I have to admit that the title of this thread excites me.

At the risk of being corrected, and without reading from the Cognitive Science group, I instinctively connect 'Philosophy of the Mind' to Empiricism and perhaps Epistemology. Once upon a time I could have passed as an Empiricist. But recent experiences (...bring on the paradoxical beauty that philosophy is!...) with Twice Exceptional children who are unable to evaluate and organise sensory stimuli, yet display and perform highly 'intelligent' activities and 'skillfull' feats in spite of, have thrust my own inferences and connections outward and inward; studies in the discovery of the capabilities and limitations of the human mind (John Locke et al), with a view to understand what is KNOWABLE by us, REGARDLESS of what exists around us (Empiricism); and the NATURE of that knowledge (Epistemology).

My current mind-body-spirit pause is at the idea (Locke's content of conciousness) of a 'collective unconcious'. Just as we experience colours associated to moods and personalities - Jungian archetypes - so the possibility exists for a shared 'pool' of knowledge and experiences that assign itself to the mind but NOT necessarily to the senses in this reality.....

PS: Autumn mushrooms? LOL! Great imagery David! I recall Ralph Waldo Emerson's 'Nature' poem/essay on the reflection of humankind with nature...I'm grateful you assigned it to the topics and not the people those topics attract...!

The particular link from philosophy of mind to empiricism escapes me – are we talking about the history of philosophy, and reactions to Descartes? Like the majority of analysts of my generation, I never bothered much with the history of philosophy (though it’s coming back into fashion – largely because we started going back to the sources of some well-established views, like Augustine’s account of the present).

It’d be great if someone could do a brief round-up of the major issues in the philosophy of mind (similar to the one I posted in “space and time”). I suppose I COULD do it, but I’ve not really done much serious thinking on Mind since the days of my PhD. Also, I tend to think of Mind as primarily a metaphysical problem. The epistemological problem is evident (but then it’s evident in just about everything in metaphysics), and much turns on wider problems with our ‘intuitive view of the world’ (the most telling being the problem of our intuitive views about time).

All the same I should, perhaps, take a few moments to set down the major problems as identified by the analytic tradition in the philosophy of mind… and then we can start on why Jung etc. is egregious nonsense… Please note my remarkable tolerance for systems other than the one I’m working from – it must warm the cockles of Haris’ heart!!!

can we discuss architectures of the brain, as in neural nets Vs language of thought hypothesis? (Van Gelder Vs Fodor) and maybe draw in some neuroscientists on the issue?

Not only could but should...

ok, i'll throw something in then. do you think it's worth binning the cartesian disembodied brain in favour of a return to Aristotle's embodied cognition?

I'd use rather more modern terms - though the 'embodied cognition' view has gained a lot of popular support since Lakoff's big book a few years back... the Cartesian position is pretty indefensible nowadays (though the God-bothers still like it).

yeah, but you've still got Fodor's and Chomski's structuralist view, plus neural nets people admit some sort of role for representations, no? (got a friend who's working on this, dunno if i can convince her to join just so that we could benefit from her insight)

In fact, we should rather say that Descartes favoured a disembodied Mind... I don't think he got as far as the brain in the vat...

Nonetheless, the reasons for Descartes' preferences are worthy of The Matrix... imagine that all the input we have is false (Réné preferred a demon to a Machine as the 'source' of false information; but he was writing in the 17th century). We can rely on nothing that our senes tell us; nor, by extension, can we rely on our memories of sensation. Any information reaching the "mind'" is thus suspect.

Of what can we be sure? Well, for Descartes, there is 'something' that is being duped; 'something' to which the false information is being presented - 'something', in fact, which can say "is this information true or false?". When I ask that question, I think; 'something' is doing the thinking - and that 'something' is 'me'. Therefore, "I" exist...

Hence we have the model now known as "the Cartesian theatre" - the idea, to put it baldly, that there is a little homunculus sitting in our heads 'watching' the information presented by our senses. The logic of such a view is evident; nevertheless, no physical examination can find ervidence of the homunclus (or an equivalent structure). For Descartes, the problem was not insurmontable: if there was no physical evidence for the Mind, this is because the Mind is not physical - the model of the 'soul' was ready for the using.

The problem with this view is causal efficacy. How can a non-physical entity have physical effect? How can a mental entity 'cause' or 'bring about' physical action ? It's clear that the mind cannot affect matter directly - the physical body is required as an intermediary. Descartes famously opted for 'the pineal organ'; later commentators - such as Malebranche - went as far as to postulate 'occasionalism', the notion that God intervenes to effect a miracle each time we act, thus bringing the material world into line with the mental.

There's evidently a very strong distinction between mind and its contents in Descartes' view. Indeed, the only 'content' which is not placed in doubt is the experience of doubt itself - the 'capacity for doubt' (and, by extension, the capacity for rational thought) is, to a certain extent, an 'intrinsic property' of the Cartesian Mind.

I must admit that I haven't read anything by Fodor since my Master's... I see he's still alive, though... yeah, the language of thought and 'mental representations are causally efficacious' - OK, I'm back up to scratch.

Folk psychology is a very good thing, and I think the 'theory of mind' approach has a lot going for it: but might these not be 'explanations' or 'rationalisations' of behaviour, rather than 'disguised causal laws'? The theory doesn't really address the problem of epiphenomenalism (the entire apparatus of representation - which is, of course, emergent - might be no more than a phenomenon associated with some underlying process; but one which has no causal role to play - the underlying process ensures causation with or without the accompanying 'representations') - I should perhaps underline that Fodor's theory is underdetermined with respect to this point.

The various objections - from Churchland to Davidson - draw to a greater or lesser extent on this observation. Churchland suggests reduction of mental to physical states (though 'how' is a problem); Davidson argues - against Churchland - for anomlous monism (no 'mental' laws) and sees folk accounts as causal explanations.

Connectionism always struck me as a very different proposition from Jerry Fodor's rather naïve 'language of thought'... when I was planning my thesis, I intended comparing the connectionist model with the 'semiotic' model I was promoting. However, the metaphysical problems posed by the firststage of the thesis led me in an entirely different direction, so I'm not really well up on present ideas in the field... our friend Tristan might have some more up to date info...

there are interesting experiments in neuroscience and psychology (there's also a field psychophysics, which is the physics of perception) as well as the whole apparatus of neural networks. As regards Descartes and his little homunculus, the homunculus seems to be implied by the need for a co-ordinating centre if you're in the framework of representations, though i can imagine how you can get round that somehow. as regards monisms- Kim has written a lot on those questions, but they seem to have reached a dead-end in the sense that nobody openly wants to advocate dualism (we're far too sophisticated for that) but then the other ways of reducing the mental to the physical are hitting brick walls, in my knowledge the latest retreat being supervenience (no change in mental without accompanying change in physical) and something called superdupervenience, which i know nothing about

Lord, is supervenience still "the big thing"? It was all the rage when I was doing my master's... and it's been generalised way beyond Mind since then. The macroscopic properties of any emergent system are generally taken to supervene on the properties of the systems which make it up...

The trouble with supervenient properties in Mind is that there's no reason why they should be causally efficient... the Davidson-style explanation works just as well when the supervenient properties are taken as epiphenomena.

I sometimes get the feeling that forty years of the philosophy of mind has been spent in fighting a losing battle to save Free Will...

dear david, the question you've flagged is the more generalised argument that kim gives as to the effect that the supervenient properties are redundant. i think mellor has published sth on this, if you want i can send you my attempt at arguing against kim on this subject (basically the subject was microcomposition and the question of wholes and parts)

YES PLEASE!!! I await with bated breath...

mm have to wait until tonight when i go back home i'm afraid, it's on my pc. by the way, any ideas about monday? (check your facebook mail)

I shall cross my legs and think of England until this evening...

Monday should be OK - I'll be certain tomorrow...

Emrah

I'm not sure that the sanity of the thinking subject makes any real difference to Cartesian doubt. As to "madness" - what definition are we using? Manic depression and schizophrenia are very different both in their pathology and in their effect on 'rational thought'.

Anything Foucault says should be taken with a pinch of salt. His comments on 'madness' in the middle ages are pure speculation.

But then I'm not the most unbiaised commentator... I've started a thread in the "Comparative Philosophy" group on the analytic/continental schism..

Haris : any thoughts on Foucault?

first thoughts on foucault, i've only read read the one about the clinic, i didn't want to but i had great difficulty making out what his argument was, he just kept going on on these stories when all he wanted to say could have been summed up in two sentences. as regards madness, i'd like to read some of it, it sounds interesting. though, analytic as we are here in england, there is such a thing as philosophy of psychiatry, Rachel Cooper may be your reference. as regards emrah's comment, i think that you could go through the cogito by substituting dreams with madness, it'd be more or less the same route, no? i think it was only circumstantial, in the sense that he simply didn't think of it. i mean, madness is still a bit of a taboo, no?

An off-field remark - perhaps founding philosophy on the senses (either positively, in the sense of empiricism, or negatively, in the sense of Cartesianism) is founded on the assumption that the 'physical' or external world is real and to some degree mind-independent. This is evident with empiricism; with Descartes, the 'demon' is to some degree 'Other' or external (some 'thing' is distorting or generating our experience of the external world).

'Madness', on the other hand, implies that the worldview is self-generated - solipsism being the most radical form of 'deviance' from any norm, as a norm requires some form of collectivity. If Descartes had taken madness as the departure point, he might have arrived at an idealistic monism.

dear david, good point about 'the external'!! there's always the problem with something external, ie even in the most radical idealism, that's why berkeley needed the mind of god. though there is perspectival realism, which gives an interesting insight. anybody from philosophy of perception can give us an insight on that?

Thanks, Haris - the 'perception' question was in my mind when I wrote about some 'thing' distorting or generating our experience.

Emrah - I made a typical philosopher's U-turn : one positon before I'd "thought about" it, another afterwards... So, yes, I've changed my mind.

I'm not sure whether Descartes would have followed the same reasoning, though.