Introduction to Philosophy Philosophy of Mind

🧭 Overview

🧠 One-sentence thesis

Descartes argued that the human mind is an immaterial substance fundamentally distinct from the material body, yet his attempts to explain mental operations in physical terms created tensions that left his dualism ambiguous and open to both dualist and physicalist interpretations.

📌 Key points (3–5)

• Core claim: Descartes proposed substance dualism—mind and body are two different kinds of substances (immaterial vs. material).
• Method over metaphysics: Descartes approached the problem epistemologically (what we can know) rather than metaphysically (what exists), reducing the soul to "thinking" and the body to physical operations.
• The interaction problem: To explain how immaterial mind and material body communicate, Descartes invoked "animal spirits" (fine bodily substances), which led him to explain many mental functions (passions, perceptions) in purely physical terms.
• Common confusion: Descartes is often labeled a strict substance dualist, but he deliberately used vague terminology ("thing" rather than "substance") and explained much mental activity physically, leaving room for physicalist readings.
• Historical impact: His views shaped modern philosophy of mind; even critics like Gilbert Ryle ("ghost in the machine") engaged deeply with Cartesian dualism to develop their own theories.

🏛️ Historical and conceptual background

🏛️ The Aristotelian tradition Descartes inherited

• Traditional view: In Aristotelian philosophy, every substance is matter + form (essence).
  • For living things, the form is the soul—what makes a body alive and what it is (e.g., a dog's soul makes flesh and bones into a living dog).
  • For humans, the soul includes the rational mind (intellect).
• The question: Is the soul something that exists on its own, separate from the body?
  • Plants and animals: their souls (growth, movement, sensation) disappear when they die.
  • Humans: Christian doctrine holds the soul is immaterial and survives death (immortality).
• Substantial form: the essence that makes a thing what it is and makes it knowable.

🔄 Descartes' departure from tradition

• Descartes found "substantial forms" unnecessary for his explanations.
• He redefined the problem:
  • Material things (including animal and human bodies) are mere aggregates of properties, not true substances with essences.
  • Only the human soul (mind) remains a true immaterial substance.
• Why? To separate the immaterial soul from material science and emphasize the soul's "quite different" nature—opening the route to proving its non-materiality and immortality.
• Don't confuse: Descartes did not reject the concept of substantial form entirely; he restricted it to the human soul alone to avoid treating the soul as something corporeal.

🧠 The immaterial mind and its powers

🧠 Rationalism and the priority of mind

Rationalism: a philosophical approach that prioritizes the functions of intellect, imagination, sense perception, and memory in ascertaining knowledge.

• Descartes' early work (Rules for the Direction of the Mind) explored the competence of thought in achieving knowledge.
• His method asked not "What is it?" but:
  • "How does it appear to me?"
  • "How does it connect with what I know?"
• The intellect is described as a "power" that is "purely spiritual" and "distinct from the whole body."
  • It can receive sense data (seeing, touching) but also refer to themes with nothing corporeal at all (abstract understanding).
  • Example: The mind can understand mathematical truths or logical principles without needing physical objects.

🎭 Passions and the soul's functions

• In The Passions of the Soul, Descartes analyzed emotions and perceptions.
• Two basic functions of the soul (both are kinds of thought):
  1. Volitions (activities): desires, resolutions—originate from the soul itself.
  2. Perceptions (passive): sensations, emotions—the soul is affected by something external.
• Key point: The soul is "really joined to the whole body" but has no location in the body (because it is immaterial and non-extended).
  • This echoes Aristotelian ensoulment (soul as the life of the organism) but also treats the body as a whole physical organism.
• Don't confuse: Although the soul is joined to the body, Descartes insists it is not a body part and is not located anywhere in space.

🧪 Animal spirits and the interaction problem

• The problem: How do immaterial mind and material body communicate?
• Descartes' solution: Animal spirits—"a certain very fine air or wind" that shuttle between brain and body parts.
  • These are described as very fine bodies (not immaterial), derived from the blood.
  • They mediate between corporeal operations and the mind.
• The pineal gland: Descartes identified this as the place where animal spirits unite sense impressions, and where the mind "exercises its functions more particularly."
  • The soul itself has no location; the gland is merely where the mind interacts with the body most directly.
• Example: Wonder (a passion) arises when:
  1. An impression in the brain represents something unusual.
  2. Animal spirits flow to strengthen that impression and keep sense organs fixed on the object.
• Implication: Much mental activity (passions, perceptions) is explained in purely physical terms, even within a dualist framework.

🤔 The path to substance dualism

🤔 Cogito ergo sum and the thinking thing

"I think therefore I am" (cogito ergo sum): the certainty that "I am, I exist" is necessarily true whenever it is mentally conceived.

• Descartes reduces the soul to mere thought to guarantee its existence.
• "I am, then, in the strict sense only a thing that thinks" (res cogitans).
• Key move: He uses the vague term "thing" (res) rather than "substance" to avoid ontological commitments.
  • "Thing" is deliberately imprecise—it points to "something" without saying what it is or whether it is real.
• Don't confuse: Descartes is not claiming the mind is a substance in the traditional sense; he is identifying thinking as the essence of whatever it is that thinks.

⚖️ Mind vs. body: the dualism emerges

• In the Meditations, Descartes contrasts:
  • Mind (res cogitans): a thinking, non-extended thing.
  • Body (res extensa): an extended, non-thinking thing.
• This suggests a clear dualism of mutually exclusive substances.
• Objection (Arnauld): Is Descartes either:
  1. A Platonist (soul is the only constituent of a human; body is a mere tool)?
  2. Offering a mere abstraction (like geometers who abstract figures from reality)?
  • In both cases, the dualism would dissolve.
• Descartes' reply: The real distinction of mind from body is the result of attentive meditation—it is not just an abstraction.

🏗️ Reshaping "substance"

• In Principles of Philosophy, Descartes defines substance as "independent existence"—strictly, only God qualifies.
• In the material world, we know substances through their principal attributes:
  • Body: extension (taking up space).
  • Mind: thinking.
• Caution: Descartes avoids claiming that material substances exist separately from their attributes.
  • He uses "thing" (res) to avoid ontological claims.
• Conclusion: Descartes was aware of the temptation to present mind and body as competing substances and tried to escape strict dualism, because:
  1. Any dualism needs mediation (hence animal spirits).
  2. If understanding is the goal, it must be accessible to material beings, not locked in the immaterial.

🧩 Tensions and ambiguities in Descartes' view

🧩 Physicalist explanations within dualism

• Descartes explained many "mental" functions in purely physical terms:
  • Sense perception, emotions, even speech (as long as it is mere expression of passions) can be found in animals and imitated by machines.
  • The body (human and animal) is like a robot or clockwork performing activities.
• The mind comes in addition to that machine—hence Ryle's criticism: the mind is a mere "ghost in the machine," inactive and unable to cause actions.
• Don't confuse: Descartes' dualism does not mean the mind does everything; much of what we call "mental" (lower faculties like sensation, movement) is reassigned to the body as physical operations.

🔀 Two readings of Descartes

Interpretation	Focus	Conclusion
Substance dualist	Descartes' insistence on the immateriality of thinking and the real distinction of mind from body	Mind and body are two totally distinct substances
Physicalist	Descartes' explanations of perceptions, emotions, and passions in corporeal terms; his vague use of "thing" instead of "substance"	Much mental activity is physical; dualism is undermined

• Key point: Descartes deliberately used imprecise terminology and undermined the traditional concept of substance, leaving his position ambiguous.
• Philosophers who emphasize substance as reality will find dualism; those who focus on his physical explanations will find physicalism.

🎯 Summary and legacy

🎯 Descartes' main contributions

• Initial goal: Prove the human soul is immaterial (as Christian doctrine teaches).
• Method: Emphasize the certainty of rational thinking and its independence from body and material objects.
• Result: A theory that appears to embrace substance dualism (mind and body as distinct substances) but also explains much mental activity in physical terms.
• The interaction problem: How can immaterial mind and material body work together?
  • Descartes' answer (animal spirits) led to physical explanations of intellectual functions.
• Ambiguity: Descartes both underlined the immateriality of thinking and reduced the concept of substance to something vague.

🌍 Influence on philosophy of mind

• Cartesian dualism became the standard term for substance dualism.
• Even critics (e.g., Gilbert Ryle) engaged deeply with Descartes to develop their own theories.
• Ryle's objection: If mind and body are distinct, the mind would be a "ghost in a machine"—unable to communicate with or cause actions in the body.
• Ongoing debate: Descartes' arguments for the immaterial nature of the mind and soul are still debated in contemporary philosophy of mind.
• Don't confuse: Descartes' legacy is not a single, clear doctrine but a set of tensions and questions that continue to shape the field.

🧭 Overview

🧠 One-sentence thesis

Materialism and behaviorism reject Cartesian dualism by claiming that minds are not immaterial entities separate from bodies, but rather are identical to physical bodies, brains, or behaviors—a position that eliminates the possibility of disembodied souls, spirits, and body-switching scenarios.

📌 Key points (3–5)

• Core claim of materialism: There is no immaterial mind separate from the body; "mind" is shorthand for "brain" or "behavior," and without a body, a mind cannot exist.
• Philosophical foundations: Empiricism, the closure principle (material causes have material effects), and Ockham's Razor (eliminate unnecessary immaterial entities) drove the shift from dualism to materialism.
• Type identity theory: Mental states are identical to specific types of physical brain states (e.g., pain = C-fibers firing), but faces the "multiple realizability" objection—different physical systems can realize the same mental state.
• Eliminative materialism: The most radical view—there are no minds, thoughts, or emotions at all; these are illusions, and "folk psychology" is a false myth.
• Logical behaviorism: Mental states are sets of observable behaviors or dispositions to behave; this avoids eliminating mental talk but translates it into empirically verifiable behavior, though it faced devastating objections about circularity and sufficiency.

🎬 Why materialism rejects body-switching fantasies

🎬 The Big thought experiment

The excerpt uses the movie Big to illustrate dualist assumptions and why materialism rejects them.

• Dualist interpretation: Josh's immaterial mind (with his memories, emotions, identity) stays the same while his body ages overnight into an adult.
• Why this is incoherent under materialism: If mind = brain, then Leibniz's Law (the indiscernibility of identicals) applies—if two things are identical, they must share all properties.
  • Rapid physical aging would change Josh's brain mass, neurons, biochemistry (testosterone, serotonin), and neural connections.
  • Those physical changes are changes in his mind (since mind = brain).
  • Therefore, Josh would have the mind of a man, not a boy; romantic desires and emotional maturity would follow from the biological changes.
• Implication: Body-switching, reincarnation, and disembodied souls are not just impossible—they are nonsense under materialism.
• Don't confuse: The fact that people easily accept Big's plot shows how deeply dualist intuitions are ingrained, but intuition is not a reliable guide to truth.

🚫 What materialism rules out

Dualist belief	Why materialism rejects it
Souls in Heaven/Hell after death	No body = no mind
Spirits or immaterial essences	Only material objects exist
Spiritual practices transcending the body	Absurd—mind cannot exist beyond body/brain
Body-switching or reincarnation	Mind is identical to a specific body/brain; cannot transfer

🔬 Philosophical foundations of materialism

🔬 Empiricism and the scientific revolution

• Empiricism (championed by David Hume): Reject any system "not founded on fact and observation."
• Mechanical philosophy (Descartes, Locke): Sought explanations subject to physical laws, though both still had to reconcile their theories with God and Christianity.
• Later shift: Theorists either eliminated God entirely or showed science could explain everything without invoking God.

🔒 The closure principle

The closure principle: Material objects have causes and effects locatable in the physical world.

• Why it matters: Without closure, science would be impossible—diseases could be blamed on God's wrath or demons instead of viruses.
• Consequence: If God is not needed to explain observable phenomena, why believe in God's existence? Similarly, if immaterial minds are not needed, why believe in them?
• Application to mind: You cannot see anyone's mind (including your own); immaterial things cannot affect material things (by closure), so brains and physical processes are the proper causes of actions, not mystical immaterial minds.

🪒 Ockham's Razor

Ockham's Razor: When something of a different kind (immaterial) is not needed to explain something else (material), it can be eliminated.

• Origin: Named after William of Ockham (1285–1347); a principle of explanatory parsimony favored in science.
• Application: Justified removing God and immaterial minds from ontology (the catalog of what exists).
• Result: Talk of minds and mental events (thoughts, feelings) became shorthand for physical processes in the body/brain that science can study.
• Materialist conclusion: Either minds are just bodies, or minds do not exist at all.

🧠 Varieties of materialism

🧠 Type identity theory

Type identity theory: All mental states are identical to certain types of physical brain states.

• Proponents: J. J. C. Smart, U. T. Place.
• Core claim: Science will reveal which mental state types correspond to which brain process types.
• Example: Pain = C-fibers firing in the brain.
  • When C-fibers fire, a person is in pain (even if unconscious or numb and unaware).
  • Example: A person struck by a rock becomes unconscious—C-fibers fire, so they are in pain, just unaware of it.
  • Example: A shark-attack victim in cold water may not feel pain immediately because cold numbs extremities, postponing or masking C-fiber firing.

Important distinctions:

• Not correlation: Mental and physical states are not two related events; they are one event.
• Not causation: A hug does not cause happiness; the hug triggers nerve signals that create a brain state identical to happiness.
• Don't confuse: Type identity does not say mental events are caused by or correlated with brain events—it says they are brain events.

⚠️ The multiple realizability objection

• Objection (Hilary Putnam): Different kinds of brains can realize the same mental state.
  • Animals experience pain but have dramatically different brains, neurons, and biochemistry than humans.
  • Hypothetical: Alien beings (silicon-based, not carbon-based) might experience pain with no physical similarity to human brains.
• Problem for type identity: If pain = C-fibers firing (a human-specific brain event), then animals and aliens cannot feel pain—but they clearly do.
• Consequence: Mental state types cannot be categorically reduced to specific human brain event types.
• Response: Many identity theorists shifted to token identity theory—each mental event reduces to some physical brain state, but not necessarily the same type of brain state across individuals or times.

🗑️ Eliminative materialism

Eliminative materialism (reductive materialism): Everything is purely physical; there are no thoughts, emotions, or minds—only brain and physical processes.

• Proponents: Paul Churchland, Patricia Churchland.
• Core claim: The mind does not exist; mental talk is an illusion or convenient fiction.
• Example: Pain is not a real feeling—it is a label we habitually apply to certain physical events (C-fibers firing).
• Radical consequence: Patricia Churchland told the Dalai Lama she cannot say she has the emotion of love for her child, because love is an illusion.
• Folk psychology: The commonsense theory that embraces thoughts, feelings, and beliefs is a false myth held by people uneducated about science.

Strengths and costs:

• Strength: Explains everything within a scientific framework; fully consistent with empiricism and closure.
• Cost: Eliminates most of what a theory of mind intends to explain—experiences, thoughts, feelings, actions, and selves.
• Criticism: Ockham's Razor has gone too far if it dismisses the very phenomena we wanted to understand.

🎭 Logical behaviorism

🎭 Core idea

Logical behaviorism: Mental events are to be understood as sets of observable behaviors or dispositions to behave in certain ways.

• Example: Pain = saying "ouch," screaming, cringing after being hit.
• Goal: Explain the mind entirely within a concrete, observable, scientific framework without eliminating mental talk.
• Advantage over eliminativism: Preserves mental talk by translating it into behavior talk, rather than declaring it false.

🗣️ The linguistic turn and logical positivism

• Logical positivists (Vienna Circle, 1922–1950s; Otto Neurath, Rudolph Carnap, Ludwig Wittgenstein, W. V. O. Quine): Attempted to mimic scientific methods in philosophy.
• Core project: Show that immaterial objects do not exist and that all mental talk can be constructed from material objects and processes.
• Translation strategy: Mental talk is shorthand for behavior talk.
  • Example: "Mom is angry" means she is frowning, not smiling, not talking much—all observable behaviors.
  • If mental talk cannot be translated into behavior, it is meaningless (like Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem "Jabberwocky").
• Impact: Shifted Western philosophy toward philosophy of language throughout the 20th century (the "linguistic turn").

🔍 Verificationism

Verificationism: All truths rely on verification, either analytically (by definition) or synthetically (by experience).

• Proponent: Carl Hempel.
• Problem (Hilary Putnam): The principle of verification itself cannot be verified—it is self-refuting.
• Attempted rescue: Rudolph Carnap spent much of his career trying different criteria to save the theory, but none succeeded.

❌ Devastating objections to logical behaviorism

❌ Circularity (Peter Geach)

• Problem: Defining beliefs or mental states purely in terms of behaviors is circular.
• Why: Every action or disposition depends on a person's beliefs and desires.
  • To define one belief in terms of actions, you must reference other beliefs and desires.
  • Those other beliefs and desires must also be defined in terms of actions, which reference yet more beliefs and desires—ad infinitum.
• Conclusion: The account never escapes mental talk; it just postpones the problem.

❌ Behavior is insufficient (Ned Block)

• Objection: Behavior can mimic mentality without mentality being present.
• Example: Puppets controlled by radio links from outside minds would behave as if they have minds, but they do not.
• Implication: Behavior is not sufficient to define mental states.

❌ Behavior is unnecessary (Hilary Putnam)

• Objection: We can coherently imagine minds without behavior.
• Example: A world where people experience pain but are conditioned to disguise all pain behaviors.
• Implication: Pain is not conceptually tied to behavior; the connection is contingent (happens to be true in our world), not necessary.
• Conclusion: Behavior is not necessary for mentality.

🔄 Wittgenstein's shift

• Ludwig Wittgenstein, initially a champion of logical positivism and behaviorism, eventually turned away from behaviorist-like theories.
• He moved toward a view where thoughts are separate and independent from our descriptions of them.

🔬 Current status and future outlook

🔬 Materialism and behaviorism today

• In science: Materialist and behaviorist views remain prominent among biologists and neuroscientists.
  • Researchers work to uncover the empirical basis of behavior and brain function.
  • Each discovery helps build a better foundation for an empirical philosophy of mind.
• In philosophy: Materialism and behaviorism are no longer dominant.
  • Empirical research alone cannot ground a materialist or behaviorist theory—philosophical arguments are still required.
  • Scientists still rely on self-reports of feelings and thoughts even while attempting to reduce mind to brain.

🔮 The unresolved challenge

• Core problem: Evidence of body and brain workings, no matter how advanced, cannot by itself establish that the mind reduces to the body or brain.
• Why: Science can show correlations and mechanisms, but it cannot demonstrate equivalence or identity without philosophical argument.
• Ockham's Razor status: Has not yet successfully eliminated the necessity of talking about minds for most philosophers.

🤔 Two possible futures

1. Evolution toward materialism: Human ways of relating may evolve to rely less on feelings/thoughts and more on reactions/behaviors—perhaps returning to a more instinctual origin.
2. Mind as progress: Some argue that reliance on an immaterial mind marks progress in our species; others argue it shows the sophistication of the brain.

• Conclusion: The debate will likely continue until talk of immaterial minds becomes unnecessary.

🧭 Overview

🧠 One-sentence thesis

Functionalism offers a middle path between materialism and behaviorism by treating the mind as a natural functional system where mental states are identified by their causal roles rather than by specific brain states or behaviors.

📌 Key points (3–5)

• The middle path: Functionalism avoids materialism (which wrongly identifies mental states with brain states) and behaviorism (which wrongly identifies mental states with behaviors), while keeping the mind natural.
• Multiple realizability: Mental states like pain can be realized in different physical systems (human brains, rabbit brains, or even non-biological systems), so they cannot be identical to specific brain states.
• Causal role identification: Mental states are defined by their functional or causal role—what causes them (inputs) and what they cause (outputs)—not by their physical makeup.
• Common confusion: Functionalism does not say mental states are behaviors (like behaviorism); it says mental states cause behaviors and are distinct from them.
• Key objections: The Chinese Room argument challenges whether the right functional organization is sufficient for understanding, and the problem of qualia questions whether functionalism can account for the felt quality of experiences.

🚢 The two monsters: why functionalism is needed

⚠️ The problem with materialism

Materialism: the joint thesis that minds are brains and mental states are brain states.

• Why we must avoid it: There is no strict identity between mental states and brain states.
• The multiple realizability argument:
  • Human Freya gets a metal splinter in her finger and winces in pain.
  • A wild rabbit mishops on a pinecone and cries out in pain.
  • Both are in the same mental state (pain), but their brains are different, so they cannot be in the same brain state.
  • Since the same pain state can be realized in multiple kinds of brains, mental states are multiply realizable.
• Implication: Brain states and mental states come apart, so they cannot be identical.
• Don't confuse: Multiple realizability means the same mental state can exist in different physical systems, not that mental states are non-physical.

⚠️ The problem with behaviorism

Behaviorism: the thesis that mental states are behavioral states or dispositions to behave in certain ways.

• Why we must avoid it: Mental states and behavioral dispositions also come apart.
• The causal explanation problem:
  • Freya believes her house is gray and includes "the only big gray Colonial on Jones St." in her party invitation.
  • We want to say her belief (mental state) caused her behavior (writing the direction).
  • If the mental state and the behavioral state were identical, the explanation would be viciously circular: the thing to be explained (behavior) would be the same as the thing explaining it (belief).
  • Nothing would really get explained.
• Implication: Mental states must be distinct from behaviors if they are to causally explain behaviors.

🧭 The goal: a natural mind

• Both materialism and behaviorism promise to treat the mind as wholly part of the natural world.
• We must not retreat to Cartesian dualism, where it becomes mysterious how mental states (on a different plane of existence) could influence physical behavior.
• Functionalism offers a third way: minds are natural, but mental states are neither brain states nor behaviors.

🖥️ What functionalism claims

🖥️ Minds as functional systems

• Core idea: Minds are computing machines—functional systems like computer operating systems, only much more complex.
• Historical foundation:
  • Alan Turing (1912–1954) conceived of a computing machine (the Turing machine) powerful enough to perform any computable function a human could carry out, consciously or subconsciously.
  • A Turing machine is an abstract computer model illustrating the limits of computability.
  • Thinking states can be coherently understood as computational states.
• Development: Philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926–2016) developed Turing's ideas into functionalism.

🔄 Mental states as functional states

Functionalism (simple form): the joint thesis that the mind is a functional system (like a computer operating system) and mental states are functional states (like inputs and outputs in that system).

• Also called "machine functionalism" or "input-output functionalism" to highlight the mechanical features.
• Mental states are identified by their functional or causal role: what causes them and what they cause.
• Example: Freya's belief "my tofu scramble is on the table before me" is:
  • The OUTPUT of seeing her breakfast on the table.
  • The INPUT for other beliefs (e.g., "something is on the table") and behaviors (e.g., sticking a fork into the scramble).
• Note: No mention of Freya's sensory cortex, thalamus, or retinal rods and cones—the belief is identified only by its functional role.

🌍 A natural, non-spooky mind

• Mental stuff is fundamentally inputs and outputs in a complex, wholly natural system.
• No worries about mental stuff being "spooky" or how it could interact with material stuff (as in Cartesian dualism).
• The how-possible question about mental-material interaction does not arise, no more than it does for software-hardware interaction in computers.
• The mysterious fog is lifted.

✅ How functionalism solves the problems

✅ Accounting for multiple realizability

• Recall: Pain is multiply realizable—Freya and the rabbit can both be in pain despite having different brains.
• Functionalist solution: Mental states are identified by their functional or causal role, not by any specific realization means.
• Being in pain does not require any specific brain state, just some adequate means of realization.
• The means of realization need not be a brain state at all—it could be silicon circuits, for example.
• Implication: Functionalism has no problem accounting for multiple realizability, unlike materialism.

✅ Mental states as real causes of behavior

• Recall: Behaviorism cannot count mental states as causes of behavior because it identifies them with behavior itself.
• Functionalist solution: The connection between mental states and behavior is a functional or causal one, not one of identity.
• Mental states (like Freya's belief about her tofu scramble) are identified with their functional or causal role in the larger system of inputs, outputs, other mental states, and behavioral states.
• Since mental states are distinct from behaviors, they can be real causes of behavior.
• Implication: Functionalism has no problem accounting for mental causation, unlike behaviorism.

🛑 Objections to functionalism

🛑 The Chinese Room (John Searle)

• Target: "Strong" artificial intelligence (strong AI)—the version of functionalism claiming that having the right inputs and outputs is sufficient for having mental states.
• The thought experiment:
  • Someone who does not understand Chinese is put in a room.
  • They sort Chinese symbols in response to other Chinese symbols, following purely formal rules in an English manual.
  • Chinese symbols come in on a conveyor belt; the person looks up the symbol shape in the manual, finds which symbols to send back, and sends them out.
  • The person gets very good at this and can fool fluent Chinese speakers with their responses.
  • To observers, the person functions as if they understand Chinese.
• Searle's conclusion: The person has no true understanding at all. Therefore, functioning in the right way is not sufficient for having mental states.
• Functionalist reply:
  • The person in the room is just one piece of the whole functional system.
  • It is the system (the whole room, including the person and the instruction manual) that understands Chinese, not just one part.
  • Don't confuse: The person alone does not understand, but the system as a whole does.

🛑 The problem of qualia

Qualia: the feeling aspect of some mental states; fundamentally qualitative states.

• The worry: There seems to be more to pain than just being the cause of pain-related behavior.
• What's missing: The undeniable sensation—the feel of pain. At the conscious level, some argue, that is all there is to pain.
• Examples of qualitative mental states:
  • Pain: the feel of the splinter in Freya's finger.
  • Color experiences: Freya's visual experience of a green Granny Smith apple—the vivid, ripe greenness.
• The functionalist's limitation:
  • Functionalism can only talk about the experience in terms of its functional or causal role.
  • Example: Freya's green experience causes her belief that she sees a green apple.
  • But functionalism cannot speak to the feeling Freya has in seeing the green apple—the qualitative character over and above whatever beliefs it causes.
• Implication: Since mental states are identified solely by their functional role, functionalism seems without resources to account for qualia.

🔄 Functionalist reply to qualia

• Offer a treatment of qualia in terms of what they function to do.
• Example: The vivid greenness of the apple functions to inform Freya about a food source and pull her visual attention to it; color experiences allow her to form accurate beliefs about her environment.
• Visual experiences provide beautiful moments, but they likely function to do much more.
• It is more likely that qualitative aspects have a function and can be understood in terms of their functions than that they are free-floating above the causal order.
• The functionalist need not remain silent on qualia.

🤔 Open questions and conclusion

🤔 Unresolved issues

• Agency: In what sense is Freya truly an agent of her own actions if we merely cite a cold input to explain her behavior?
• Avowal: How does Freya avow (acknowledge, claim ownership of) her own beliefs on a merely functionalist view?
• Personal identity: If minds are kinds of computers, what does that make thinking creatures like Freya? Kinds of robots, albeit sophisticated ones?
• These difficult questions need satisfactory answers before many philosophers will be content with functionalism.

🧭 The path forward

• Functionalism takes the idea seriously that minds really are kinds of computing machines.
• This idea is still very much alive and as controversial as ever.
• For some philosophers, functionalism has made a start down the right path: away from Cartesian dualism and between the two terrors of materialism and behaviorism.
• Not all objections have been considered, nor all sophisticated versions of functionalism that aim to address the objections.

🧭 Overview

🧠 One-sentence thesis

Property dualism claims that while only one kind of substance (material) exists in the world, it possesses two fundamentally distinct kinds of properties—physical and mental—thereby avoiding the problems of substance dualism while preserving the reality of mental phenomena.

📌 Key points (3–5)

• Core claim: There is one fundamental substance (material) but two essentially different kinds of properties: physical properties (like weight, mass) and mental properties (like beliefs, pain sensations).
• Why it was proposed: Property dualism attempts to be more scientific than substance dualism, avoid the interaction problem between two substances, and still honor our intuitions about the distinctness of mental life.
• Two main kinds: (1) mental properties depend on physical properties (supervenience-based, non-reductive physicalism), and (2) mental properties are "over and above" physical properties (emergentism, denial of supervenience).
• Common confusion: Property dualism vs. substance dualism—substance dualism posits two kinds of things (material and immaterial substances), while property dualism posits only one kind of thing (material substance) with two kinds of characteristics.
• Major objection: The causal exclusion problem—if mental properties supervene on physical properties and the physical world is causally closed, mental properties seem to have no real causal power (epiphenomenalism).

🧱 Substances vs. properties: the foundation

🧱 What is a substance?

A substance is a unified fundamental kind of entity (e.g., a person, an animal) that can be the bearer of properties.

• The Latin root substantia means "that which lies below"—what exists underneath something else.
• A substance is independent of its properties: a zebra remains a zebra even if its stripes change or (on some views) if all its properties were to disappear.
• Example: A zebra is a substance; its color and number of stripes are properties.

🧱 What are properties?

• Properties are characteristics or attributes of things.
• Properties are attributed to and possessed by substances.
• Example: Having a certain color, shape, belief, or desire are all properties.

🔄 Cartesian substance dualism (the contrast)

• Descartes posited two kinds of substance: material (extended in space, divisible) and mental (characterized by thought).
• Each person is made up of both substances, which are entirely different in kind and can exist independently.
• Problem: This raises the interaction problem—how can two entirely different kinds of things causally affect each other?

🔄 Property dualism's alternative

• Property dualism rejects the idea of two substances.
• Instead: there is one kind of substance (material) but two kinds of properties (physical and mental).
• This avoids the problem of interaction between two substances, since there is only one substance.
• Don't confuse: Property dualism is still dualism because it posits two fundamentally different kinds of properties, not because it posits two substances.

🛠️ Arguments for property dualism

🛠️ Multiple realization argument (Putnam)

• Originally used to support functionalism, but also supports property dualism.
• Core idea: Mental states (like pain) can be "multiply realizable"—implemented in creatures with very different physical structures.
• Example: An octopus or an alien might feel pain, but pain might be realized by different brain structures than in humans.
• Implication: Pain cannot be strictly identical with one specific physical property (as the type identity theory claims).
• Therefore, mental properties and physical properties are distinct → property dualism is true.

🛠️ Knowledge argument (Frank Jackson)

• Involves the imaginary case of Mary, a brilliant neuroscientist raised in a black-and-white room.
• Mary knows all the physical facts about vision but has never seen color.
• One day, Mary leaves the room and sees a red tomato.
• Claim: Mary learns something new—what red looks like.
• Conclusion: There must be more to the world than just physical facts; there are more properties than just physical properties.
• Don't confuse: This argument targets the completeness of physical explanation, not the existence of a mental substance.

🔀 Two kinds of property dualism

🔀 First kind: mental properties depend on physical properties (non-reductive physicalism)

🔗 Supervenience

Supervenience: Property A supervenes on property B if there cannot be a difference in A without a difference in B (though there can be differences in B with no change in A).

• Example: If aesthetic properties of art supervene on physical properties, you cannot change the aesthetic without changing the physical.
• Applied to mind: If you feel fine now but have a headache five minutes later, there must be a physical difference in your brain.
• Another way to put it: If you duplicate all physical properties of the world, mental properties come "for free."

🔗 Jaegwon Kim's position

• Kim holds that intentional properties (beliefs, hopes) can be functionally reduced to physical properties.
• But phenomenal properties (taste, pain, afterimages) supervene on physical properties yet cannot be reduced to them.
• Why the difference?
  • Phenomenal states cannot be defined functionally; pain is not just "the state caused by tissue damage that leads to avoidance behavior"—pain is what it feels like.
  • Intentional states are anchored to observable behavior, making them amenable to functional analysis.
• Kim resists calling this "property dualism" and prefers "something near enough" physicalism.

Property type	Can be functionally reduced?	Why?
Intentional (beliefs, desires)	Yes	Anchored to observable behavior; functional role can be identified
Phenomenal (pain, taste)	No	Defined by subjective feeling, not by causal role

🔀 Second kind: mental properties are "over and above" physical properties

🔝 Two senses of "over and above"

1. Downward causation: Mental properties have independent causal powers and are responsible for effects in the physical world.
   • Example: The mental property of desiring a drink causes you to walk to the fridge, not just the firing of neurons.
2. Denial of supervenience: Mental properties can vary independently of physical properties.
   • Example: Two people could have the same brain states but different mental states (one in pain, the other not).

🔝 Emergentism

• Emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries (J.S. Mill, Samuel Alexander, C. Lloyd Morgan, C.D. Broad).
• Core claim: When a system reaches a certain level of complexity, entirely new properties emerge that are novel, irreducible, and "over and above" the lower level.
• Example: When a brain becomes complex enough, mental properties (sensations, thoughts, desires) emerge from it in addition to physical properties.
• These mental properties are genuinely distinct: they have novel causal powers or do not supervene on physical properties (or both).

🔝 Zombie argument (David Chalmers)

• Philosophical zombies: Beings that are behaviorally and physically identical to us but have no inner experience.
• If such beings are not only conceivable but also possible, then there can be mental differences without physical differences.
• Implication: Phenomenal properties cannot be explained in terms of physical properties; they are really distinct.
• This supports the denial of supervenience.

⚠️ Objections to property dualism

⚠️ The causal exclusion problem

🚫 Setup of the problem

• Suppose mental property M is instantiated and supervenes on physical property P.
• M appears to cause another mental property M¹, which supervenes on physical property P¹.
• Question: Is the cause of M¹ really M, or is it P¹ (the physical base of M¹)?

🚫 Two physicalist principles

1. Causal closure: The physical world is causally closed—every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause.
2. Denial of overdetermination: An effect cannot have more than one wholly sufficient cause.

🚫 The exclusion argument

• Given causal closure, P¹ must have a sufficient physical cause P.
• Given denial of overdetermination, P¹ cannot have two sufficient causes (M and P).
• Therefore, P is the real cause of P¹, not M.
• Conclusion: Mental properties seem to be epiphenomenal—they have no causal effects on physical events.
• This is a problem because it violates our common-sense intuition that mental states (like desires) cause physical actions (like walking to the fridge).

🚫 Relation to substance dualism

• Property dualism was supposed to avoid the interaction problem of substance dualism by positing only one substance.
• But the causal exclusion problem shows that property dualism faces a similar problem: how can mental properties causally affect physical properties?
• Additional objection: Mental-to-physical causation seems to violate the conservation of energy (though this is disputed).

⚠️ Is non-reductive physicalism really dualism?

🤔 The challenge

• Emergentism and views that deny supervenience are clearly property dualist—mental properties are genuinely distinct, irreducible, and not wholly determined by physical properties.
• But is non-reductive physicalism genuinely dualist?
• Problem: If mental properties are not "over and above" physical properties, it's hard to see this as genuine property dualism.

🤔 What physicalism means

Physicalism: What there fundamentally is is what is described by physics.

• Mental properties are not properties found in physics, so they are non-physical.
• But non-reductive physicalism claims they are grounded in the physical realm through supervenience and are (in principle) explainable in physical terms.
• It is sometimes called token identity theory: instances of mental states can be identified with instances of physical states, even if types of mental states are not identical with types of physical states.
• Analogy: All instances of "being beautiful" are physical objects, but the property of being beautiful is not a physical property.

🤔 Tim Crane's objection

• If physicalism requires that non-physical properties are (in principle) explicable in physical terms, why is this a property dualist position?
• For genuine property dualism, the ontology of physics should not be enough to explain mental properties.
• Conclusion: Mere denial of the identity of mental and physical properties is not enough for real property dualism; real property dualists must either believe in downward causation or deny supervenience (or both).

📊 Summary comparison

View	Number of substances	Number of property kinds	Mental properties depend on physical?	Mental properties causally efficacious?
Substance dualism	Two (material, mental)	Two	No (independent substances)	Yes (but interaction problem)
Property dualism (non-reductive physicalism)	One (material)	Two	Yes (supervenience)	Unclear (causal exclusion problem)
Property dualism (emergentism, denial of supervenience)	One (material)	Two	No (or only weakly)	Yes (downward causation)
Reductive physicalism (type identity theory)	One (material)	One (mental = physical)	Yes (identity)	Yes (mental just is physical)

🎯 Overall assessment

• Property dualism attempts to preserve the reality of mental properties while giving them a foothold in the physical world.
• It avoids the intractable difficulties of substance dualism (interaction problem) and the problems of the identity theory (multiple realization).
• However, it faces important objections:
  • The causal exclusion problem threatens to make mental properties epiphenomenal.
  • It is unclear whether non-reductive physicalism is genuinely dualist.
• Despite renewed popularity, critics argue these objections have not been adequately addressed.

Markdown notes end here.

🧭 Overview

🧠 One-sentence thesis

Qualia—the distinctive subjective qualities of experiences like colors, sounds, and sensations—pose a fundamental challenge to scientific explanations of the mind because they seem irreducibly private, ineffable, and immediately knowable only through direct experience.

📌 Key points (3–5)

• What qualia are: the distinctive qualities of experience (what red looks like, what cinnamon tastes like) that we encounter in every waking moment.
• Apparent features: qualia seem private (only you can access yours), ineffable (can't be fully put into words), and immediately apprehensible (you know what something sounds like just by hearing it).
• The scientific challenge: while science can explain how the brain works, it seems unable to explain what experiences are actually like—the subjective character of qualia.
• Common confusion: knowing all scientific facts about color vs. knowing what color looks like—Mary's Room shows these may be different kinds of knowledge.
• Debate scope: philosophers disagree about which mental states have qualia (emotions? high-level perception? thinking?) and whether qualia as traditionally conceived even exist.

🎨 What qualia are and their apparent properties

🎨 The basic concept

Qualia: the qualities of experience known to philosophers of mind; the distinctive character of sights, sounds, feelings, tastes, and other sensory experiences.

• The term is "oddly obscure" but refers to something utterly familiar—what we experience every moment we're awake.
• Examples from everyday life:
  • The pink and blue hues of sunset
  • The high-pitched trills of birds
  • The coolness of an evening breeze
  • The throbbing sensation of a headache
• We actively seek out new qualia (ordering unfamiliar dishes to learn what they taste like) or try to end unpleasant ones (taking aspirin for headache pain).

🔒 Privacy

• What it means: your qualia are features of your experience alone; others can never directly access them.
• This property explains why you might wonder whether other people experience colors the same way you do—whether "my blue may be your green."
• We can never know which qualia other people are experiencing.

🤐 Ineffability

• What it means: qualia cannot neatly be put into words.
• Example: trying to explain to a blind person what red looks like, or conveying to a lifelong vegetarian what tuna tastes like.
• We might attempt metaphors ("red is like a trumpet"), but these inevitably fail to do justice to the actual sensation.

👁️ Immediate apprehensibility

• What it means: qualia are immediately and fully graspable just by experiencing them.
• Contrast with objects of experience:
  • You hear a soft thud at night and may wonder what caused it (falling object? door slamming? housemate returning).
  • But you don't have to speculate about what the noise sounded like to you—you grasped that simply by hearing it.
• Stronger controversial claim: we can never make errors of judgment about our own qualia; if something feels painful to you, it's nonsensical to suggest you might be wrong.

Important note: All these properties are controversial (see the skepticism section below), but they capture intuitive features of how qualia seem to us.

🧪 The challenge to science: Mary's Room

🧪 Why qualia seem scientifically inexplicable

• Science can explain how the brain works—neurons, synapses, information transmission, hormone release.
• This might explain behavior: perception as information transmission from sense organs through brain processing areas, or aggression in terms of neurotransmitter release.
• The hard problem: scientific descriptions don't seem able to explain why red looks the specific way it does, or why cinnamon tastes like this and vanilla like that.
• The challenge is not just understanding the neuroscience of vision or taste—progress is being made there.
• The real difficulty: science tells us how the brain works but seems unable to tell us what experiences are actually like.

Example: A person deaf since birth wants to know what Beethoven sounds like. Even with perfect brain-scanners showing exactly what happens to neurons when someone listens to music, this couldn't properly convey the subjective experience of hearing the Choral Symphony's opening bars.

🏠 Mary's Room thought experiment

Setup: Mary is a brilliant scientist who knows all the physical facts about color perception—all the physics of light, biology of the eye, and neuroscience of color processing in the brain. However, she has spent her life in a black-and-white room and has never seen color herself.

What happens: One day Mary leaves her room and sees a shiny red apple for the first time. "Wow!" she thinks, "So that's what red looks like."

The argument:

1. Mary knows all the scientific facts about color before she leaves her room.
2. Mary learns new facts (about what colors look like) when she leaves her room.
3. Therefore, not all facts are scientific facts.

Implication: There are certain facts that can't be accessed by scientific knowledge alone—facts about qualia, about what colors actually look like—that rely on subjective experience.

🔄 The ability hypothesis response

• Core claim: What Mary gains is not knowledge but a new set of abilities.
• Analogy: Someone who knows a lot about music but can't play instruments learns to play piano after practice—they gain a skill, not new factual knowledge.
• Applied to Mary: Before leaving, she couldn't recognize objects as red, imagine red, or remember red. After leaving, her experiences give her these abilities.
• Our sense that she gains knowledge is misplaced—what she gains is a new kind of skill.
• Challenge: Some philosophers doubt this adequately explains away the intuition that Mary really does gain special knowledge.

🔁 Old fact, new knowledge response

• Core idea: Mary encounters the same facts in a new way, not genuinely new facts.
• Analogy: Someone learns "Istanbul was founded in 330AD," then separately learns "Constantinople was founded in 330AD." If they don't know these are the same city, they seem to learn something new—but strictly speaking, they encountered a fact they already knew in a different form.
• Applied to Mary: She really did know all facts about color before leaving. When she sees red, she encounters these same facts in a new way—via her own color vision rather than via theoretical scientific language.
• Challenge: Must offer a developed account of this special experiential way of gaining knowledge without appealing to non-scientific or non-physical facts.

🚫 The denial response

• Core claim: Mary would not gain any new knowledge or ability when she leaves her room.
• If she really knew all the scientific facts about color, she would already have all knowledge and abilities associated with seeing colors, despite never personally seeing them.
• Making it plausible: Focus on premise 1—can we really imagine someone knowing all relevant scientific facts?
  • Current science is incomplete and falls far short of knowing every fact even within its own domain.
  • Most scientists are so specialized they know only a small proportion of facts in their own field.
  • Mary would have to be more like a superintelligence from the distant future than a normal human.
  • Given this, should our intuitions about what we can imagine be given much weight?

Current state: No single response has been generally accepted as solving the problem; the puzzle of qualia for the scientific worldview remains a central area of philosophical research.

🌈 Debates about the scope of qualia

😊 Do emotions have qualia?

• The question: Are there distinctive feelings (or sets of feelings) associated with emotions like joy, anger, or sadness?
• Debate: Do these involve special qualia of their own, or can they be understood in terms of other qualia (especially bodily sensations)?
• William James (1842-1910) adopted the bodily sensation view in a famous 1884 article.
• Evidence for bodily view: Consider the intense physical sensations accompanying excitement—heart rate going up, mouth becoming dry, muscles tensing. Could such "bodily qualia" be all there is to emotional qualia?
• The issue remains hotly debated.

🦆 High-level perceptual qualia

• The question: Beyond color and shape qualia, could there be special qualia involved in seeing someone as looking friendly or recognizing an animal as a raccoon?
• The rich content view: There are "high-level" qualia associated with properties beyond basic features like color, shape, and motion.

🐰 The duck-rabbit illusion argument

• With mental effort, we can "switch" from seeing the picture as a duck to seeing it as a rabbit.
• It arguably seems like there's a shift in the way the picture looks.
• However, it's far from clear that our experience of low-level features (colors and shapes) actually changes.
• Implication: If the low-level features don't change but the experience does, this might provide evidence for special qualia associated with seeing the image as a duck versus as a rabbit.

🧠 Cognitive qualia (cognitive phenomenology)

• The question: Do non-perceptual states like thinking and understanding have special qualia associated with them?
• Example: Quickly add 17 and 48 in your head—was there a distinctive feeling accompanying your thoughts about the numbers?

🗣️ The foreign language argument

• Jack (English speaker) and Jacques (French speaker) both listen to a French radio broadcast.
• Jack cannot understand what he's hearing; Jacques can.
• Intuitively, there seems to be a difference in the quality of their experiences arising from differences in understanding.
• Counter-argument: Perhaps any qualia in thinking can be understood just in terms of regular perceptual qualia (colors, shapes) occurring as images in our minds—like seeing or hearing numbers in your "mind's eye."

🤔 Skepticism about qualia

🤔 Dennett's challenge: confused questions

• Daniel Dennett is a famous skeptic who insists the very idea of qualia is confused.
• In "Quining Qualia" (1988), he gives examples where the philosophical idea of qualia invites impossible and perhaps nonsensical questions.

🥦 The cauliflower case

• Two people: one loves cauliflower, the other despises it.
• The impossible question: Do they have different qualia when tasting cauliflower, or do they have different reactions to the same qualia?
• Dennett suggests such questions barely make sense.
• Stronger version: Imagine you yourself go from despising cauliflower to loving it. Even in this first-person case, you cannot say whether your qualia changed or your attitudes changed.
• The problem: If questions about qualia can't be answered from the first-person perspective, and qualia are supposedly private and ineffable, then they can't be answered at all.
• Dennett's conclusion: Rather than embrace such mysterious entities, we should abandon the very idea of qualia as confused.

🌳 The transparency thesis

• Traditional view: Qualia are things we can observe in our experience in their own right, separate from our experience of objects in the world (hence "raw feels").
• Challenge: Insofar as we experience qualia at all, we experience them as properties of objects in the world.
• Example: In looking at a green tree, we do not experience "raw greenness." Rather, the "qualia of greenness" are experienced as properties of the tree itself.
• Implication: If correct, qualia might simply be an aspect of our awareness of real objects in the world, rather than mysterious "mental paint."
• If so, cognitive science might understand qualia through the broader project of explaining how perception makes us aware of the world.

Don't confuse: The transparency thesis doesn't deny qualia exist—it reframes them as aspects of object-awareness rather than separate mental entities.

📊 Summary comparison

Aspect	Traditional qualia view	Skeptical/alternative views
Nature	Separate mental entities; "raw feels"	Aspects of object-awareness (transparency thesis) or confused concept (Dennett)
Privacy	Fundamentally private and inaccessible to others	Questions about sameness/difference may be nonsensical
Scientific explanation	Seems to resist scientific explanation	May be explainable through perception science (transparency) or misconceived (Dennett)
Scope	Clearly in perception; debated for emotions, high-level perception, cognition	If qualia are confused, scope questions are moot
Mary's Room	Shows non-physical facts exist	Shows new abilities, new presentation of old facts, or relies on impossible premise

🧭 Overview

🧠 One-sentence thesis

Consciousness—understood primarily as phenomenal experience (what-it-is-like-ness)—is central to philosophy of mind, yet philosophers disagree sharply on whether it can be explained by representational content, cognitive processes, or information integration.

📌 Key points (3–5)

• Two core concepts: Phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness) is experience itself; access consciousness (A-consciousness) is information available to reasoning and behavior.
• Common confusion: P-consciousness and A-consciousness are dissociable—you can be phenomenally conscious of something (e.g., background noise) without it being access-conscious until you "notice" it.
• Easy vs hard problems: Easy problems (reportability, attention, integration) yield to standard cognitive science methods; the hard problem is explaining why there is subjective experience at all.
• Representationalism debate: The dominant view tries to explain consciousness via representational content, but critics argue this leaves out the what-it-is-like-ness of experience.
• Attention ≠ consciousness: Attention and consciousness are related but not identical; some argue attention without awareness (e.g., blindsight) or awareness without full attention (overflow) are possible.

🧩 Core concepts of consciousness

🧩 What consciousness is

Consciousness is experience; it covers perceptions (seeing colors, hearing sounds), bodily awareness (temperature, limb position), and the experiential aspect of mental life.

• The term "consciousness" is often interchangeable with "awareness."
• It is closely connected to attention (noticing).
• Ned Block characterizes phenomenal consciousness as experience—there is "something it is like" to be in that state.
• Example: When you see red, smell coffee, or feel warmth, you have conscious experiences with distinctive phenomenology.

🔍 Phenomenal vs access consciousness

Block distinguishes two kinds:

Concept	Definition	Key feature
P-consciousness	Experience; "what it is like" to be in that state	Subjective, qualitative feel
A-consciousness	Content processed by the Executive System, available for reasoning and behavior control	Functional, information-processing role

• Why they are distinct: Block argues these are different in kind—one can exist without the other.
• P without A example: You hear a pneumatic drill outside your window during a conversation; you were phenomenally conscious of the noise all along, but only at noon do you become access-conscious of it (you "notice" it).
• A without P: Block says no actual cases are clear, but it is "conceptually possible"—no logical incoherence in the idea.
• Don't confuse: Being conscious of something (phenomenal) vs that information being available to reasoning (access).

⚙️ Easy vs hard problems

David Chalmers divides consciousness research:

Easy problems: Those susceptible to standard cognitive science methods—explaining phenomena via computational or neural mechanisms.

Examples of easy problems:

• Integration of information by a cognitive system.
• Reportability of mental states.
• A system's ability to access its own internal states.
• The focus of attention.

Hard problem: Explaining why and how subjective experience arises—why there is "something it is like" at all.

• Easy problems are still difficult, but they are tractable in principle.
• The hard problem resists standard methods because it concerns subjective, first-person phenomenology.
• Block's P- vs A-consciousness discussion is primarily in the territory of easy problems; earlier chapters (1–5) address the hard problem.

🧪 Theories of consciousness

🧪 First-order representationalism

The view that representational content can exclusively explain phenomenal consciousness.

• Core claim: P-consciousness is identical to, or supervenes on, representational content.
• Supervenience: If B supervenes on A, any change in B requires a change in A, but not vice versa.
  • Example: Ethical facts supervene on physical facts—if ethical facts change, physical facts must have changed; but physical facts can change while ethical facts stay the same.
• Why it matters: Representationalism offers a naturalistic explanation—content can be explained by information, which natural sciences find respectable.
• Main proponents: Fred Dretske (1995), Michael Tye (1995).
• Objection: Critics (including Block) argue this leaves out the what-it-is-like-ness—beliefs can have content but be unconscious, so content alone doesn't capture phenomenology.

🧠 Higher-order representationalism

A mental state is conscious in virtue of being accompanied by a higher-order state that represents it.

• Transitivity principle (Rosenthal): "Mental states are conscious only if one is in some way conscious of them"—being conscious of a state is necessary for that state to be conscious.
• Two main versions:

Version	Nature of higher-order state	Key idea
Higher-order perception (inner sense)	Perceptual	Like outer sense but directed inward; more primitive, can apply to non-linguistic animals
Higher-order thought	Thought	Either actual (Rosenthal: states are objects of higher-order thoughts) or dispositional (Carruthers: states are available to higher-order thoughts)

• Actualist vs dispositionalist: Actualist = only states you are actually accessing now are conscious; dispositionalist = any state you could access is conscious (less demanding).
• Don't confuse: Higher-order theories still count as representationalism because perceptions and thoughts have contents.

🔁 Reflexive representationalism

Phenomenally conscious states possess higher-order representational contents that represent the states themselves.

• Key difference from higher-order theories: No duplication of mental states—the content is part of the conscious state itself.
• Example: Your visual experience of a book has both the phenomenology and the content "there is a book in front of me"; the phenomenology arises from that content.
• Merit: Avoids postulating separate higher-order states.
• Caution: This view comes in many varieties and should not be conflated with higher-order theories.

🧮 Cognitive theories

Consciousness is explained by cognitive processes, not primarily by representational content.

• Global Workspace Theory (Bernard Baars, 1988): Consciousness emerges from competition among processors for limited working memory; information is broadcast to a "global workspace" accessible to many systems.
  • Analogy: Think of a digital computer's shared memory.
• Multiple Drafts Model (Daniel Dennett, 1991): Different probes elicit different answers about conscious states; no single "Cartesian theater" where consciousness happens.
• Why cognitive, not representational: These theories invoke notions like working memory, broadcasting, and competition—cognitive-scientific concepts—rather than philosophical notions of content.
• Objection: Block and others argue cognitive theories, like representationalism, cannot capture the what-it-is-like-ness of experience.

📊 Information Integration Theory (IIT)

Consciousness is a purely information-theoretic property; the relevant kind of information integration is necessary and sufficient for consciousness.

• Proposed by: Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi (2008).
• Core claim: Consciousness is integrated information—no other notion is more fundamental.
• Status: The theory is quite young and technical; details are still being developed.
• Comparison: Some compare IIT to panpsychism (the view that consciousness is a fundamental property of the world), but each theory must be understood on its own terms.
• Don't confuse: IIT assigns information a defining role, not just a supporting role.

🔗 Attention and consciousness

🔗 Why attention matters

• Before the 1990s, scientists avoided "consciousness" as unscientific and studied "attention" instead—it was easier to quantify.
• Attention served as a surrogate for consciousness in empirical research.
• Example: "Visible persistence" (Coltheart, 1980) is hard to define without reference to conscious seeing, even if implicitly.
• Now consciousness studies are widespread; the question is: How do attention and consciousness relate?

🔗 Are they identical?

• Hard to maintain identity: Simple organisms may have basic attentional capacities (deploying cognitive resources to focus) without being conscious in the relevant sense.
• Main question: Is attention necessary and/or sufficient for consciousness?

🔗 Attention necessary for consciousness?

• Jesse Prinz (2012): Argues attention is necessary and sufficient (close to identity).
• Objection—phenomenological overflow (Block, 2007): You can be conscious of more than you attend to—attention is not necessary.
  • Example: You might be phenomenally aware of background details in your visual field even though you are not attending to them.

🔗 Attention sufficient for consciousness?

• Objection—blindsight (Kentridge et al., 1999): Patients with cortical damage are blind in parts of their visual fields but show markers of attention in those areas; they insist they are unconscious of those regions.
  • This suggests attention without awareness—attention is not sufficient.
• Don't confuse: Attention (focusing cognitive resources) vs awareness (phenomenal consciousness).
• Current status: Both topics remain highly debated and will continue to be active areas of research.

🧭 Overview

🧠 One-sentence thesis

The debate between externalism and internalism centers on whether the content of concepts depends constitutively on mind-external environmental factors or whether scientific inquiry should focus on the internal computational mechanisms that generate and interpret concepts.

📌 Key points (3–5)

• The problem of intentionality: how mental states, thoughts, and linguistic expressions can be "about" something—how they represent or refer to things.
• Externalism's core claim: the content of concepts and thoughts supervenes on both internal psychological states and external environmental factors; "meanings just ain't in the head."
• Internalism's core claim: for scientific purposes, the internal computational mechanisms that build and combine concepts are the proper focus; content ascriptions vary with theorist interests and are not essential to the theory itself.
• Common confusion: externalism vs. internalism is not a simple yes/no dispute about whether the world matters; rather, it is a difference in research programs—externalists study concepts and their environmental relations, internalists study the mind-internal mechanisms that generate concepts.
• Why it matters: the choice between these approaches shapes how we explain propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires), folk-psychological explanations of behavior, and the nature of linguistic meaning.

🧩 What concepts are and why they matter

🧩 Concepts as constituents of thought

A concept is generally understood in the philosophy of mind to refer to a constituent of thought.

• Propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, etc.) have the form "X thinks that P."
• The proposition P is composed of concepts (e.g., in "the book is on the table," the concepts are roughly "book," "table," "on").
• Concepts are shared between people: if both John and Leila think that P, they share the content inherent in the concepts of P.
• Don't confuse: concepts themselves vs. the mechanisms that build concepts—externalists focus on the former, internalists on the latter.

🎯 Folk psychology and behavior explanation

Propositional attitudes and concepts are used in folk-psychological (intentional) explanations of behavior.

Example: Why did Leila take her umbrella?

• She believes it will rain today.
• She believes using an umbrella will shelter her from rain.
• She desires not to get wet.
• Humans act in accordance with their beliefs and desires (all else equal).
• Therefore, she took the umbrella because she believed X, desired Y, and believed doing Z would bring about Y.

This is a counterfactual explanation: if she did not believe X and did not desire Y, she would not do Z.

🌍 Externalism: content depends on the environment

🌍 The externalist thesis

Externalists argue that a theory of content must account for the relation between linguistic expressions (or mental states) and things in the world.

• The environment is constitutive of mental states, determining what they are.
• As Colin McGinn puts it: "Does the world enter into the very nature of the mind?" Externalists answer yes—"the mind is penetrated by the world, configured by it."
• Content supervenes on both what's in the head and features of the environment; changing the environment changes the content.

🧪 The Twin Earth thought experiment

Hilary Putnam's famous argument claims to show that two subjects can have identical internal psychological states but different content due to environmental variation.

Setup:

• On Earth, "water" refers to H₂O.
• On Twin-Earth, "water" refers to XYZ (a different substance that looks and behaves like water).
• Oscar on Earth says "water" → refers to H₂O.
• Twin-Oscar on Twin-Earth says "water" → refers to XYZ.

The puzzle:

• Suppose Oscar is transported from Earth to Twin-Earth (all his psychological states remain unchanged).
• If knowing the meaning of a term is just a matter of being in a certain psychological state, then "water" uttered by Oscar on Twin-Earth should still refer to H₂O.
• But intuitively, when Oscar says "water" on Twin-Earth while pointing to a lake of XYZ, the word should refer to XYZ (the stuff in that environment).
• Something is wrong: if two people utter the same word in the same environment, we expect it to refer to the same thing.

Putnam's conclusion: "Cut the pie any way you like, 'meanings' just ain't in the head!"—mind-internal properties alone cannot fix meanings or reference.

🧠 Extension to thought content

The same argument applies not just to word meanings but to the contents of propositional attitudes (thoughts).

• Even though thoughts are "inside the head," their content supervenes on external environmental factors.
• Example: to speak of coffee tables, it does not suffice merely to have the concept; one must be in contact with actual coffee tables.

🔬 Internalism: focus on internal mechanisms

🔬 The internalist thesis

Internalism is an explanatory strategy that makes the internal structure and constitution of the organism a basis for the investigation of its external function and the ways in which it is embedded in an environment. (Wolfram Hinzen)

• Internalism studies the internal structure and mechanisms of an organism.
• The external environment comes into the picture when the theorist ascribes content to the internal processes.
• Key point: such content ascriptions vary with the theorist's interests and aims; content and its ascription are not an essential part of the theory itself.

⚙️ Computational mechanisms vs. content ascriptions

Frances Egan's work illustrates the internalist approach: the computational characterization of an internal mechanism abstracts away from specific content ascriptions.

Example: A mechanism that detects vertical lines in visual input.

• The mechanism itself (its computations) is in the scope of internalist theory.
• The representational content ascribed to the output (e.g., "edge of a building" or "part of a face") is not.
• The same mechanism could be embedded in the visual system (ascribed visual content) or the auditory system (ascribed auditory content).
• Nothing inherent to the computations makes them visual or auditory; the label depends on where the input came from.

Don't confuse: the mechanism itself vs. the content we ascribe to its output—internalism studies the former, which remains unchanged regardless of embedding.

🧩 Internalism does not deny the link to the world

Internalism does not deny that organisms are embedded in environments or that concepts relate to the world.

• Rather, internalists argue that for scientific inquiry into language and mind, the internal properties are the most relevant and fruitful subject matter.
• Internalism is not a solution to externalist problems; it is a different research program with different questions.

🗣️ Internalist semantics: meaning as internal instructions

🗣️ The problem with world-dependent theories

Jerrold Katz and Jerry Fodor showed that a theory of meaning that includes all relevant world knowledge needed for interpretation faces great difficulties.

Example sentences:

1. "Should we take junior back to the zoo?"
2. "Should we take the lion back to the zoo?"
3. "Should we take the bus back to the zoo?"

To interpret these correctly, one needs world knowledge:

• Lions are kept in cages; children and buses are not.
• (1) means take a child to show them the animals.
• (2) means take a lion and put it in a cage.
• (3) cannot mean either of the above.

Another example: "I saw the man with the binoculars."

• Without knowing what binoculars are, only one interpretation is available: a man holding an object called "binoculars."
• Once you know binoculars are used to see distant objects, a second interpretation becomes available: "I used binoculars to see a man."
• Disambiguation requires world knowledge (what binoculars are used for), not purely semantic or grammatical facts.

The upshot: A theory that insists on including the mind's relations to the external world cannot predict in advance what information will be needed for sentence interpretation, nor systematize such relations into a fruitful explanatory theory.

🏗️ Meaning as blueprints for concept construction

Internalist semantics (e.g., Noam Chomsky, Paul Pietroski) construes meaning in terms of blueprints used by the language faculty to construct concepts.

• The meaning of a word is cashed out not in terms of its relation to the outside world, but in terms of its internal role in the mind's construction of the concept.
• The mind has mechanisms that include instructions to build concepts.
• These concepts are then transferred to other mind-internal systems (systems of thought, articulatory-perceptual system).
• These systems use concepts for various ends: thinking, talking about the world, etc.

Internalist semantics concerns:

• The computational mechanisms of the language faculty.
• Their relation to the systems of thought.
• Not the concepts themselves, but the mechanisms that fetch, build, and combine concepts within the mind.

Contrast with externalism:

Aspect	Externalism	Internalism
Focus	Concepts themselves, their role in language use, relation to environment	Mechanisms that build and combine concepts
Content	Constitutive of mental states, depends on environment	Ascribed by theorist, varies with interests, not essential to theory
Goal	Explain how concepts refer to the world	Explain the computational machinery that generates concepts

🔄 The nature of the debate

🔄 Different research programs, not a simple disagreement

The difference between externalism and internalism is not a yes/no dispute about whether the world matters.

• It is a difference in the sort of questions each attempts to answer.
• It is a difference in how each construes the role that content plays in the explanation of language and mind.
• Externalists study concepts and their environmental relations; internalists study the mind-internal mechanisms that generate concepts.

🔬 An empirical question

As Gabriel Segal remarks: "We should not expect to discover too much from the armchair. Discovering the true nature of content should be a scientific enterprise (whether we also call it 'philosophical' or not)."

• The argument in favor of either approach is not a knockdown argument.
• There is no guarantee that one side will turn out to be the correct path.
• The choice should be guided by empirical fruitfulness and explanatory success.

🧭 Overview

🧠 One-sentence thesis

Whether humans possess free will—the control required for morally responsible action—depends on whether such control is compatible with determinism and whether our actions are genuinely ours rather than products of unconscious processes or external factors.

📌 Key points (3–5)

• What free will means: the kind of control over our actions that makes us deserving of blame or praise (moral responsibility).
• Three models of freedom: easy freedom (doing what you want), alternative possibilities (ability to do otherwise), and source freedom (being the right kind of source of your actions).
• Determinism vs. fatalism: determinism says only one future is physically possible given the past and laws of nature; fatalism says we are powerless regardless of what we do—these are not the same.
• Common confusion: determinism does not mean our choices are irrelevant; our deliberations can still be part of the causal chain that produces our actions.
• Two major challenges: the consequence argument (determinism rules out alternative possibilities) and the ultimacy argument (determinism rules out being the ultimate source of our actions).

🔍 What is free will?

🔍 Free will as moral responsibility

Free will: the kind of control required for morally responsible action—control that makes someone deserving of blame or praise for what they do (or fail to do).

• The excerpt frames free will not as an abstract metaphysical capacity but as the control needed to justify holding people accountable.
• Example: Quinn goes out the night before an exam instead of studying. If she has free will, she is blameworthy for her choice; if not, blame may be inappropriate.
• This definition ties freedom directly to everyday moral judgments.

🔍 The illusion question

• The excerpt opens by asking whether our sense of freedom—"it's up to me"—might be an illusion.
• If Quinn's decision is an "inevitable, deterministic consequence of the past and the laws of nature," does she really control her choice?
• If unconscious brain processes or environmental factors are the real causes, are we truly in control?

🌐 Determinism, fatalism, and freedom

🌐 What determinism claims

Determinism: the view that at any one time, only one future is physically possible; a complete description of the past plus the laws of nature logically entails all future events.

• Determinism is not the claim that free actions are impossible—it is a claim about the structure of causation in the world.
• Indeterminism is simply the denial of determinism (more than one future is physically possible at any moment).
• Whether determinism rules out freedom depends on what freedom requires.

🌐 Determinism vs. fatalism

Concept	What it says	Role of our choices
Determinism	Future follows from past + laws of nature	Our choices can be part of the causal chain
Fatalism	Future is fixed/preordained no matter what	Our choices are irrelevant

• Don't confuse: determinism allows that our deliberations and decisions are part of the causal process; fatalism says nothing we do matters.
• Example: In a deterministic world, water boils at 11:22 because I heated it to 100°C (my action is part of the cause). In a fatalistic world, the water boils at 11:22 no matter what I do—even if I try to empty the pot.

🌐 Compatibilism vs. incompatibilism

• Incompatibilism: determinism rules out free action.
• Compatibilism: free action is compatible with determinism.
• The debate hinges on which model of freedom is correct.

🛤️ Three models of freedom

🛤️ Easy freedom

Easy freedom: the ability to "do what you want to do."

• If you want to walk across the room and you can, you are free.
• Classic compatibilists argued this kind of freedom is compatible with determinism: even if determinism is true, you can still do what you want without external hindrance.
• Example: Right now, you can put down your textbook and get coffee—nothing is stopping you. Determinism does not prevent you from doing what you want.
• Contrast: If you were chained to your chair, you would lack easy freedom—not because of determinism, but because of an external obstacle.

🛤️ Alternative possibilities freedom

Alternative possibilities view: free action requires the ability to do otherwise than what you actually did.

• This is the "Garden of Forking Paths" model: if Anya freely sips her coffee, she must have been able to refrain from sipping.
• The key is having genuine options at the moment of choice.
• Example: Quinn decides to go out; if she is free, she could have stayed in and studied instead.

🛤️ Source freedom

Source view: free action requires the right kind of relationship between the antecedent sources of our actions and the actions we perform—the agent must be the source of her action.

• Sometimes described as requiring the agent to be the "ultimate source" of her action.
• This view does not focus on whether you could have done otherwise, but on whether the action genuinely originates from you.
• Example: If Quinn's decision stems from her own reasons and deliberation, she is the source; if it is imposed by external manipulation, she is not.

⚖️ The consequence argument

⚖️ The argument

1. If determinism is true, all human actions are consequences of past events and the laws of nature.
2. No human can do other than they actually do except by changing the laws of nature or the past.
3. No human can change the laws of nature or the past.
4. Therefore, if determinism is true, no human has free will.

• This argument targets both easy freedom and alternative possibilities freedom.
• It claims that determinism means we are "powerless to do otherwise" because our actions are fixed by factors beyond our control.

⚖️ Responses to the consequence argument

• Redefine "ability to do otherwise": Perhaps we do have a kind of ability to change the past or laws—if Quinn had stayed home, the past or laws would be slightly different. This is a conditional sense of "could have."
• Example: Quinn "could have stayed home" means "if she had stayed home, the past would have been different"—not that she can now reach back and alter the past.
• Deny that freedom requires alternative possibilities: If freedom does not require the ability to do otherwise, the consequence argument does not threaten free will (see Frankfurt cases below).
• Accept incompatibilism: Agree that determinism rules out alternative possibilities, but argue that determinism is false, so freedom is still possible.

🎭 Frankfurt cases and source freedom

🎭 Frankfurt's thought experiment

• Black wants Jones to perform a certain action.
• Black will intervene only if Jones is about to decide not to do what Black wants.
• As it turns out, Jones decides on his own to do exactly what Black wanted—Black never intervenes.
• Key point: Jones cannot do otherwise (Black would have forced him), yet Jones seems free and responsible because he acted for his own reasons.

🎭 What Frankfurt cases show

• The ability to do otherwise may not be necessary for free will.
• What matters is whether the agent is the source of the action in the right way.
• Don't confuse: Jones acting on his own vs. Jones being forced by Black. In the first case, Jones is the source; in the second, Black is.
• This insight motivates source compatibilism: freedom is about the right causal history, not alternative possibilities.

🔗 The ultimacy argument

🔗 The argument

1. A person acts of her own free will only if she is the act's ultimate source.
2. If determinism is true, no one is the ultimate source of her actions.
3. Therefore, if determinism is true, no one acts of her own free will.

• Developed by Galen Strawson; targets source views of freedom.
• The core idea: we do what we do because of the way we are, but the way we are is a product of factors beyond our control (past, laws of nature, genetics, upbringing).
• Example: Quinn prioritizes a night out over studying because of how she is—but she is not the ultimate source of how she is. Factors extending back to the initial conditions of the universe shaped her.

🔗 Responses to the ultimacy argument

• Clarify "ultimate source": Perhaps "ultimate source" is too strong. We can be a "mediated source" in the relevant sense—our actions stem from our reasons, desires, and deliberations, even if those are shaped by prior causes.
• Example: Even if Quinn's desires are shaped by her upbringing, she still weighs reasons and decides. That process makes her the source in the way that matters for moral responsibility.
• Distinguish being the source of how we are from being the source of what we do: Maybe we are not free with respect to our beliefs and desires (they are products of factors beyond our control), but we are still free with respect to whether we act on them.
• Example: Quinn may not control that she has a desire to go out, but she can still control whether she chooses to act on that desire.

🧠 Challenges from neuroscience

🧠 Libet's experiments

• Subjects were asked to flex their wrists whenever they felt the urge.
• EEG scans showed increased brain activity (readiness potential) around 550 milliseconds before the action.
• Subjects reported conscious awareness of the urge around 200 milliseconds before the action.
• Implication: Unconscious brain processes seem to initiate actions before conscious awareness, suggesting conscious decisions are not the real causes.

🧠 Objections to Libet (Alfred Mele)

• Self-reports are unreliable: Conscious perception takes time; the actual moment of intention may be closer to 550 milliseconds than subjects report.
• What happens at 550 milliseconds may not be a decision: It could be preparation or readiness, not the intention itself. The real intention may occur consciously at 200 milliseconds.
• Wrist-flicking is not typical of free action: Most free choices (e.g., choosing a major) are complex, extended over time, and involve both conscious and unconscious processes. Why think free choices cannot involve unconscious components?

🧠 Takeaway

• Libet's experiments are intriguing but probably do not establish that we lack free will.
• Don't confuse: unconscious processes playing a role in action vs. unconscious processes being the only cause. Free action may involve both conscious and unconscious elements.

🌍 Challenges from social psychology

🌍 Situationist research

• A growing body of research suggests that situational and environmental factors profoundly influence behavior.
• Example: Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments—ordinary people administered potentially lethal shocks to innocent subjects when instructed by an authority figure. Minor environmental factors (e.g., whether the experimenter looked professional) affected compliance.
• Implication: Our situations and environments, not our conscious choices, may be the real causes of our actions.

🌍 Responses to situationism

• Not everyone succumbs: Not all participants in situationist studies are unable to resist situational influences.
• Awareness helps: When we are aware of situational influences, we are more likely to resist them.
• More modest conclusion: Exercising control is harder than we think, but being influenced by the world is different from being determined by it. We can still sometimes exercise control.
• Example: Knowing about cognitive biases makes us less susceptible to them—this suggests we have some capacity for self-control.

🌍 Takeaway

• Situationist research does not prove we lack free will; it shows that free action is difficult and that we are more influenced by our environments than we often realize.

🤔 Conclusion

🤔 The open question

• The excerpt ends by noting that no one knows yet whether humans sometimes exercise the control required for moral responsibility.
• The question "Are you free?" is left to the reader.
• The debate involves deep philosophical arguments (consequence argument, ultimacy argument) and empirical challenges (neuroscience, social psychology), none of which have been definitively resolved.