to have a mind? What does it take for that mind to be rational, conscious or emotional? Does it involve something immaterial or is it a case of having the right physical properties? Could something without a biological brain have a mind? Could something without a physical body have a mind?
Our answer to the Distribution Question has enormous implications for how we interact with the people, creatures and artefacts around us. If we learn that the goalkeeper doesn’t really have a mind, then how we treat her would immediately change. It would alter our expectations of her, the duties we feel towards her and the rights we attribute to her. Whether something has a mind can be a deciding factor in whether it deserves our moral consideration. The question of when a developing infant acquires a mind has great ethical import. Well into the 1970s, it was routine to give babies surgical procedures without anaesthetic. Why? Because the surgeons thought that babies hadn’t yet developed minds capable of suffering so there was no need to risk giving them anaesthetic. It looks like the surgeons were making a huge ethical mistake here, and this mistake was built on their erroneous answer to the Distribution Question.
Something similar applies to our treatment of non-human organisms. You needn’t feel guilty about standing on a daisy because you don’t think that daisies have minds, but you ought to feel guilty about standing on a cat. So in order to treat organisms the right way, we really ought to know where in the tree of life minds start to emerge. AI stretches our moral imagination even further. You wouldn’t feel guilty about sending a self-driving car to the scrap-heap, but is your indifference justified? One problem here is that we tend to be on the lookout for minds like ours. Could daisies or cars have minds that we fail to recognize because they’re so totally unlike our own? And once we consider the possibility of completely different kinds of mind, the field of possible minds gets even broader. Maybe molecules have minds. Maybe planets do. Maybe the universe as a whole forms a vast ‘über-mind’ of which we are all a part. If any of these possibilities are true, it could completely change how we act.
1.5 A Plan of Action
Over the next five chapters, we’ll be looking at the key positions in philosophy of mind – the main ‘theories of the mental’. These theories are defined by the answers they offer to the Three Big Questions, so by the time we’re finished you’ll have a decent grip on how to approach those questions. We’ll be looking at the main theories of the mental in historical order, running from Descartes’ work in the seventeenth century right up to contemporary debates in the field. One advantage of this is that it allows us to see how each new theory relies on its predecessors, building on their successes and attempting to overcome their failures. Another advantage is that it allows us to see how philosophy of mind interacts with the science of its time, drawing on scientific insights and challenging scientific assumptions. Furthermore, it allows us to see how philosophers living in different centuries can nevertheless be cut from the same cloth, adopting similar approaches to the puzzles of the mind. The following is an overview of our journey:
Chapter 2 explores Descartes’ dualism. The seventeenth century saw great progress in our scientific understanding of the material world. Descartes, a scientist in his own right, asked how the mind would fit into this emerging picture. He argued that the mind must be an immaterial substance that stands apart from the material world but that is able to interact with it via the body. But Descartes’ arguments faced a flurry of objections that still haunt dualists today.
Chapter 3 jumps ahead to the early to mid-twentieth century and introduces two materialist theories of mind. Behaviourism argues that mental states are nothing more than patterns of behaviour, and identity theory argues that mental states are nothing more than brain states. These theories were inspired by the emerging sciences of brain and behaviour and promised to overcome the failings of dualism. But each theory faced problems of its own.
Chapter 4 takes us to the mid- to late twentieth century and the computer revolution. According to functionalism, the mind is akin to a computer with our brain acting as the hardware on which the software of the mind runs. We look at how functionalism improved on other materialist theories to become the leading theory of the mental.
Chapter 5 looks at a problem for materialism that gained special traction at the end of the twentieth century – the Problem of Consciousness. A range of striking thought-experiments suggest that theories like functionalism cannot explain what our mental lives feel like on the inside. Conscious experience is thus an explanatory residue that requires special treatment. I look at two radical ways of dealing with this explanatory residue: a partial reversion to dualism on the one hand and a flat denial that conscious experience exists on the other.
Chapter 6 offers a brief overview of the contemporary scene in philosophy of mind. We will explore how recent work has enhanced our understanding of the Three Big Questions and how philosophy of mind has become integrated with the cognitive sciences. I’ll also take a look at how philosophy of mind might develop in the future.
In one sense, the overview of philosophy of mind that I will offer won’t be especially opinionated. I’ll be presenting mainstream views and keeping some of my more eccentric opinions to myself. But in another sense the overview I offer will inevitably be opinionated. The philosophy of mind is a big field, so my selection of which ideas to discuss in this short book reflects my opinions on what’s most important in the discipline. One way to get the benefit of some different perspectives is to engage with the suggested readings at the end of each chapter, which are arranged in recommended reading order.
Key Concepts
Anti-materialism: the view that materialism is false and at least some entities are non-physical.
Brentano’s thesis: the thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental, i.e. that all and only mental states have the property of being about things beyond themselves.
Epistemic asymmetry: the fact that we each know about our own mental states in a way that others cannot. Intentionality: the property of being about something. The belief that tea is restorative is about tea and has tea as its ‘intentional object’. Not all intentional objects actually exist.
Materialism: the view that everything, including mental states, is ultimately constituted by physical entities.
Mark of the mental: a feature that all and only mental states have, differentiating the mental from the physical. Propositional attitudes: a mental attitude taken towards a propositional content. If you believe that tea is restorative, the proposition is that tea is restorative and the attitude is believing.
References and Further Reading
Tim Crane (2001), Elements of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press. This excellent introduction explores how all the different kinds of mental state fit together. Crane’s focus is on intentionality and the claim that intentionality is the mark of the mental.
Franz Brentano (1911 [1874]), Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Excerpt reprinted in David J. Chalmers (ed.) (2021), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, 2nd edn, New York: Oxford University Press. This is the original formulation of the view that would later be known as
