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Further Discussion

Course video 32 of 50

(Dr. Suilin Lavelle) If you’re reading this, then you’ve got a mind. But what is a mind, and what does it take to have one? Should we understand minds as sets of dispositions to behave in certain ways, as patterns of neural activation, or as akin to programmes that are run on the computational hardware of our brains? In this module, we’ll look at how and why recent philosophy of mind and psychology has embraced each of these options in turn, and think about the problems and prospects for each.

This course will introduce you to some of the main areas of research in contemporary philosophy. Each module a different philosopher will talk you through some of the most important questions and issues in their area of expertise. We’ll begin by trying to understand what philosophy is – what are its characteristic aims and methods, and how does it differ from other subjects? Then we’ll spend the rest of the course gaining an introductory overview of several different areas of philosophy. Topics you’ll learn about will include: Epistemology, where we’ll consider what our knowledge of the world and ourselves consists in, and how we come to have it; Philosophy of science, where we’ll investigate foundational conceptual issues in scientific research and practice; Philosophy of Mind, where we’ll ask questions about what it means for something to have a mind, and how minds should be understood and explained; Political Philosophy, where we'll investigate whether we have an obligation to obey the law; Moral Philosophy, where we’ll attempt to understand the nature of our moral judgements and reactions – whether they aim at some objective moral truth, or are mere personal or cultural preferences, and; Metaphysics, where we’ll think through some fundamental conceptual questions about free will and the nature of reality. The development of this MOOC has been led by the University of Edinburgh's Eidyn research centre. To accompany 'Introduction to Philosophy', we are pleased to announce a tie-in book from Routledge entitled 'Philosophy for Everyone'. This course companion to the 'Introduction to Philosophy' course was written by the Edinburgh Philosophy team expressly with the needs of MOOC students in mind. 'Philosophy for Everyone' contains clear and user-friendly chapters, chapter summaries, glossary, study questions, suggestions for further reading and guides to online resources. Please click "Start Here" and navigate to the "Optional Reading" page for more information.

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Unterrichtet von

Dr. Dave Ward
Lecturer in Philosophy
Professor Duncan Pritchard
Professor of Philosophy
Professor Michela Massimi
Full Professor
Dr. Suilin Lavelle
Lecturer in Philosophy
Dr. Matthew Chrisman
Reader in Philosophy
Dr. Allan Hazlett
Dr. Alasdair Richmond
Dr.
Guy Fletcher
Lecturer
Elinor Mason
Senior Lecturer

Skript

Hello everyone, and thank you for the really interesting discussions that we

had for my week of the course on minds, brains, and computers.

There were some great discussions on the forum,

and I'm not able to reply to them all.

But there were just two points that I thought might be worth bringing

up and following up, because people might want to read more about them.

So the first concerns animal minds, and

this came up on the thread about intentionality.

So just to clarify, yes, I am using aboutness to

refer to what most philosophers would refer to as intentionality.

The reason I didn't use the word intentionality is

it does come with a lot of philosophical, kind

of conceptual baggage, which I didn't necessarily want to

tie in, such as whether all mental states have intentionality.

So, that's why I use the term aboutness for these talks.

Anyway, in these discussions,

there were some questions about whether animals have minds,

and if they do have minds whether we can know.

Now, this is actually quite a vexed question in philosophy, and it's

one of those nice questions that

borders philosophy and psychology and cognitive ethology.

So there is a school of philosophy that says, look,

in order to have thoughts you have to have language.

And therefore because animals, as far as we can tell, aren't language users.

Yes there's chimpanzees who can kind of connect some words with objects in

the world, but it doesn't appear that they have very complex grammar yet.

Until we've got animals that can use language, those animals can't think.

Now another school of philosophers particularly

kind of more cognitive science based philosophers

like Peter Carruthers say, well this doesn't seem to be a very fair argument.

Just because we can't necessarily express what's going on in

an animal's mind, because we naturally have a human anthropocentric viewpoint.

That doesn't mean that these animals aren't thinking about things.

So say you have a dog which is barking up a tree.

It's seen a squirrel run up a tree and it's standing at the bottom barking.

Now, in our hu, hu, in our human terms, it seems to make sense

to say, well, that dog thinks that there's a squirrel up in the tree.

But of course this only really roughly

captures what's going on in the dog's mind.

For example, dogs might not know that squirrels are mammals.

That squirrels typically have bushy tails.

It doesn't have the kind of rich concept of a squirrel which we humans have.

And therefore the content of the dog's thought will be very different from ours.

But we can infer from its behavior, the way it changes

its behavior if that squirrel moves from the tree it's barking up

to a different tree, that the dog perhaps has a mental

state which roughly can approximate what we say as the dog

is thinking that the squirrel is up the tree, even if

it need not necessarily match onto the human elements of that thought.

For those of you who are interested in animal minds,

I can highly recommend the website of the philosopher Peter Carruthers.

He has all his papers available

freely, and he has a whole section on animal

minds, and some of those papers are introductory papers.

So they might be nice to have a look at.

The second issue I wanted to bring up regarded the Turing machine.

And somebody said, well, really, the Turing machine doesn't

test whether a computer can think like a human.

Rather, it tests, at what stage we as humans

are willing to attribute conscious states to other things.

And this is a really interesting question.

This is something that I'm quite

interested in particularly from a developmental perspective.

At what point do you sort of

infants start thinking about other people as locus's of conscious experience?

At what point do they kind of think, well that person

has a point of view in the world and a perspective?

And truth be told, we don't know very much about this.

So, you are right, there are two questions.

There's the question of what enables or what behavioral cues do humans

pick up on in order to attribute conscious awareness to another thing?

And second, whether those cues really are good cues to

be picking on, in order to attribute consciousness to another thing?

Or are we just being misled?

So, you have the more kind of metaphysical if you like, which

is, does this thing have consciousness

regardless of our human intuitions about it?

And, a separate question which is, what are those behavioral cues

that humans pick up on in the world such that they

attribute conscious awareness to another thing?

And then there's a methodological question

of, well how should we measure consciousness

if not by our human intuitions as

to whether something has consciousness or not?

And, that's a big methodological question which requires further thought.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the lectures on philosophy of mind.

I've certainly enjoyed reading the

discussion forums, and keep on philosophizing.

Thank you very much.

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