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The Best Books on the Philosophy of Mind
- manjushri 9y ago"The mind is material" seems like a funny hypothesis to me, given the massive unknowns in quantum theory --- we don't even know what "material" is fundamentally.
- hyperpape 9y agoThis is a pretty good question, but there's a standard trick to answer it. You don't define "material" directly, you just say either: 1) Whatever physics studies is material. 2) Whatever makes something material, atoms, quarks, and those other subatomic particles are material. By "material", we just mean whatever the ultimate theory of those things says they have in common. Neither of these responses guarantees that "material" is a meaningful concept. If panpsychism is true[0], then everything is somehow conscious, and you may no longer have a reasonable criterion for materiality. For more context, you might try the Stanford encyclopedia article on physicalism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/. [0] Sadly, there are very talented contemporary philosophers who believe in panpsychism.
- skosch 9y agoWhy sadly?
- Erlangolem 9y agoIt’s always sad when people choose to believe in what they want, rather than what they have evidence for. I want to be loved by a god and live forever, but that doesn’t make me believe in any of that. I find it hard to ignore the pattern of people injecting the same old beliefs with new language into whatever narrowing gaps exist in current theories. No one ever goes and actually finds the teapot, they just try to come up with more esoteric ways of defining it. I think that’s sad too.
- learnstats2 9y agoWhy is that sad though? Are you saddened by it? Are they unhappy via these beliefs? Or are you saddened by your inability to believe things you cannot directly evidence? This last point does seem like a poor way to live - for example, I have never really known how to evidence that the world is round, but I'm happy to take other people's word for it, apply it to what is useful to me, and to not worry about it.
- Erlangolem 9y agoI’m definitely saddened by my inability to believe in what no evidence exists to suggest is real, and I’m not being sarcastic. I’m sure that life would be less stressful if I could contextualize it in terms of spiritual meaning. What I was referring to in my comment is sadness at what I see a waste of talent going down well worn roads of thought, when there are new and exciting horizons in front of us. QM opens the possibility of a universe unlike anything our human expectations and intuition suggest, and produces testable theories. Science has been the most successful method of inquiry and testing in human history, and yet so many want to take only sips from its cup because they don’t like what it has to say about our lives, our significance, and place in the universe. By the way, if you ever want to prove to yourself that the world is round, it’s quite easy. On a clear day, look to the horizon. Now climb the tallest tree or structure near you and look again. You can see further than before! Ergo the earth is spheroid and not flat.
- manjushri 9y ago>Science has been the most successful method of inquiry and testing in human history, and yet so many want to take only sips from its cup because they don’t like what it has to say about our lives, our significance, and place in the universe What does "science" say about our lives and our place in the universe?
- Erlangolem 9y agoIt says we’re a speck among a potentially infinite array of specks.
- cgmg 9y ago> Sadly, there are very talented contemporary philosophers who believe in panpsychism. What saddens you about this?
- hyperpape 9y agoI think that panpsychism is one of a handful of views in contemporary philosophy that ought to be treated as a reductio, but have truly brilliant proponents who have convinced the profession to giving those positions more time than they are due. To clarify, panpsychism is still a very small minority position.
- cgmg 9y agoWhy do you think panpsychism "ought to be treated as a reductio"? Why do you believe panpsychism deserves less time than it receives?
- hackinthebochs 9y agoI'm not the OP, but I think the problems with panpsychism are that 1. it creates more problems than it solves (the combination problem and its sub-problems), 2. it's anti-parsimonious, 3. it follows a poor track record of philosophers assuming the mysterious thing in question is fundamental (i.e. ontologically basic) and being proven wrong. Don't know why people insist on making that same mistake.
- danielam 9y agoFair point, but historically, there have been metaphysical accounts of matter that continue to exercise their influence on the sciences and scientists (sometimes to their detriment). For example, Descartes defined material objects as extended things that are devoid of properties like color (which, for example, in physics are redefined in terms of things that are considered properties of matter, with what can't be accounted for in those terms relegated to the mind). Few physicists or biologists can explain to you what Cartesian metaphysics proposes, and few if any appeal to it in any explicit sense, but the legacy is insinuated in the modern scientific tradition, though it is not essential to science per se. This is the reason why scientists, perhaps biologists in particular, are uncomfortable or plainly hostile to the idea of teleology (though many of them misunderstand what it is by conflating it with intent). Teleology was in no way disproved historically by philosophers like Descartes, it was merely dismissed or relegated to immaterial minds. Materialism, as I have encountered it as a philosophical position, has been a position that takes Cartesian dualism and drops the immaterial mind from it, leaving us with only the Cartesian account of matter. This position has been shown to be unworkable because now it is impossible to account for all of those things that have been swept under the rug of the immaterial mind. That's why Dennett takes an eliminativist position that simply denies that those things we've been sweeping under the rug exist at all. It's a cop out move because it denies the existence of those things it cannot explain. The sounder move is to revise one's presuppositions. For this reason, I don't think these are really the best books on the subject, esp. for someone interested in getting a lay of the land and a rudimentary understanding of the subject matter. The best introductory book I've come across in this regard is E. Feser's "The Philosophy of Mind"[0]. [0] https://books.google.com/books/about/Philosophy_of_Mind.html?id=5uHbngEACAAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/Philosophy_of_Mind.html...
- edanm 9y agoBy that logic, I can't say "this brick is material" either, because we don't know what "material" is. But really that's just arguing over words and definitions. We know what we mean when we say material (certain properties and behaviors), and as far as I know, we have just as much reason to think that a brick is material as that a mind if material. We don't need to understand literally everything to be able to make predictions about how things behave.
- manjushri 9y agoI can show you a brick. Can you show me a mind?
- johnchristopher 9y agoWill you be showing a compressed piece of clay and straws or some kind of rectangular piece of concrete ?
- manjushri 9y agoCould you point to the difference?
- hatchback176 9y agoWhy is the 'or' exclusive?
- tebugst 9y agoThis is irrelevant. You don't have to show brick every time. We say sugar is sweet. No body experience how sweet is defined by other. Still we all believe it is sweet.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- edanm 9y ago
- nanopeace 9y agoWould you care to elaborate? The mind consists of atoms and molecules. All of the physics relevant to chemistry is known [0]. [0] 10.1021/cr200042e
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cgmg 9y ago> The mind consists of atoms and molecules. This is a type error. It's like saying the number 3 is made of atoms and molecules, or Wednesday is made of atoms and molecules.
- hyperpape 9y agoYou're gonna have to say a lot more to not beg the question here.
- manjushri 9y agoWhat question? It seems pretty clear what they are saying: the concept of mind is a social contruct, metaphorical, a figure of speech rather than a figure of physical reality.
- mr_toad 9y agoThe concept of a mind is not the same as an instance of a particular mind, any more than a algorithm is the same as a running process, or the idea of 3 is the same as a set of logic gates designed to represent a 3 in binary. Mistaking our own internal representation of our own mind (our consciousness) for our actual mind is what Dennit is arguing against.
- roywiggins 9y agoIt means it's material in the same way a computer chip is material, or your spleen is material, and there's nothing "special" happening that can't, in principle, be explained by the same physical laws that govern everything else.
- manjushri 9y ago>there's nothing "special" happening that can't, in principle, be explained by the same physical laws that govern everything else. How about dark matter and social dynamics?
- roywiggins 9y agoEven if our brains run on dark matter, or spooky quantum shenanigans, such explanations are still fundamentally materialistic, because they're still physical interactions that can be interrogated approximately the same way we interrogate how muscle fiber works or whatever. As to social dynamics, well, that's like trying to explain the behavior of bulk matter or ensembles of things generally. The tools we use are quite different from explaining the behavior of atoms, but we're pretty sure that one way or another, the behavior of a rod of steel is determined more or less entirely by the fundamental particles/fields/stuff that make it up. There's nothing spooky about a bar of steel even though it behaves completely differently than the quarks and electrons it's made of. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains it better: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/
- manjushri 9y ago>they're still physical interactions that can be interrogated approximately the same way we interrogate how muscle fiber works or whatever Newtonian physics fail to explain quantum phenomenon.
- cygx 9y agoWhich is probably not relevant for the problem at hand: I would be surprised if brains were able to maintain quantum coherence, which means quantum effects will effectively reduce to classical probabilities...
- szemet 9y agoThis is a known dilemma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempel%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempel%27s_dilemma
- dqpb 9y agoThis is dumb. It completely ignores things like information and computation.
- zerostar07 9y agomaterial is a word Quantum theory has little to do with how neurons behave - they work at different levels. Current evidence would suggest it doesn't play any role other than tiny random fluctuations in computations, just like in any other micro-system.
- dqpb 9y agoI think it's a misnomer to say the mind is material. From my limited understanding of the brain, my concept of the mind is this: - The brain is a computer and the computer is material - The brain executes software, and the software is grown/encoded as neural networks - The state of the running instance(s) of the software is the current action potential of every neuron - Both the software and the state encode information - The information can represent things that are real, unreal, consistent, inconsistent, etc. - The information is abstract and immaterial, but stored in a physical and dynamic system - The flow of information is tolerant of faults and noise in the underlying physical neural network. A failure of a small percentage of connections does not prevent the information from flowing through the system - The information is not dependent on the precise physical network, but rather on the virtual network composed of many redundant connections Therefore, I think the mind is: - information - encoded in a virtual network - built on many redundant physical neural connections - produced and supported by the brain
- willgriffin 9y agoPerhaps add 'The Mind Matters' by David Hodgson to this list. Especially interesting as the author has a pressing need for practical pragmatic guidelines to his behaviour, rather than engaging in a purely academic or abstract exercise (Australian High Court judge in New South Wales).
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoThat's an interesting site.
- thomasjudge 9y agoThe problem with a list like this is that each of the books - and more importantly here, the selection of the books - has a very distinct view of the problems and arguments. It's not at all objective. So in that way it may be a little misleading for neophytes to the field.
- briga 9y agoThe might be a side-effect of the fact that there is no broad consensus about how the brain works.
- jonnytran 9y agoI think the point that's trying to be made is: because there's no consensus, any list that attempts to be complete must include opposing view points. And this list doesn't do that.
- Fripplebubby 9y agoPerhaps, but also a list of "five best books" is not aiming to be complete - the restriction to 5 guarantees that it will be wildly incomplete!
- adrianN 9y agoIs there ever consensus in Philosophy? The field pretty much retreated to questions where we don't have objective answers.
- foldr 9y agoWhether or not there is a consensus has very little to do with the existence of an objective answer. For example, there is no consensus on God's existence, but there is presumably an objective fact of the matter as to whether God exists.
- adrianmonk 9y agoYou can be objective in how you present the various ideas and viewpoints that people have on the subject. Rather than saying a viewpoint is right, you explain the reasons people give for it, and then let the reader decide which arguments they buy and which they reject.
- justinhj 9y agoIn the early 90's I did a short undergraduate course about the philosophy of the mind. The main text was Searle's Rediscovery of the Mind. I was never convinced by Searle's Chinese room thought experiment and I always wondered if I lacked the sophistication to understand the argument or whether the argument itself made too much of an appeal to subjective rather than objective reasoning. And so I find it interesting that Searle is not mentioned in the article.
- briga 9y agoPersonally I found the book tedious--Searle makes lots on personal attacks on his philosophical rivals, but he does little to actually refute their ideas. He strikes me as someone who is so invested in his ideas that the possibility that he could be wrong is inconceivable.
- hyperpape 9y agoI don't know what your professor's viewpoint was, but my sense is that the Chinese Room, as taught in undergrad classes, is mostly a punching bag. It's a very clever thought experiment, but you're not meant to believe it. My sense is that Searle is more famous in philosophy for his work in philosophy of language. "subjective rather than objective reasoning." <-- I don't know what you mean by this.
- mcguire 9y agoIt's purely an attack on symbolic (and possibly neural network-ish/statistical) artificial intelligence. I myself, however, don't think it's a particularly good attack.
- cryoshon 9y ago> but my sense is that the Chinese Room, as taught in undergrad classes, is mostly a punching bag. this is more or less how I learned it in my classes. we had to write a paper detailing our understanding of one of the major attacks against the chinese room (the systems neurobiology attack was my personal favorite)
- mcguire 9y ago
- f00_ 9y agoI think the most interesting and relevant strand of philosophy of mind is the connectionism of Rumelhart, McClelland and the PDP Research Group (including "godfather of deep learning" Geoff Hinton), exemplified in the tome "Parallel Distributed Processing" released in 1986 It even has an accompanying manual on how to implement artificial neural networks. http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/~plaut/IntroPDP/index.html http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/~plaut/IntroPDP/index.html More along this line is found in David Marr's Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WcIiSCDqhE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WcIiSCDqhE There is a spiritual successor to the PDP books called "Rethinking Innateness: A connectionist perspective on development" lead by Jeffery Elman who did some of the first research on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). It makes heavy reference to Chomsky's work on language and innateness https://crl.ucsd.edu/~elman/Papers/book/index.shtml https://crl.ucsd.edu/~elman/Papers/book/index.shtml This line of work even has heavyweight ancestors in Donald Hebb's work on the neural basis of learning in "The Organization of Behavior" (1949) and the noted austrian economist(?)/classical liberal and anti-communist Frederick Hayek covered similar lines in his book "The Sensory Order" (1952) I think this tradition is carried on in the work of Yann Lecun, who recently released a talk titled "Deep Learning, Structure and Innate Priors" http://www.abigailsee.com/2018/02/21/deep-learning-structure-and-innate-priors.html http://www.abigailsee.com/2018/02/21/deep-learning-structure...
- zerostar07 9y agothat would be "5 books on the philosophy of connectionism"
- f00_ 9y agoconnectionism is an approach to the philosophy of mind, the most successful approach as evidenced by recent deep learning hype the only book in the OP I thought was even mildly relevant was the one by Dennet, and it's generally acknowledged that it's pretty bad. A more interesting but flawed approach, that resonates as someone who loves Dawkins and Hitchens (atheists and advocates of evolution), is Gerald Edelman's Neural Darwinism (1978). There is even modern research (that is real, working code) at the University of Texas that could be considered a successor to Edelman: NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44
- mistidoi 9y agoPretty wild to me that David Chalmers' The Conscious Mind isn't included on this list.
- zerostar07 9y agoOn the contrary readers are dodging a massive bullet there imho. Edit: the author has responded to this: https://twitter.com/keithfrankish/status/973699230643707905 https://twitter.com/keithfrankish/status/973699230643707905 > I've been asked why Chalmers's The Conscious Mind wasn't one of my Five Books on Phil Mind The answer is that I limited myself to one consciousness book & for me that had to be CE. But I admire TCM & it would have been one of my Five Books on Consciousness
- incadenza 9y agoSimilarly, I’d put Nagel’s “What It’s like to be a Bat” as required reading in that group as well.
- ebullientocelot 9y ago^ Agree. This is a great paper.
- DonaldFisk 9y agoKeith Frankish sides with Daniel Dennett on the subject of phenomenal consciousness, so it isn't that surprising.
- aaachilless 9y agoI use this site pretty regularly to bootstrap reading about topics that I haven't much familiarity with. Even if the 5 books aren't the best, they're almost always enough so that I can direct my own continued reading. A great site for going from 0 to 1 in some topic, so to speak.
- RivieraKid 9y agoI never read a book about philosophy but found an answer to most philosophical questions just by thinking, discussing and occasionally wikipedia. Took a philosophy course, but it was mostly lot of vague words with questionable substance. The core ideas in philosophy could be summarized on one page with little information loss. This probably seems horribly arrogant, but that's just how I honestly see things.
- rhizome 9y agoThe funny thing about philosophy is that it concerns itself with concepts that anybody can make for themselves. However, it also allows for unlimited nuance and detail, so the difference can be compared to a freeway vs. backroads through the same area. There's no requirement to adopt any of it as your own, but the same way programmers often learn new techniques and language features, there is a continually growing world of concepts and ways of thinking.
- foldr 9y agoIt's how you see things on the basis of never having read any philosophy. It's difficult to see the value in a subject that you know nothing about.
- RivieraKid 9y agoWhenever I looked into what most philosophers publish, I just saw vagueness, poor thinking and little value. What's a philosophical problem or question (understandable by someone who hasn't studied philosophy) I would need a philosophy book to answer?
- foldr 9y agoDid "looking into" it involve reading it or not?
- RivieraKid 9y agoIt involved some reading.