

CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS SCIENTIFIC HYPOTHESIS

human
mental states = human
brain states
?, multiply realizable
intelligent robots
mental states = silicon chip
states

…and so on.

(6) Eliminativist Theory:

CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS SCIENTIFIC HYPOTHESIS

mental states ≠ brain states FALSE! mental states = brain states