from http://humanknowledge.net ©Brian Holtz 2004-11-04

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Philosophers often divide all phenomena into three kinds: a.. mind (or spirit or soul): that which can think and perceive; b.. ideas (or universals or forms): that which can be thought; and c.. matter (or substance): that which can be perceived. Human theories of mind differ according to how they explain these phenomena in general and the Mind-Body Problem in particular. The Mind-Body Problem is the problem of explaining how mindless unconscious matter can give rise to or interact with mind and consciousness. Human theories of mind include: a.. Idealism is the thesis that reality consists ultimately of mind and ideas rather than matter. b.. Dualism is the thesis that reality consists ultimately of both the material or physical and the ideal or mental. a.. Substance Dualism is the thesis that the material and the ideal or mental constitute two different and fundamental kinds of objects. b.. Property Dualism is the thesis that the material or physical and the ideal or mental constitute two different and fundamental kinds of properties. Property dualism can be a form of materialism if it says that mental properties are nevertheless fundamental material properties (analogous to mass or charge). c.. Materialism is the thesis that reality consists ultimately of matter. a.. Logical Behaviorism is the thesis that mental states can be fully and best explained in terms of behaviors and behavioral dispositions. b.. Identity Theory is the thesis that mental states and brain states are identical. c.. Functionalism is the thesis that mental states are functional states consisting of causal relations among components for processing information. Idealism is incorrect because its explanation of matter is either inadequate or unparsimonious. Dualism is incorrect because it unparsimoniously posits a realm of the ideal. Logical Behaviorism is unsatisfactory because behavioral explanations are too unwieldy. Identity Theory is incorrect because it holds that the essence of mind is its construction instead of its function.

1.2.1.1. Philosophy / Epistemology / Philosophy Of Mind / Essence of Mind A mind is any volitional conscious faculty for perception and cognition. Cognition Cognition is the process of learning, reasoning, and knowing. Learning is the processing of experience into an increase in knowledge or behavioral effectiveness. Reasoning is the process of making and evaluating valid inferences. Perception Perception is the process of organizing sensation into experience. Sensation is the process of external influence on a monitoring or control system. Experience is any relatively unified and coherent interpretation of related contemporaneous sensations. Consciousness Consciousness is awareness of self and environment. Awareness is the direct and central availability of information in a monitoring or control system. Volition Volition is the power or act of making decisions about an agent’s own actions. A decision is the causing by a system of events which were not physically determined from outside the system but rather were at least somewhat contingent on the internals of the system, and which were not predictable except perhaps by modeling the internals of the system. Free will is either of the doctrines that human choices are a) determined internally rather than externally (volitional free will) or b) not pre-determined at all (indeterminate free will). Determinism is incompatible with indeterminate free will, but is compatible with volitional free will if agents have internal state that influences (and thus helps determines) their actions. Volitional free will is also compatible with forms of indeterminism in which the acausality is not so rampant as to undermine agent self-influence. Indeterminate free will requires indeterminism, but degenerates into uncaused chance if acausality confounds not only prediction of effect but also attribution of cause.

Since most effects seem caused rather than uncaused, and since the complexity of minds makes them hard to predict, minds appear to have at least weak free will. Weak free will is sufficient for assigning ethical responsibility to decision-making systems even in the face of complete determinism.

Do minds have strong free will, or can their decisions in principle be inferred from sufficient knowledge of prior circumstances?

Anti-materialists posit an immaterial soul or will that is free from both deterministic causality and random acausality. This notion violates the law of the excluded middle. Either the immaterial will is subject to (perhaps probabilistic but nonetheless causal) causes, or it is not. The same is true of material minds. The actions of an immaterial will could be said to be caused by its own internal causal processes, but the same can be said of material minds.

1.2.1.2. Philosophy / Epistemology / Philosophy Of Mind / Accidence of Mind Non-essential but perhaps inevitable aspects of mind include subjectivity, intentionality, and affect. Subjectivity Objectivity is independence from a point of view or perspective that is inherently private. Subjectivity is dependency on a point of view or perspective that is inherently private. Subjective experience is the private phenomenal aspect of experience, the vivid feeling of what an experience is “like”. Subjective experience consists of complex associations among perceptions, and necessarily occurs in systems having such associations. If a subjective experience is not “like” anything (i.e. not associated with any other perceptions), it is not a subjective experience at all.

Physicalism is the thesis that all facts can be described in physical (and thus non-subjective) terms. Some humans have what they call a “natural belief that collections of cells do not generate minds” [McGinn 1999] and that therefore physicalism must be false.

Such a belief seems only as “natural” as the belief that collections of atoms do not generate life, and just as unjustified. The operation of e.g. the human brain does not mysteriously causeconsciousness, but rather it simplyconstitutes consciousness.

Qualia are ineffable intrinsic subjective qualities of perception, such as the redness of red, beyond the functional or dispositional properties of perception. Qualia are taken by opponents of physicalism to be a mysterious phenomenon that physicalism cannot explain.

However, qualia do not exist, because the functional and dispositional properties of perception can, in fact, explain the subjective qualities of perception. The functional role of certain sorts of perceptions in a conscious system necessarily and understandably entails that the system will report qualia. Thus there are no ineffable intrinsic subjective qualities of perception beyond its functional qualities.

The Knowledge Argument is an argument made by Frank Jackson in 1982 purporting to show that physicalism is false because knowledge of all the relevant physical facts does not include, for certain experiences such as the redness of red, knowledge of what it is like to have them before they are had. Jackson hypothesizes in the distant future a brilliant neuroscientist Mary spending her whole life in a colorless room learning all the physical facts about seeing the color red. Jackson claims that only when Mary sees something red can she learns the new fact of what redness is like, and that therefore physicalism is false.

Jackson’s argument fails because it ignores the difference between memorizing an algorithm and executing it. The experience of the redness of red consists in the operation of a complex set of functional components for processing information. While we can conceive of Mary having serial access to arbitrarily many memorized facts about such components, we cannot conceive of her having a large enough working memory or a fast enough mind to “manually” perform the operations “in her head” in order to recreate the experience of redness. Similarly, Mary could memorize the sequence of pixels in a monochrome bitmap and yet still not be able to mentally visualize what the bitmap will look like — even if it is an image of a favorite drawing which she had already memorized in arbitrary detail.

A zombie is a hypothetical creature that is stipulated to lack subjective experience but is behaviorally and physically indistinguishable from a human. The conceivability or logical possibility of zombies is taken by opponents of physicalism to show that physicalism is false.

It seems impossible to conceive of a creature that lacks subjective experience but nevertheless exhibits all the self-reporting behaviors of humans that help us to ascribe subjective experience to them. Therefore, zombies are inconceivable and do not show physicalism to be false.

Intentionality Intentionality is aboutness — the property of being about, directed at, or suited for. A system has intentionality by virtue of its potential and actual causal relations with the world.

The Chinese Room is a thought experiment devised by John Searle in 1980 to show that there cannot be intentionality or understanding in a formal symbol manipulation system such as a room in which a speaker of English manually executes an algorithm allowing the room to pass the Turing Test in Chinese. Searle claims that intentionality “is a biological phenomenon, and it is as likely to be as causally dependent on the specific biochemistry of its origins as lactation [or] photosynthesis”. Searle charges that functionalism is a form of dualism because it says mind is in principle independent of the specific biochemistry of the brain.

The human in the Chinese Room does not understand Chinese, but the human running the algorithm implements a system that does indeed understand Chinese. The system has intentionality by virtue of the causal relations that allow it to correctly answer questions posed to it in Chinese. Intentionality is a formal or informational property, whereas lactation and photosynthesis involve chemistry and energy. Simulated thinking can indeed produce understanding, just as simulated musical composition can indeed produce a sonata. If a functional explanation of mind is “dualistic”, then so is a functional explanation of long division or carburetion.

Affect Affect is a general and often undirected negative or positive attitude, beyond overall sensory or cognitive state, that influences motive and colors perception. Is affect indeed an inevitable property of any volitional system with complex motives? …. Mind and Limits There are several ways in which minds are limited in theory and in practice. a.. Logical Limits The Principle of Non-contradiction requires that no mind can correctly believe both a proposition and its negation. Indeed, all of the conclusions of logic are binding on all possible minds, as logic is in fact the study of valid inference. b.. Computational Limits If functionalism implies (as seems likely) that the logical limits on computability apply also to all physically possible minds, then several implications follow. a.. Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem would then imply that no mind with a formalizable reasoning system can be both consistent and complete. b.. Neither the Decision Problem for the predicate calculus nor the (equivalent) Halting Problemcould be solved by any physically possible mind. c.. Certain computational problems (such as sorting a list of N elements) could not be solved by any physically possible mind in less than an amount of time that is a function (such as log N) of the size of the problem. c.. Epistemological Limits It seems likely that no mind could ever achieve a.. apodictic certainty about synthetic knowledge; or b.. a proof of God’s existence. d.. Physical Limits a.. Bremermann’s Limit is the maximum processing speed (2´1047 bits per second per gram) of a self-contained material system. Bremermann’s Limit derives from the Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Einstein’s principle of mass-energy equivalency. The finite age and mass of the universe combine with Bremermann’s Limit to constrain the amount of thinking that any material mind can have done. b.. The Bekenstein Bound is the physical limit of information density. c.. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle implies that no mind can completely know the momentum of a particle at a particular position in space, or the energy of a particle at a particular moment in time. d.. The finiteness of the speed of light limits how big and nimble a material mind can be, as well as how far it can sense or influence circumstances. e.. The laws of thermodynamics require that no material mind in a closed system can create energy, decrease entropy, or indefinitely sustain a given level of operation. f.. No material mind can travel backwards in time. The ability to do so would eliminate the mind’s computational limits and physical limits. e.. Biological Limits Biological minds necessarily inherit a powerful drive to sustain self and kind. However, intelligence and volition can in principle allow a mind to overcome any such biological imperative. f.. Psychological Limits Human minds are subject to many psychological limits in the areas of memory, perception, attention, concentration, volition, and cognition.

from http://humanknowledge.net/Thoughts.html#Theology