Mind and Body Phil 336

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Mind-Body Essay Assignment

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Mind-Body Essay Assignment Now that you have successfully read and analyzed the arguments surrounding the mind/body problem, you are now ready to bring everything you have learned together in a short essay. The purpose of the Week 6 Essay Assignment is to give you an opportunity to demonstrate your analytical abilities using the knowledge you have gained over the last four weeks:. For this essay, you don’t need to conduct any “research” in the library or on the Internet . Everything you need to know to complete this essay is already in this course. Technical requirements of the Mind-Body Essay Assignment: · 4-5 pages 1000-1250 words (more is ok, less is not) · Submit a Microsoft x (not .pages or ) · Double Spaced, 12pt Times New Roman font, 1” right and left margins The purpose of the Mind-Body Essay Assignment: · To give you experience closely analyzing a philosophical problem that we have been studying · To give you experience synthesizing the ideas and arguments we have been studying into a cohesive argument · To demonstrate that you can accurately summarize, describe or paraphrase the ideas and arguments we have been studying In your essay, address the following philosophical question(s) analytically: Is the human mind only physical? How this essay will be graded Clearly, there are many “answers” to this question as you have discovered over the last weeks. But for the purposes of this course, your “answer” is less important than demonstrating (1) that you understand and can accurately describe the philosophical problem, including coherently addressing counterarguments to your position (2) that you can break down the philosophical problem into relevant parts and connect these parts coherently, and (3) that you can integrate relevant ideas and arguments from the course readings into a cohesive position. In other words, your grade for this essay will depend on how well you do analytical philosophy, and not whether you think you got the “right” answer. Structure your essay like any other college essay, with an introduction that outlines your position and an argumentative thesis statement, a body consisting of three or four sections discussing the arguments and counterarguments that favor and don’t favor your position, then a conclusion that summarizes your position and offers a larger context for the issue. In addition, at the beginning of your essay in the introduction, spend at least a paragraph defining the key technical/philosophical terms that you will be using in your essay. Assume your reader is new to the question and to the philosophical issue. Your essay should have the following basic structure: 1. Introduction · Describe the philosophical problem as accurately as possible · Include a clear argumentative thesis statement · Define key technical/philosophical terms that you will use in the essay 2. Body · Demonstrate in an organized fashion the strength/validity of each the arguments that favor your view · Address in an organized fashion each of the counter arguments that don’t favor your view 3. Conclusion · Summarize your position and why the arguments favor your view · Offer a larger context in which your position is helpful to understand Remember to use analogies, metaphors, examples, and other tools of reasoning in order to explain what you mean. Cite only the readings or supplemental resources provided in this course for weeks 3-6. No external internet resources are allowed that are not part of the required reading lists or supplemental resources. You may use your conclusions from the Week 4 Aristotle and Descartes Textual Analysis assignment. Three Key Expectations of the Mind-Body Essay Assignment: · Present the philosophical problem accurately and precisely; address counterarguments seriously. · Break down the problem into relevant parts · Integrate relevant ideas and arguments from the course resources coherently

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Mind-Body Essay Assignment Rubric
Course: PHIL 336 6380 Ideas Shaping the 21st Century (2228)

Criteria Excellent Good
Needs
Improvement

Poor Criterion Score

Ideas
/ 4040 points

The essay

contains a

highly accurate

and precise

description of

the issue or

problem, along

with a careful

consideration

possible

alternatives or

solutions.

The

essay contains

relevant

examples, and

indicates the

salient issues

the examples

highlight.

30 points

The

description of

the problem or

issue is fairly

accurate and

precise, and

possible

alternatives or

solutions are

considered.

Examples are

given, but

similar

examples may

have been

better.

20 points

The

description of

the problem or

issue is fairly

accurate but

not precise,

and possible

alternatives or

solutions are

either

not

considered, or

ill-described.

Examples are

given, but it is

not made clear

how they are

relevant.

10 points

The

description of

the problem or

issue is

inaccurate, and

possible

alternatives or

solutions are

not

considered,

and examples

are not

provided.

9/15/22, 3:07 PM Mind-Body Essay Assignment – PHIL 336 6380 Ideas Shaping the 21st Century (2228) – UMGC Learning Management System

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Total / 100

Criteria Excellent Good
Needs
Improvement

Poor Criterion Score

Analysis
/ 30

Synthesis
/ 30

30 points

The paper

successfully

breaks the

argument,

issue, or

problem into

relevant parts.

The

connections

between the

parts are clear

and highly

accurate.

22.5 points

The paper

successfully

breaks the

argument,

issue, or

problem into

relevant parts.

The

connections

between the

parts are fairly

accurate.

15 points

The paper

breaks the

argument,

issue, or

problem into

parts, but

some parts

may be missing

unclear.

The

connections

between the

parts are

somewhat

accurate.

7.5 points

The parts

identified are

not the correct

and/or

relevant ones.

The

connections

between the

parts are

completely

inaccurate.

30 points

The paper

successfully

integrates all

relevant parts

from various

places in the

learning

materials into a

coherent

whole. The

connections

between the

parts are clear

and insightful.

22.5 points

The paper

integrates

most relevant

parts from

various places

into a mostly

coherent

whole. The

connections

between the

parts are

generally

clear.

15 points

The paper

integrates

some parts

from various

places into a

somewhat

coherent

whole. The

connections

between the

parts are

somewhat

unclear.

7.5 points

The parts to be

integrated are

not clear

and/or

relevant. The

connections

between the

parts are

unclear.

9/15/22, 3:07 PM Mind-Body Essay Assignment – PHIL 336 6380 Ideas Shaping the 21st Century (2228) – UMGC Learning Management System

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Overall Score

Exemplary
90 points minimum

Proficient
80 points minimum

Emerging
70 points minimum

Minimal
60 points minimum

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9/15/22, 2:54 PM Descartes, the 2nd Meditation, Parts 1-16. – PHIL 336 6380 Ideas Shaping the 21st Century (2228)

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Rene Descartes, The Second Meditation,

OF THE NATURE OF THE HUMAN MIND; AND THAT IT IS MORE EASILY KNOWN THAN THE
BODY.

1. The Meditation of yesterday has filled my mind with so many doubts, that it is no longer in my power
to forget them. Nor do I see, meanwhile, any principle on which they can be resolved; and, just as if I
had fallen all of a sudden into very deep water, I am so greatly disconcerted as to be unable either to
plant my feet firmly on the bottom or sustain myself by swimming on the surface. I will, nevertheless,
make an effort, and try anew the same path on which I had entered yesterday, that is, proceed by
casting aside all that admits of the slightest doubt, not less than if I had discovered it to be absolutely
false; and I will continue always in this track until I shall find something that is certain, or at least, if I
can do nothing more, until I shall know with certainty that there is nothing certain. Archimedes, that he
might transport the entire globe from the place it occupied to another, demanded only a point that was
firm and immovable; so, also, I shall be entitled to entertain the highest expectations, if I am fortunate
enough to discover only one thing that is certain and indubitable.

2. I suppose, accordingly, that all the things which I see are false (fictitious); I believe that none of
those objects which my fallacious memory represents ever existed; I suppose that I possess no
senses; I believe that body, figure, extension, motion, and place are merely fictions of my mind. What
is there, then, that can be esteemed true ? Perhaps this only, that there is absolutely nothing certain.

3. But how do I know that there is not something different altogether from the objects I have now
enumerated, of which it is impossible to entertain the slightest doubt? Is there not a God, or some
being, by whatever name I may designate him, who causes these thoughts to arise in my mind ? But
why suppose such a being, for it may be I myself am capable of producing them? Am I, then, at least
not something? But I before denied that I possessed senses or a body; I hesitate, however, for what
follows from that? Am I so dependent on the body and the senses that without these I cannot exist?
But I had the persuasion that there was absolutely nothing in the world, that there was no sky and no
earth, neither minds nor bodies; was I not, therefore, at the same time, persuaded that I did not exist?
Far from it; I assuredly existed, since I was persuaded. But there is I know not what being, who is
possessed at once of the highest power and the deepest cunning, who is constantly employing all his
ingenuity in deceiving me. Doubtless, then, I exist, since I am deceived; and, let him deceive me as he
may, he can never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I shall be conscious that I am
something. So that it must, in fine, be maintained, all things being maturely and carefully considered,
that this proposition (pronunciatum ) I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time it is expressed by me,
or conceived in my mind.

4. But I do not yet know with sufficient clearness what I am, though assured that I am; and hence, in
the next place, I must take care, lest perchance I inconsiderately substitute some other object in room
of what is properly myself, and thus wander from truth, even in that knowledge ( cognition ) which I
hold to be of all others the most certain and evident. For this reason, I will now consider anew what I
formerly believed myself to be, before I entered on the present train of thought; and of my previous
opinion I will retrench all that can in the least be invalidated by the grounds of doubt I have adduced,
in order that there may at length remain nothing but what is certain and indubitable.

5. What then did I formerly think I was ? Undoubtedly I judged that I was a man. But what is a man
? Shall I say a rational animal ? Assuredly not; for it would be necessary forthwith to inquire into what
is meant by animal, and what by rational, and thus, from a single question, I should insensibly glide
into others, and these more difficult than the first; nor do I now possess enough of leisure to warrant
me in wasting my time amid subtleties of this sort. I prefer here to attend to the thoughts that sprung
up of themselves in my mind, and were inspired by my own nature alone, when I applied myself to the
consideration of what I was. In the first place, then, I thought that I possessed a countenance, hands,
arms, and all the fabric of members that appears in a corpse, and which I called by the name of body.

9/15/22, 2:54 PM Descartes, the 2nd Meditation, Parts 1-16. – PHIL 336 6380 Ideas Shaping the 21st Century (2228)

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It further occurred to me that I was nourished, that I walked, perceived, and thought, and all those
actions I referred to the soul; but what the soul itself was I either did not stay to consider, or, if I did, I
imagined that it was something extremely rare and subtile, like wind, or flame, or ether, spread
through my grosser parts. As regarded the body, I did not even doubt of its nature, but thought I
distinctly knew it, and if I had wished to describe it according to the notions I then entertained, I should
have explained myself in this manner: By body I understand all that can be terminated by a certain
figure; that can be comprised in a certain place, and so fill a certain space as therefrom to exclude
every other body; that can be perceived either by touch, sight, hearing, taste, or smell; that can be
moved in different ways, not indeed of itself, but by something foreign to it by which it is touched [and
from which it receives the impression]; for the power of self-motion, as likewise that of perceiving and
thinking, I held as by no means pertaining to the nature of body; on the contrary, I was somewhat
astonished to find such faculties existing in some bodies.

6. But [as to myself, what can I now say that I am], since I suppose there exists an extremely powerful,
and, if I may so speak, malignant being, whose whole endeavors are directed toward deceiving me
? Can I affirm that I possess any one of all those attributes of which I have lately spoken as belonging
to the nature of body ? After attentively considering them in my own mind, I find none of them that can
properly be said to belong to myself. To recount them were idle and tedious. Let us pass, then, to the
attributes of the soul. The first mentioned were the powers of nutrition and walking; but, if it be true
that I have no body, it is true likewise that I am capable neither of walking nor of being nourished.
Perception is another attribute of the soul; but perception too is impossible without the body; besides, I
have frequently, during sleep, believed that I perceived objects which I afterward observed I did not in
reality perceive. Thinking is another attribute of the soul; and here I discover what properly belongs to
myself. This alone is inseparable from me. I am–I exist: this is certain; but how often? As often as I
think; for perhaps it would even happen, if I should wholly cease to think, that I should at the same
time altogether cease to be. I now admit nothing that is not necessarily true. I am therefore, precisely
speaking, only a thinking thing, that is, a mind (mens sive animus), understanding, or reason, terms
whose signification was before unknown to me. I am, however, a real thing, and really existent; but
what thing? The answer was, a thinking thing.

7. The question now arises, am I aught besides ? I will stimulate my imagination with a view to
discover whether I am not still something more than a thinking being. Now it is plain I am not the
assemblage of members called the human body; I am not a thin and penetrating air diffused through
all these members, or wind, or flame, or vapor, or breath, or any of all the things I can imagine; for I
supposed that all these were not, and, without changing the supposition, I find that I still feel assured
of my existence. But it is true, perhaps, that those very things which I suppose to be non-existent,
because they are unknown to me, are not in truth different from myself whom I know. This is a point I
cannot determine, and do not now enter into any dispute regarding it. I can only judge of things that
are known to me: I am conscious that I exist, and I who know that I exist inquire into what I am. It is,
however, perfectly certain that the knowledge of my existence, thus precisely taken, is not dependent
on things, the existence of which is as yet unknown to me: and consequently it is not dependent on
any of the things I can feign in imagination. Moreover, the phrase itself, I frame an image (efffingo),
reminds me of my error; for I should in truth frame one if I were to imagine myself to be anything, since
to imagine is nothing more than to contemplate the figure or image of a corporeal thing; but I already
know that I exist, and that it is possible at the same time that all those images, and in general all that
relates to the nature of body, are merely dreams [or chimeras]. From this I discover that it is not more
reasonable to say, I will excite my imagination that I may know more distinctly what I am, than to
express myself as follows: I am now awake, and perceive something real; but because my perception
is not sufficiently clear, I will of express purpose go to sleep that my dreams may represent to me the
object of my perception with more truth and clearness. And, therefore, I know that nothing of all that I
can embrace in imagination belongs to the knowledge which I have of myself, and that there is need
to recall with the utmost care the mind from this mode of thinking, that it may be able to know its own
nature with perfect distinctness.

9/15/22, 2:54 PM Descartes, the 2nd Meditation, Parts 1-16. – PHIL 336 6380 Ideas Shaping the 21st Century (2228)

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8. But what, then, am I ? A thinking thing, it has been said. But what is a thinking thing? It is a thing
that doubts, understands, [conceives], affirms, denies, wills, refuses; that imagines also, and
perceives.

9. Assuredly it is not little, if all these properties belong to my nature. But why should they not belong
to it ? Am I not that very being who now doubts of almost everything; who, for all that, understands
and conceives certain things; who affirms one alone as true, and denies the others; who desires to
know more of them, and does not wish to be deceived; who imagines many things, sometimes even
despite his will; and is likewise percipient of many, as if through the medium of the senses. Is there
nothing of all this as true as that I am, even although I should be always dreaming, and although he
who gave me being employed all his ingenuity to deceive me ? Is there also any one of these
attributes that can be properly distinguished from my thought, or that can be said to be separate
from myself ? For it is of itself so evident that it is I who doubt, I who understand, and I who desire,
that it is here unnecessary to add anything by way of rendering it more clear. And I am as certainly the
same being who imagines; for although it may be (as I before supposed) that nothing I imagine is true,
still the power of imagination does not cease really to exist in me and to form part of my thought. In
fine, I am the same being who perceives, that is, who apprehends certain objects as by the organs of
sense, since, in truth, I see light, hear a noise, and feel heat. But it will be said that these
presentations are false, and that I am dreaming. Let it be so. At all events it is certain that I seem to
see light, hear a noise, and feel heat; this cannot be false, and this is what in me is properly called
perceiving (sentire), which is nothing else than thinking.

10. From this I begin to know what I am with somewhat greater clearness and distinctness than
heretofore. But, nevertheless, it still seems to me, and I cannot help believing, that corporeal things,
whose images are formed by thought [which fall under the senses], and are examined by the same,
are known with much greater distinctness than that I know not what part of myself which is not
imaginable; although, in truth, it may seem strange to say that I know and comprehend with greater
distinctness things whose existence appears to me doubtful, that are unknown, and do not belong to
me, than others of whose reality I am persuaded, that are known to me, and appertain to my proper
nature; in a word, than myself. But I see clearly what is the state of the case. My mind is apt
to wander, and will not yet submit to be restrained within the limits of truth. Let us therefore leave the
mind to itself once more, and, according to it every kind of liberty [permit it to consider the objects that
appear to it from without], in order that, having afterward withdrawn it from these gently and
opportunely [ and fixed it on the consideration of its being and the properties it finds in itself], it may
then be the more easily controlled.

11. Let us now accordingly consider the objects that are commonly thought to be [the most easily, and
likewise] the most distinctly known, viz, the bodies we touch and see; not, indeed, bodies in general,
for these general notions are usually somewhat more confused, but one body in particular. Take, for
example, this piece of wax; it is quite fresh, having been but recently taken from the beehive; it has not
yet lost the sweetness of the honey it contained; it still retains somewhat of the odor of the flowers
from which it was gathered; its color, figure, size, are apparent ( to the sight ); it is hard, cold, easily
handled; and sounds when struck upon with the finger. In fine, all that contributes to make a body as
distinctly known as possible, is found in the one before us. But, while I am speaking, let it be placed
near the fire–what remained of the taste exhales, the smell evaporates, the color changes, its figure is
destroyed, its size increases, it becomes liquid, it grows hot, it can hardly be handled, and, although
struck upon, it emits no sound. Does the same wax still remain after this change ? It must be admitted
that it does remain; no one doubts it, or judges otherwise. What, then, was it I knew with so much
distinctness in the piece of wax? Assuredly, it could be nothing of all that I observed by means of the
senses, since all the things that fell under taste, smell, sight, touch, and hearing are changed, and yet
the same wax remains.

12. It was perhaps what I now think, viz, that this wax was neither the sweetness of honey, the
pleasant odor of flowers, the whiteness, the figure, nor the sound, but only a body that a little before

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appeared to me conspicuous under these forms, and which is now perceived under others. But, to
speak precisely, what is it that I imagine when I think of it in this way? Let it be attentively considered,
and, retrenching all that does not belong to the wax, let us see what remains. There certainly remains
nothing, except something extended, flexible, and movable. But what is meant by flexible and movable
? Is it not that I imagine that the piece of wax, being round, is capable of becoming square, or of
passing from a square into a triangular figure ? Assuredly such is not the case, because I conceive
that it admits of an infinity of similar changes; and I am, moreover, unable to compass this infinity by
imagination, and consequently this conception which I have of the wax is not the product of the faculty
of imagination. But what now is this extension ? Is it not also unknown ? for it becomes greater when
the wax is melted, greater when it is boiled, and greater still when the heat increases; and I should not
conceive [clearly and] according to truth, the wax as it is, if I did not suppose that the piece we are
considering admitted even of a wider variety of extension than I ever imagined, I must, therefore,
admit that I cannot even comprehend by imagination what the piece of wax is, and that it is the mind
alone ( mens, Lat., entendement, F.) which perceives it. I speak of one piece in particular; for as to
wax in general, this is still more evident. But what is the piece of wax that can be perceived only by the
[understanding or] mind? It is certainly the same which I see, touch, imagine; and, in fine, it is the
same which, from the beginning, I believed it to be. But (and this it is of moment to observe) the
perception of it is neither an act of sight, of touch, nor of imagination, and never was either of these,
though it might formerly seem so, but is simply an intuition (inspectio) of the mind, which may be
imperfect and confused, as it formerly was, or very clear and distinct, as it is at present, according as
the attention is more or less directed to the elements which it contains, and of which it is composed.

13. But, meanwhile, I feel greatly astonished when I observe [the weakness of my mind, and] its
proneness to error. For although, without at all giving expression to what I think, I consider all this in
my own mind, words yet occasionally impede my progress, and I am almost led into error by the terms
of ordinary language. We say, for example, that we see the same wax when it is before us, and not
that we judge it to be the same from its retaining the same color and figure: whence I should forthwith
be disposed to conclude that the wax is known by the act of sight, and not by the intuition of the mind
alone, were it not for the analogous instance of human beings passing on in the street below, as
observed from a window. In this case I do not fail to say that I see the men themselves, just as I say
that I see the wax; and yet what do I see from the window beyond hats and cloaks that might cover
artificial machines, whose motions might be determined by springs ? But I judge that there are human
beings from these appearances, and thus I comprehend, by the faculty of judgment alone which is in
the mind, what I believed I saw with my eyes.

14. The man who makes it his aim to rise to knowledge superior to the common, ought to be ashamed
to seek occasions of doubting from the vulgar forms of speech: instead, therefore, of doing this, I shall
proceed with the matter in hand, and inquire whether I had a clearer and more perfect perception of
the piece of wax when I first saw it, and when I thought I knew it by means of the external sense itself,
or, at all events, by the common sense (sensus communis), as it is called, that is, by the imaginative
faculty; or whether I rather apprehend it more clearly at present, after having examined with greater
care, both what it is, and in what way it can be known. It would certainly be ridiculous to entertain any
doubt on this point. For what, in that first perception, was there distinct ? What did I perceive which
any animal might not have perceived ? But when I distinguish the wax from its exterior forms, and
when, as if I had stripped it of its vestments, I consider it quite naked, it is certain, although some error
may still be found in my judgment, that I cannot, nevertheless, thus apprehend it without possessing a
human mind.

15. But finally, what shall I say of the mind itself, that is, of myself ? for as yet I do not admit that I am
anything but mind. What, then! I who seem to possess so distinct an apprehension of the piece of
wax, do I not know myself, both with greater truth and certitude, and also much more distinctly and
clearly? For if I judge that the wax exists because I see it, it assuredly follows, much more evidently,
that I myself am or exist, for the same reason: for it is possible that what I see may not in truth be wax,
and that I do not even possess eyes with which to see anything; but it cannot be that when I see, or,

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which comes to the same thing, when I think I see, I myself who think am nothing. So likewise, if I
judge that the wax exists because I touch it, it will still also follow that I am; and if I determine that my
imagination, or any other cause, whatever it be, persuades me of the existence of the wax, I will still
draw the same conclusion. And what is here remarked of the piece of wax, is applicable to all the
other things that are external to me. And further, if the [notion or] perception of wax appeared to me
more precise and distinct, after that not only sight and touch, but many other causes besides,
rendered it manifest to my apprehension, with how much greater distinctness must I now know myself,
since all the reasons that contribute to the knowledge of the nature of wax, or of any body whatever,
manifest still better the nature of my mind ? And there are besides so many other things in the mind
itself that contribute to the illustration of its nature, that those dependent on the body, to which I have
here referred, scarcely merit to be taken into account.

16. But, in conclusion, I find I have insensibly reverted to the point I desired; for, since it is now
manifest to me that bodies themselves are not properly perceived by the senses nor by the faculty of
imagination, but by the intellect alone; and since they are not perceived because they are seen and
touched, but only because they are understood [ or rightly comprehended by thought ], I readily
discover that there is nothing more easily or clearly apprehended than my own mind. But because it is
difficult to rid one’s self so promptly of an opinion to which one has been long accustomed, it will be
desirable to tarry for some time at this stage, that, by long continued meditation, I may more deeply
impress upon my memory this new knowledge.

READING 1

A catalog of conscious
experiences

David J. Chalmers

Source: Chalmers, David J. (1996) The Conscious Mind, Oxford, Oxford University

Press, pp.6–11. Used by permission of Oxford University Press Inc.

1 Conscious experience can be fascinating to attend to. Experience comes
in an enormous number of varieties, each with its own character. A far-from-
complete catalog of the aspects of conscious experience is given in the
following pretheoretical, impressionistic list. Nothing here should be taken
too seriously as philosophy, but it should help focus attention on the subject
matter at hand.

2 Visual experiences. Among the many varieties of visual experience, color
sensations stand out as the paradigmexamples of conscious experience, due to
their pure, seemingly ineffable qualitative nature. Some color experiences can
seem particularly striking, and so can be particularly good at focusing our
attention on themystery of consciousness. Inmy environment now, there is a
particularly rich shade of deep purple from a book on my shelf; an almost
surreal shade of green in a photograph of ferns on my wall; and a sparkling
array of bright red, green, orange, andblue lights on aChristmas tree that I can
see throughmywindow.But any color canbe awe-provoking ifwe attend to it,
and reflect upon its nature.Why should it feel like that?Why should it feel like
anything at all? How could I possibly convey the nature of this color
experience to someone who has not had such an experience?

3 Other aspects of visual experience include the experience of shape, of
size, of brightness, and of darkness. A particularly subtle aspect is the
experience of depth. As a child, one of my eyes had excellent vision, but the
other was very poor. Because of my one good eye, the world looked crisp and
sharp, and it certainly seemed three-dimensional. One day, I was fitted with
glasses, and the changewas remarkable.Theworldwasnotmuch sharper than
before, but it suddenly lookedmore three-dimensional: things that had depth

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before somehow got deeper, and the world seemed a richer place. If you cover
one eye and then uncover it, you can get an idea of the change. Inmy previous
state, I would have said that there was no way for the depth of my vision to
improve; the world already seemed as three-dimensional as it could be. The
change was subtle, almost ineffable, but extremely striking. Certainly there is
an intellectual story one can tell about howbinocular vision allows information
from each eye to be consolidated into information about distances, thus
enabling more sophisticated control of action, but somehow this causal story
does not reveal the way the experience felt. Why that change in processing
should be accompanied by such a remaking of my experience was mysterious
to me as a ten-year-old, and is still a source of wonder today.

4 Auditory experiences. In some ways, sounds are even stranger than visual
images. The structure of images usually corresponds to the structure of the
world in a straightforward way, but sounds can seem quite independent. My
telephone receives an incoming call, an internal device vibrates, a complex
wave is set up in the air and eventually reaches my eardrum, and somehow,
almost magically, I hear a ring. Nothing about the quality of the ring seems to
correspond directly to any structure in the world, although I certainly know
that it originated with the speaker, and that it is determined by a waveform.
But why should that waveform, or even these neural firings, have given rise to
a sound quality like that?

5 Musical experience is perhaps the richest aspect of auditory experience,
although the experience of speechmust be close.Music is capable of washing
over and completely absorbing us, surrounding us in a way that a visual field
can surround us but in which auditory experiences usually do not. One can
analyze aspects ofmusical experience by breaking the soundswe perceive into
notes and tones with complex interrelationships, but the experience of music
somehow goes beyond this. A unified qualitative experience arises from a
chord, but not from randomly selected notes. An old piano and a far-off oboe
can combine to produce an unexpectedly haunting experience. As always,
when we reflect, we ask the question: why should that feel like this?

6 Tactile experiences.Texturesprovide another of the richest quality spaces
that we experience: think of the feel of velvet, and contrast it to the texture of
cold metal, or a clammy hand, or a stubbly chin. All of these have their own
unique quality.The tactile experiences ofwater, of cotton candy, or of another
person’s lips are different again.

READING 1 A CATALOG OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCES 183

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7 Olfactory experiences. Think of the musty smell of an old wardrobe, the
stench of rotting garbage, the whiff of newly mown grass, the warm aroma of
freshly baked bread. Smell is in some ways the most mysterious of all the
senses, due to the rich, intangible, indescribable nature of smell sensations.
Ackermann (1990) calls it ‘the mute sense; the one without words’. While
there is something ineffable about any sensation, the other senses have
properties that facilitate some description. Visual and auditory experiences
have a complex combinatorial structure that can be described. Tactile and
taste experiences generally arise from direct contact with some object, and a
rich descriptive vocabulary has been built up by reference to these objects.
Smell has little in the way of apparent structure, and often floats free of any
apparent object, remaining a primitive presence in our sensory manifold.
(Perhaps animals might do better [Figure 1].) The primitiveness is perhaps
partly due to the slot-and-key process by which our olfactory receptors are
sensitive to various kinds of molecules. It seems arbitrary that a given sort of
molecule should give rise to this sort of sensation, but give rise it does.

8 Taste experiences. Psychophysical investigations tell us that there are only
four independent dimensions of taste perception: sweet, sour, bitter, and salt.
But this four-dimensional space combineswithour sense of smell toproduce a
great variety of possible experiences: the taste of Turkish Delight, of curried
black-eyed pea salad, of a peppermint Lifesaver, of a ripe peach.

Figure 1 Effability and ineffability in olfactory experience. (Calvin and Hobbes # Watterson. Distributed by
Universal Press Syndicate. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.)

184 CONSCIOUSNESS

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9 Experiences of hot and cold. An oppressively hot, humid day and a frosty
winter’s day produce strikingly different qualitative experiences. Think also
of the heat sensations on one’s skin from being close to a fire, and the hot-cold
sensation that one gets from touching ultracold ice.

10 Pain. Pain is a paradigm example of conscious experience, beloved by
philosophers. Perhaps this is because pains form a very distinctive class of
qualitative experiences, and are difficult to map directly onto any structure in
the world or in the body, although they are usually associated with some part
of the body. Because of this, pains can seem even more subjective than most
sensory experiences. There are a great variety of pain experiences, from
shooting pains and fierce burns through sharp pricks to dull aches.

11 Other bodily sensations. Pains are only themost salient kind of sensations
associatedwith particular parts of the body. Others include headaches (which
are perhaps a class of pain), hunger pangs, itches, tickles, and the experience
associated with the need to urinate. Many bodily sensations have an entirely
unique quality, different in kind fromanything else in our experience: think of
orgasms, or the feeling of hitting one’s funny bone.There are also experiences
associated with proprioception, the sense of where one’s body is in space.

12 Mental imagery. Moving ever inward, toward experiences that are not
associated with particular objects in the environment or the body but that are
in some sense generated internally, we come tomental images.There is often a
rich phenomenology associated with visual images conjured up in one’s
imagination, though not nearly as detailed as those derived from direct visual
perception. There are also the interesting colored patterns that one gets when
one closes one’s eyes and squints, and the strong after-images that one gets
after looking at something bright. One can have similar kinds of auditory
‘images’ conjured up by one’s imagination, and even tactile, olfactory, and
gustatory images, although these are harder to pin down and their associated
qualitative feel is usually fainter.

13 Conscious thought. Some of the things we think and believe do not have
any particular qualitative feel associatedwith them, butmany do.This applies
particularly to explicit, occurrent thoughts that one thinks to oneself, and to
various thoughts that affect one’s stream of consciousness. It is often hard to
pin down just what the qualitative feel of an occurrent thought is, but it is
certainly there. There is something it is like to be having such thoughts.

READING 1 A CATALOG OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCES 185

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14 When I think of a lion, for instance, there seems to be a whiff of leonine
quality to my phenomenology: what it is like to think of a lion is subtly
different from what it is like to think of the Eiffel tower. More obviously,
cognitive attitudes such as desire often have a strong phenomenal flavor.
Desire seems to exert a phenomenological ‘tug’, and memory often has a
qualitative component, as with the experience of nostalgia or regret.

15 Emotions. Emotions often have distinctive experiences associated with
them. The sparkle of a happy mood, the weariness of a deep depression, the
red-hot glow of a rush of anger, themelancholy of regret: all of these can affect
conscious experience profoundly, although in a much less specific way than
localized experiences such as sensations.These emotions pervade andcolor all
of our conscious experiences while they last.

16 Other more transient feelings lie partway between emotions and the
more obviously cognitive aspects of mind. Think of the rush of pleasure one
feels when one gets a joke. Another example is the feeling of tension one gets
when watching a suspense movie, or when waiting for an important event.
Thebutterflies in one’s stomach that can accompanynervousness also fall into
this class.

17 The sense of self. One sometimes feels that there is something to
conscious experience that transcends all these specific elements: a kind of
backgroundhum, for instance, that is somehow fundamental to consciousness
and that is there even when the other components are not. This
phenomenology of self is so deep and intangible that it sometimes seems
illusory, consisting in nothing over and above specific elements such as those
listed above. Still, there seems to be something to the phenomenology of self,
even if it is very hard to pin down.

18 This catalog covers a number of bases, but leaves out as much as it puts
in. I have said nothing, for instance, about dreams, arousal and fatigue,
intoxication, or the novel character of other drug-induced experiences.There
are also rich experiences that derive their character from the combination of
two or many of the components described above. I have mentioned the
combined effects of smell and taste, but an equally salient example is the
combined experience of music and emotion, which interact in a subtle,
difficult-to-separate way. I have also left aside the unity of conscious
experience – the way that all of these experiences seem to be tied together as
the experience of a single experiencer. Like the sense of self, this unity

186 CONSCIOUSNESS

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sometimes seems illusory – it is certainly harder to pin down than any specific
experiences – but there is a strong intuition that unity is there.

References

ACKERMAN, D. (1990) A Natural History of the Senses, New York, Random
House.

READING 1 A CATALOG OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCES 187

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ANTIMATERIALISM ABOUT
THE MIND

Introduction

At the very end of his fine book Philosophy of Mind, pub-
lished in 2006, the distinguished American philosopher
Jaegwon Kim writes that the “limit of physicalism” is qua-
lia. Physicalism can be defended, he thinks, for everything
except qualia. Qualia cannot, like everything else mental,
such as intention, be functionally defined, Kim thinks, and
qualia cannot be reduced to anything physical; nor can they
be defined at all. Yet Kim is still a proponent of a natural-
istic worldview, a worldview that includes mind. How can
this be? He writes in Physicalism, or Something Near Enough,
that “physicalism is not the truth, but it is the truth near
enough, and near enough ought to be good enough.”1 This
is stylistically good stuff and a good way to end a book, but
it simply will not do from a philosophical point of view.

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84 Chapter 4

Over here is a worldview, physicalism, which claims that
everything is physical. Over there is a clear case, according
to Kim himself, of something nonphysical, with a probably
potentially infinite number of instances: all the colors, all
the sounds, all the smells, all the tastes, all the objects of
the other sensory modalities, and all the objects of sensory
modalities that we do not experience, if there are any, for
example the ultraviolet perception that bees have, their
perception of polarization, and so on. To be fair we must
also include all the nonsensory “what it is like’s,” all the
shades and mixtures and degrees of anger, for example, or
depression, or confusion, or elation, or delight, transport,
ecstasy, joy, exhilaration, glee, bliss, and on and on. So we
have a theory to which there is an infinitely extensible
counterexample, and Kim says that is “near enough.” Near
enough to what, one wonders? Not the truth, most cer-
tainly. If we conjoin the truth of physicalism with the truth
of the proposition that millions of nonphysical color qualia
and all the rest can exist, then what we have, by straight
logic, is a falsehood, since the second proposition contra-
dicts the first. The conjunction of a truth and a falsehood
is a falsehood. How is that falsehood “near enough” to the
truth? It seems to amount to something like “If physical-
ism were only true, though it isn’t, it would be true.”

Kim is a philosopher with no phobia about meta-
physics, so it is hard to understand why he did not start
fresh, saying to himself, “Here is the situation. Everything

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antimaterialism about the mind 85

suggests physicalism; but it is false. For one very important
class of irreducible entities stands against it.” And then he
might perhaps have asked the question, “How can that be?
How on earth can that be how things are? How can it be
that everything points one way, but the truth lies in the
opposite direction?” Kim’s blind spot about this may have
to do with the fact that colors and the other qualia are ap-
parently causally inactive. His own work has been devoted
to the topic of causation and the application of the concept
to a variety of philosophical problems; causal inactivity, I
suspect, is for him “near enough” to nonexistence. But this
is just prejudice against noncausal concepts.

Next I want to examine some well-known arguments,
three in number, all going in roughly the same direction,
that have produced what some have regarded as an antima-
terialist or antiphysicalist tendency in the philosophy of
mind recently. The three arguments that I will consider, in
their different ways, record the fact that qualia are indeed
a problem for physicalism, or worse, that the existence of
qualia is a counterexample to the claim of physicalism that
everything, including the mind, is physical. Proponents of
these arguments have sometimes been lumped together
by others as mysterians, but the label is unhelpful. None of
the arguments has as its conclusion the proposition that
anything is mysterious. Their only conclusion is the very
unmysterious proposition that physicalism is false. Before
looking at the arguments themselves, I will say something

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86 Chapter 4

about a view that shares with the three arguments the con-
clusion that physicalism is false, but has little or no appeal
for most people, though it was the dominant philosophy
in the religiously tinged philosophical atmosphere of more
than a century ago.

Idealism

To be antimaterialist or antiphysicalist about the mind one
does not have to accept the larger claim made by idealism.
“Idealism” is a name given to a number of different phi-
losophies of mind, prominent in the nineteenth century,
and no single account of it has been universally accepted by
philosophers. Idealism is a metaphysics that tells us some-
thing about the nature of reality, as a metaphysics is sup-
posed to do. Just as physicalism tells us that everything is
physical, and materialism tells us that everything is mat-
ter, idealism tells us that everything is spiritual, or that
everything is mental. But what does this mean? A minimal
way of stating the claim is that reality is nonphysical, so
that idealism is the contrary of physicalism. At the least
idealism is antiphysicalist.

This formulation of idealism has a big advantage. If we
take reality to be everything that exists, then if the body
exists, idealism asserts that the body is nonphysical. So if
as we have seen the mind–body problem is the problem

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Just as physicalism tells
us that everything is
physical, and material-
ism tells us that every-
thing is matter, idealism
tells us that everything
is spiritual, or that
everything is mental.

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88 Chapter 4

of squaring the four propositions in our inconsistent tet-
rad, idealism easily solves the problem by denying the first
proposition, that the body is physical. For according to ide-
alism, nothing is physical. So there is no difficulty about
nonphysical and physical things interacting, since there
are no nonphysical things.

Two big questions remain. The first one is how any-
one could believe such a view. How could one believe that
the body is nonphysical? In one extremely common Eng-
lish language usage “the body” is taken to be the physi-
cal part of the human being or the organism, whether or
not there exists any part other than the physical part.
In this usage it would actually be contradictory to say
that the body is nonphysical, since that would be to say
that the physical part of the human being, whether or
not there exists any part other than the physical part, is
nonphysical.

There is also a view called phenomenalism, however,
descended from the work of George Berkeley and David
Hume, which analyzes statements about bodies, including
human bodies, into statements about actual and possible
experiences or “ideas,” in the terminology of John Locke,
Berkeley, Hume, and the other British empiricists. If it
were successful, this program of translation would preserve
the truth of every statement about physical bodies, while
understanding them at bottom as statements about pos-
sible or actual experiences or sense data. To say that there

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antimaterialism about the mind 89

is a sandwich in front of me is to say that there is a whitish-
brown trapezoid in my visual field, with yellowish fringes
(that’s the cheese hanging out of the edges of the sand-
wich), and so on, and also to say that the whitish-brown
trapezoid will disappear between two pink strips (that’s
my mouth, phenomenalistically interpreted) in the next
ten minutes, and so on.

A number of objections to phenomenalism have car-
ried a lot of weight, such a lot of weight that there are few
phenomenalists (or idealists) left. To my mind the biggest
objection is that there is no explanation as to why the
experiences appear in the sequences they do. Nonphe-
nomenalists will explain this by a very natural reference
to physical objects and their behavior. The reason the
perceptual trapezoid disappeared between the two pink
strips in my field of vision, says the nonphenomenalist,
is that the sandwich went into my mouth. But this expla-
nation is not available to the phenomenalists. They will
have to start by saying that the trapezoid disappeared be-
tween the pink strips because the sandwich went into my
mouth, but then for them this second statement comes
down to the statement that the trapezoid disappeared
between the pink strips. However, a phenomenalist who
takes the phenomena to be both sensed and unsensed
objects of experience, or what Bertrand Russell called sen-
sibilia, can deal with this worry. The forthcoming explana-
tions are just the regular explanations of physics and the

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90 Chapter 4

other sciences, and of the common sense that goes along
with them.

So there are ways to defend phenomenalism at this
point, but to my mind a deeper question for idealism is
how mind and body interact, given that neither is physi-
cal. If we are idealists, bodies do not have linear dimen-
sions or a position in space. One still wants to know how
minds and bodies interact. There is something very un-
clear about what idealism asserts, both about mind–body
and body–mind causation or interaction. Physical things
interact with physical things because physical particles
push physical particles along. Does one thought interact
with another by mind-particles pushing mind-particles
along? But there are no mind-particles. Is it just a mat-
ter of magic, then? Behind these difficulties is a mystery
about mind–mind interaction. How do mental things, such
as feelings, interact with other mental things, such as
thoughts, since neither of them possesses physical mass
and energy to fuel the causing? This last question is of
course a question not just for idealism, and so I shall set
it aside as we look at the three arguments for antiphysi-
calism. Though the interaction of the mental with the
mental is a fascinating problem, it is not really a part of
the mind–body problem. The mind–body problem is not
the mind–mind problem, whatever light it may shed on the
mind–mind problem.

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antimaterialism about the mind 91

Three Important Antiphysicalist Arguments

At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of
the next, physicalism seems largely to have run its theo-
retical course as a solution to the mind–body problem. Al-
though most philosophers are probably physicalists today
in spite of this, when toward the end of the last century a
number of significant antimaterialist arguments appeared
(I discuss one from Thomas Nagel, one from David Chalm-
ers, and one from Frank Jackson), there was no unanimity
of response from the physicalists.2 It would be worthwhile
to have a study just of what the physicalist responses to
the arguments were and how they worked, what in Ger-
man is called a Rezeptionsgeschichte, a history of the recep-
tion of the arguments. The truth is that for physicalists
the Rezeption seems to have been all over the map. Most of
the critical responses were physicalist, of course, because
typically the antiphysicalists like me were happy to see the
arguments prospering philosophically, if generating con-
troversy is what philosophical prospering is.

It is also important to know something about these
arguments because they may tell us something about what
it is that has eluded physicalism, and, just as importantly,
they may tell us why it has eluded physicalism. The argu-
ments themselves do not offer a solution to the mind–body
problem, and they have been combined with a number of
different solutions. For example, some have taken Nagel’s

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92 Chapter 4

argument, inaccurately in my view, as a support for simple
psychophysical dualism, whereas in reality it is an argu-
ment for skepticism about our grip on the mind–body
problem, combined with some intriguing hints about how
this skepticism can be overcome; Chalmers’s argument
has been offered in support of both functionalism (though
not about qualia) and dualism of all sorts, not just his own
“naturalistic dualism”; and so on.

Nagel’s argument is perhaps the most dramatic of the
three arguments, but it has the logically weakest conclu-
sion of the three. His conclusion is not that physicalism is
false, but that though it is true, we do not see how it could
be true. We do not understand how it could be true that our
experience is physical, much as someone leaving a chrysa-
lis in a box might not understand how it could turn into a
butterfly by morning. A physical explanation is objective,
but “the phenomenological features of experience”—qua-
lia—are subjective. They belong to a particular point of
view, which is ours, and they cannot be detached from that
point of view. The physical line of thought, however, will
“gradually abandon” that point of view, leaving us with no
understanding at all of the subjective.

Nagel asks us to imagine trying to understand what
it is like to be a bat. The subjective experience of a bat,
he claims, is one that is closed to us, with our entirely
external knowledge of it. Objective phenomena, such as
lightning and thunder, can be understood completely and

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antimaterialism about the mind 93

objectively. The subjective experience of the alien charac-
ter of the bat’s consciousness can be understood neither
completely nor objectively.

It will not help to try to imagine that one has
webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly
around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s
mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives
the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-
frequency sound signals; and that one spends the
day hanging upside down by one’s feet in the attic.
Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far),
it tells me what it would be like for me to behave as
a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to
know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.3

It seems to me one could have a vivid hallucinogenic
experience, one that turned out to be exactly like the expe-
rience of a bat, though one might never know that it was
accurate. The hallucination might even include the experi-
ence of living in a cave with other bats, an experience that
one subsequently discovered to be completely accurate,
perhaps by visiting the cave. It is doubtful whether there is
any particular limit on what is imaginable, and that includes
what is logically impossible. Philosophers are more or less
agreed on the imaginability of the logically impossible.
Seen from this point of view, Nagel’s point really expresses

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94 Chapter 4

the dependence of imagination on sense experience. His
problem is not the so-called other minds problem. That is
the problem, like the mind–body problem going back in its
most unregenerate form to Descartes, of how we can know
the mind of another, in addition to knowing the external
condition and behavior of that person’s body, presented to
us in experience. Nagel’s problem is rather the problem of a
systematic gap in our knowledge due to a particular biolog-
ical limitation, a limitation we have as a group or species.
We cannot know what it is like for bees to see ultraviolet
light, for example, without to some extent—exactly to the
extent that we come somehow to possess the ultraviolet
perceptual systems of the bee and cease to be ourselves—
becoming the bee.

However, one cannot argue that I cannot imagine what
it is like to be you on the ground that then I would have to
be you. With those we know well, perhaps especially when
they are in trouble, we can imagine without difficulty what
it is like to be them. We have a greater empathy than Nagel
allows. Indeed, if his argument works, it establishes that
we can never have any empathy at all, and that we are all
psychopaths. If empathy is what it is commonsensically
taken to be, which is to be able to feel the feelings that
another has, then empathy is logically impossible.

I do agree with Nagel, however, that our experience
cannot be reduced to the physical, though not for the rea-
son he gives. The phenomena of sound cannot be reduced

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antimaterialism about the mind 95

to waves, color to electromagnetic radiation, and so on.
But this is not because the phenomena express a particu-
lar point of view or subjectivity. It is instead a result of the
simple fact that colors and sounds are not waves and they
possess properties that are incompatible with the proper-
ties of waves. Sounds do not have amplitude, for example,
though they do have volume, so it makes no sense to ask
for the amplitude of a particular sound, rather than the
volume. Colors do not have amplitude, though they do
have brightness, so it makes no sense to ask for the ampli-
tude of a particular color.

It may help to try to locate Nagel’s view on the map
of the mind–body problem given to us by the inconsistent
tetrad with which we started. Nagel certainly accepts that
the body is physical, and that the mind and the body in-
teract. He also sees that physical and nonphysical things
cannot interact. He accepts the gulf between the physical
and the phenomenological. So he is stuck with the ques-
tion how it can possibly be true that the mind is physi-
cal, which is what he wants to believe anyway. We cannot
understand, he thinks, how it could be true that the mind
is physical, though it is, despite the fact that we can un-
derstand and even have evidence that it is true. What is
left is just that there is a difficulty for physicalism, and
Nagel suggests that the path toward what he rather mys-
teriously calls an “objective phenomenology” is the right
one to take.

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96 Chapter 4

I suspect that the concepts of imagination or concep-
tion and possibility may play very much the same role in
the Australian philosopher David Chalmers’s famous
zombie argument against physicalism as they do in Na-
gel’s argument. In Chalmers’s article of 1995, “Facing Up
to the Problem of Consciousness,” and in his 1996 book
The Conscious Mind, he argues that our world contains con-
sciousness, but that we can conceive of a world exactly like
it physically—physically identical—in which the creature
corresponding to Chalmers, say, and identical to him phys-
ically, does not have consciousness.4 This creature would
be a Chalmers zombie. From the possible existence of this
entirely physical creature, it follows that consciousness is
not physical—for if it were, the zombie Chalmers would
have consciousness in virtue of its physical characteristics,
in particular the neurophysiological ones. Just by exist-
ing it would be conscious. The zombie argument, by the
way, has a history before Chalmers that goes back earlier
in twentieth-century philosophy, and can ultimately be
traced to Descartes’s considerations concerning the pos-
sibility that the mind should exist without the body.

There are interesting arguments against the possi-
bility of zombies, but none of them are particularly con-
vincing, to my mind. For example, suppose that Chalmers
smells his morning coffee and says, “I smell coffee.” What
he says is true. But what about the zombie Chalmers? He
(or it) does not smell coffee, in the sense that he has the

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antimaterialism about the mind 97

appropriate qualia, so when he says “I smell coffee,” in this
sense, his statement is false. So, the objection goes, the
two beings are not physically identical. But of course there
is no real difficulty here, since truth and falsity have never
been supposed to be physical concepts, or not by many,
rather than semantical ones, or if they have they should
not have been. The difference between the truth of what
Chalmers says and the falsity of what zombie Chalmers
says does not constitute a legitimate physical difference. It
consists of two logical relationships between what Chalm-
ers says and what his zombie twin says, and the facts.

Much of the argument directed against Chalmers’s
zombies has been about the possibility of zombies, and
has deployed sophisticated considerations concerning ab-
stract possibility. Are zombies possible? Could they exist?
If we say that they can, we seem to be begging the question
against physicalism, for we are assuming that the physical
zombie is not conscious, and that the physical part of the
zombie is not responsible for the zombie’s consciousness,
since there is no such thing. If on the other hand we say
that nonconscious zombies cannot exist, we seem to be
begging the question against antiphysicalism, by just as-
suming physicalism.

A simpler though inconclusive argument against
the zombie argument is that saying that the zombie is
not conscious begs the question against physicalism. A
central-state materialist, for example, will say that the

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98 Chapter 4

physical part of Chalmers, which includes his brain, is
conscious, and that to say otherwise in a premise merely
states but does not argue for the denial of physicalism.
The trouble is that it will not do to assume that the zom-
bie is conscious, for by the same token that would assume
without argument that physicalism is true. It is not clear
where the victory lies here, but what Chalmers has to say
in later papers about a positive solution to the mind–body
problem for qualia seems to be a form of property dual-
ism. Mind and body interact, because they are not distinct,
so Chalmers’s position is not dualism. But the mind does
have nonphysical properties, as shown by the zombie ar-
gument. For Chalmers the mental does not reduce to the
physical. Chalmers is a property dualist, but with a differ-
ence. The difference is his treatment of the proposition
that the mind is nonphysical. In one sense Chalmers de-
nies this proposition. The mind is perfectly physical. But
in another sense, he accepts the proposition: the mind is
also nonphysical, in that claims about the mind do not re-
duce to claims about anything physical. We cannot take a
proposition about what I am thinking, say, and reduce it to
a proposition about the neural circuitry in the brain. Nev-
ertheless, my thinking is the neural circuitry in my brain.
This position is reminiscent of the earlier central-state ma-
terialist’s view that though “gene” does not mean “DNA,”
nevertheless the gene is DNA, and that though “mind”
does not mean “the relevant part of the central nervous

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antimaterialism about the mind 99

system” (CNS), nevertheless the mind is the relevant part
of the CNS. Both the central-state materialists and Chalm-
ers detect an ambiguity in the first proposition that the
mind is nonphysical, and are able to have their cake and
eat it, both affirming and denying the proposition, in the
two different senses. In one sense, the property sense, the
proposition is true, and in another, the substance or thing
sense, the proposition is false.

It is still a troubling question, though, in what way
mental states could be physical states. This is not a mat-
ter of what we say or think, but of the way we are to con-
ceive of my thinking of my grandmother in Italy as a set of
neurons firing, or for that matter anything “emerging” out
of a set of neurons firing or “supervening” on them. That
is Nagel’s worry. We cannot imagine following a sequence
of events in which the sequence of the events of the neu-
rons firing followed far enough will continuously lead to
the event of my thinking of my grandmother in Italy. For
this reason, Nagel and those who followed him in a similar
line of thought (Chalmers, Frank Jackson, Joseph Levine,
and Colin McGinn are the most prominent) have been
lumped together as “mysterians,” who proclaim the mys-
tery of consciousness. But the word is not really a good fit
for Chalmers and Jackson, who would be better described
simply as antiphysicalist.

Chalmers has also discussed a form of panpsychism
that he calls “panprotopsychism.” Panpsychism is the view

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100 Chapter 4

that fundamental physical objects have mental or conscious
states, so that the mental is built into the world alongside
the physical from the beginning. It is as though God could
not help creating parallel mental states whenever he cre-
ated the fundamental physical states. “Panprotopsychism”
looks like a load of typographical errors, but it is not. It is
the view that the fundamental physical objects have “pro-
toconscious” states. These are the precursors of conscious
states that, though they are not themselves conscious
states, can together cause conscious states to emerge from
their combination or collection. Collectively they are con-
scious states, but only collectively. Here it seems to me that
Chalmers’s view looks like a form of emergentism, or per-
haps epiphenomenalism. It has some of the difficulties of
those views, and perhaps the extra one of seeming to sug-
gest that somehow the protoconscious states are thought
to be in some more primitive sense already conscious. For
if they lack consciousness individually it really is difficult
to see how a collection of them could have it. (This sort
of difficulty is known as “the combination problem.”) And
Chalmers’s view seems to inflate the mind–body problem
to cosmic proportions. The relation between mind and
body will emerge for every part of the universe (this is the
“pan” bit) that has a psychic part.

Chalmers himself does write that he is not sure that the
arguments for panpsychism are sound, but he also is not
sure that they are not sound. His remarks, read in context,

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antimaterialism about the mind 101

suggest at the least a tremendous sympathy with the argu-
ments for panpsychism, to the extent that he seems to be
giving his own view, whereas I do not feel the same rush of
excitement in his arguments going in the other direction.
His own project seems to be one of working out ways in
which physical and nonphysical things can interact, or do
something that plays the role of interaction. He offers, for
example, the hypothesis that information might play the
role of the fundamental something that has both physical
states and states that carry qualia. So information could
manifest itself in one way or the other, and this might be
regarded as interaction of a sort. It is an interesting specu-
lation, but no more, I think, because it is very hard to see
how a sequence of bits in a bitstream—traveling optical in-
formation, for example in a telecommunications network,
made up of a flicker of successive light and dark states at
a point in the fiber, or 0s and 1s—could turn itself into a
stream of qualia or consciousness. It would be an event of
biblical proportions.

Chalmers is prepared to concede, however, that his is
a very speculative theory, though it may just do work to
mitigate the epiphenomenal implications of the zombie
argument. The zombies behave physically like their con-
scious counterparts, but in that case there appears to be
a problem in understanding how consciousness has any
effect on the physical. Chalmers thinks as a result that
we must work toward seeing how consciousness and the

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102 Chapter 4

physical can work together, or in what way it can be false
that physical and nonphysical things cannot interact or do
something as good as interact. I am not even a little bit con-
vinced by all this, because I just cannot see how something
digital like “information” (1s and 0s) could turn itself into
the color red. This really is just nonsense. The information
whizzing around in a CPU does not out of itself produce
red. The color arises on the computer monitor, not from
information as such, but from codes yielding coordinated
physical and optical effects in the phosphor dots, plus the
contribution of the eye, for example in the optical fusion of
red and green to produce yellow. (Yellow is not physically
present on a TV screen, as can be verified by examining it
with a good magnifying glass.) Which effects occur is de-
pendent on the information presented to the monitor, but
the color that appears does so for the usual physical and
psychological reasons detailed in the science of color, prin-
cipally from the explanation of how the electron beams
striking the phosphor dots produce different colors, not
from pure information theory.

An argument related to the zombie argument was pro-
posed by Frank Jackson, another Australian philosopher.
(Why, I wonder, have two-thirds of the best arguments
against physicalism come from Australians? Perhaps it is
because the previous generation of philosophers in Austra-
lia had more leading physicalists than anywhere else, apart
perhaps from the United States, so that the antiphysicalist

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antimaterialism about the mind 103

arguments were a reaction to the prevailing view. Or per-
haps it is something in the beer.)

Of course, there are more than three arguments against
physicalism, but the three I discuss here have been among
the more influential and the most discussed. Jackson’s ar-
gument in “Epiphenomenal Qualia” is simplicity itself. He
asks us to imagine a brilliant color scientist, whom he calls
Mary. Mary is brought up and lives in a black-and-white
environment. She is “brilliant” in the sense that she pos-
sesses all the information given by a completed physical
science of color, including neuroscience. She has all of this
information at her fingertips. Now comes the day when
she opens the door and leaves her achromatic environ-
ment. She steps into the fully colored world. It seems that
she will acquire some new information, assuming that her
color vision system starts to work fairly quickly; she learns
something new. Perhaps we might wish to say, though
Jackson does not, that she finally learns what red is, what
blue is, and so on. In any case, she learns what these colors
look like. But if she has learned something new, and gained
information in addition to the totality of physical informa-
tion, then not all information is physical information.

In a separate argument in the same paper Jackson
also describes a character called Fred, who sees a color that
“standard human observers” do not see. All the physical
information in the world will not help an observer (I shall
call him F-red) who does not see this new color—perhaps

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104 Chapter 4

it is a shade of red—to know what it is that Fred is seeing.
F-red is like Mary before she leaves her room. F-red has all
the physical information that there is or could be, but he
still does not know what Fred sees. (Jackson is of course
assuming that there could be a novel color, which is natu-
rally something that has been argued about.)

Both of Jackson’s arguments look valid, and if they are,
they establish that the mind is nonphysical, or at least that
we have nonphysical information about the mind. Some-
time after publishing his argument, however, however,
Jackson took it back. He had decided that it led to dualism
and that the dualism it led to is epiphenomenalist. This
meant that the qualitative states whose nonphysical char-
acter he had championed, though they exist, are without
effect on human behavior. There they are, but they have
no effects. Epiphenomenalism is hard to believe, however,
not least because, as we saw earlier, it has all the problems
of dualism, and more of its own. (Two-way epiphenome-
nalism might be better, but that is just dualist interaction-
ism.) As part of his self-apostasy Jackson came to believe
that sensory experience in general is representation, so that
what is important about it is the information it gives, not
its qualitative character. Or rather, its qualitative character
is representation.

Is this a good line to take? Suppose that there existed
a solipsistic two-entity universe, a world with only two
things in it: a perceiver, and the perceiver’s qualitative

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antimaterialism about the mind 105

experience, a single quale. There is ex hypothesi nothing
for the quale to represent, but it seems undeniable that
the perceiver experiences it. We might think that he could
come to enjoy it.

One is bound to feel that the three antiphysicalist ar-
guments have something in common. Their conclusions
are not exactly the same, of course. Nagel’s argument has
the conclusion that we cannot see how our first proposi-
tion (“The mind is nonphysical”) can be false. Yet it is, be-
cause physicalism is true.

The zombie argument starts with the fact that the
Chalmers zombie is possible. If the zombie exists, he or
perhaps “it” is not conscious. It is physically identical with
the whole of Chalmers’s physicality. But there is more to
Chalmers; Chalmers is conscious. So consciousness is not
physical. Like Jackson’s argument, Chalmers’s argument
has as its conclusion the proposition that the mind is non-
physical and that physicalism is false. Jackson realized
quickly the epiphenomenalist implications of his argument
for the mind–body problem, and abandoned it. Chalmers
took the heroic line of trying to see ways in which dualism
could be true, and that is what has led him to consider pan-
psychism. His views come from someone who is no matter
what prepared to take the mind–body very seriously, and
panpsychism, though it may seem bizarre, is a reflection
of this seriousness.

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106 Chapter 4

The mind–body problem is not going to be made to go
away easily, and neither is consciousness. Consciousness
may be less important in the general economy of the mind
than the more enthusiastic of the “qualia freaks” suppose,
but the three antimaterialist arguments attest to its real-
ity and importance. For Nagel, the mind is physical, but we
cannot see how that is possible, and that is the power of
the mind–body problem. If we cannot see how something
is possible, we are bound to respect the view of those who
believe that it is possible. But this is not a solution to the
mind–body problem. It is a declaration that physicalism is
true, but incomprehensible. The second half of this claim
is true, though, even if the first is false.

For Jackson and Chalmers, the qualitative part of the
mind is nonphysical, and so they are dualists. Jackson’s du-
alism is epiphenomenalist, and he found that in the end it
was not a position he could live with.

Chalmers has stuck to his guns, and he has toyed with
exotic theories such as panpsychism that build dualism
into the fabric of things. The difficulty here is that he is
not giving us an account of the very thing of which Des-
cartes could not give us an account. Even the panpsychist
ought to be able to give a coherent account of the relation
between the mental and the physical, and he does not. His
position is sound enough, to the extent that it does recog-
nize the “data” (the inconsistent tetrad) that fuel the origi-
nal problem. The trouble is that the mind–body problem

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The mind–body
problem is not going
to be made to go away
easily, and neither
is consciousness.

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108 Chapter 4

metastasizes into the same problem across the entire uni-
verse. Why give us infinitely many more instances of the
mind–body problem than we already have? It is of course
open to the panpsychist to retort that if one instance of the
problem is solved, they all are, so the numbers do not mat-
ter. Either way, though, it is better to look for a solution
where one is to be found.

Let us look next at the scientific solutions that have
been offered to the problem.

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THE MIND–BODY PROBLEM:
BACKGROUND AND HISTORY

What Is the Mind–Body Problem?

From a logical point of view, the mind–body problem is
easy to understand, and it can be expressed clearly, in just
four propositions or statements. The following formula-
tion is one I have adapted from Keith Campbell.

(1) The mind is a nonphysical thing.
(2) The body is a physical thing.
(3) The mind and the body interact.
(4) Physical and nonphysical things cannot interact.

It is very hard to deny any of these four propositions.
But they cannot consistently be held to be true together.
At least one of them must be false, and the attempt to

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2 Chapter 1

�e mind interacts with the body.

is is

A nonphysical thing cannot interact with a physical thing.

show the exact way in which this plays out is the work of
developing a solution to the mind–body problem.

As formulated above in (1)–(4), the mind–body prob-
lem is an entirely logical problem. The four propositions
simply cannot consistently be maintained together; noth-
ing can change that. There really is a contradiction to be
derived from them, and the problem is the tension between
the propositions. Of course, it is also possible to maintain
vague propositions very similar to all four propositions,
but which do not have the hard-and-fast relationships that
are suggested by the formal terms in which the inconsis-
tent group is stated.

Figure 1 shows how the four terms “mind,” “body,”
“physical,” and “nonphysical” are related in the four propo-
sitions in such a way as to produce an inconsistency. The

Figure 1

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the Mind–Body proBleM 3

point of putting the problem in this rather formal way is
that the four propositions are what philosophers and logi-
cians sometimes call an “inconsistent tetrad.” What this
phrase means is that of the four propositions (the tetrad)
any three can be true at the same time, but if they are, then
the fourth is false. Here is the inconsistency. For example,
if (1), (2), and (3) are true, then (4) is false. If the mind is
a nonphysical thing, and the body is a physical thing, and
mind and body interact, then it follows that at least one
nonphysical thing and one physical thing do in fact inter-
act, and so it is false that physical and nonphysical things
cannot interact; and the fourth proposition is false.

Or suppose the last three propositions, (2), (3), and
(4), are true. Suppose that physical and nonphysical things
cannot interact, that mind and body do interact, and that
the body is a physical thing. Then it follows that the mind
is not a nonphysical thing, which is to say that the mind is a
physical thing. The mind must be a physical thing, because
the body is a physical thing, and it interacts with the mind.
But physical and nonphysical things, we assumed, cannot
interact. So (1) must be false.

It is fun to play around with the four original proposi-
tions (1) through (4) in this way, choosing any three, and
then deriving the opposite or negation of the fourth. By
doing this one can get a good sense of how the mind–body
problem is a logical problem. It is a problem that cannot
be solved, if by solving it one means holding onto all four

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4 Chapter 1

propositions at once. When one has seen that holding onto
all four propositions is not a logical option, one can see
clearly that the first and most basic question is which one
of the four propositions one is going to deny.

We can also describe the mind–body problem in less
formal terms. Consider the human body, with everything
in it, including internal and external organs and parts, such
as the stomach, nerves and brain, arms, legs, eyes, and all
the rest. Even with all this equipment, especially the sen-
sory organs, it is interesting and surprising that we can
consciously perceive things in the world that are far away
from us. For example, I can open my eyes in the morning,
and see a nice cup of coffee waiting for me on the bedside
table. There it is, a foot away, and I am not touching it,
yet somehow it is making itself manifest to me. How
does it happen that I see it? How does the visual system
convey to my awareness or mind the image of the cup of
coffee?

The answer is not particularly simple. Very roughly,
the physical story is that light enters my eyes from the cup
of coffee, and this light impinges on the two retinas at the
backs of the eyes. Then, as we have learned from physi-
ological science, the two retinas send electrical signals past
the optic chiasm down the optic nerve. These signals are
conveyed to the so-called visual cortex at the back of the
brain. And then there is a sort of a miracle. The visual cor-
tex becomes active, and I see the coffee cup. I am conscious

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the Mind–Body proBleM 5

of the cup, we might even say, though it is not clear what
this means and how it differs from saying that I see the cup.

How did the physical state of the brain produce in me
the exciting awareness of the presence of the cup of coffee?
One minute there are just neurons firing away, and no im-
age of the cup of coffee. The next, there it is; I see the cup
of coffee, a foot away. I am not aware of all those neurons
firing, and I certainly don’t see them. The neurosurgeon is
the one who sees them. What I see is a cup of coffee. How
did my neurons contact me or my mind or consciousness,
and stamp there the image of the cup of coffee for me?
How did the sensation of a cup of coffee arise from the
mass of neurons?

It’s a mystery.
That mystery is the mind–body problem, or part of it.
We might want to divide the problem up this way. Let

us call the “visual experience” the mental state that, in this
case, contains the image of the cup of coffee. The mental
state is related in some way, still to be determined, to what-
ever is going on objectively and physically when we see
the cup.

In addition to these two sets of events (the mental ex-
perience and the physical events that underlie it) there is
said to be the “subjective character” of what is seen. This
subjective character is something for which some philoso-
phers have adopted the phrase “what it is like,” as in the
phrase “what it is like to have the experience of seeing a

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6 Chapter 1

cup.” What it is like to have the experience of seeing a cup
is to be identified with the consciousness of seeing a cup.
To be conscious of the cup is for there to be something it is
like to have that experience. The phrase originates with the
philosopher Timothy Sprigge, and was also used later and
made popular by Thomas Nagel.2 It is intended to capture
this extra bit of what experience involves. What is it like
to see a cup of coffee? Or, in more general terms, what is it
like to be a conscious human being?

Compare this with the question of what it is like to
be a stone. Well, there is nothing it is like to be a stone.
So by the criterion of Sprigge and Nagel, the stone has no
consciousness.

This “what it is like” has also received from philoso-
phers and others the name quale (Latin, singular, pro-
nounced “kwa-lay,” to rhyme with “parlay”) and qualia
(Latin, plural, pronounced “kwa-lee-ah,” to rhyme with
“la-dee-dah”).

When I see or otherwise perceive a cup of coffee, I am
aware of the quale that attaches to the experience, and
which is presumably altogether absent from a video feed
carrying the same information. Video displays do not have
consciousness. For consciousness to come into the picture,
someone has to be looking at the video picture.

The idea of the quale is unfortunately not altogether
clear. Some philosophers have used the term to refer not to
properties of experiences, such as the white cup shape that

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What is it like to see a
cup of coffee? Or, in
more general terms,
what is it like to be a
conscious human being?

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8 Chapter 1

I see when I see the cup, as I have outlined their role above,
but to the experiences themselves.

There is a genuine ambiguity here, and the two philo-
sophical usages are inconsistent. If qualia are experiences,
then they themselves are properties of the subjects who
have them, and they are psychological entities. If they are
properties of experiences, then they are not properties of
the subjects who have the experiences; they are indepen-
dent metaphysical entities, for example the color white, and
the shape of the cup, which somehow turn up in the subjects’
minds.

There is also the question whether when I see a white
cup I have one quale or many. Do I have one white cup
quale, or many smaller white-colored cup qualia that to-
gether make up the whole cup image? Neither answer is
satisfactory. How many qualia do I have when I look at a
speckled hen, to take a famous example? I cannot see how
many spots or speckles there are, especially if the hen is
running about, with its head bobbing, and there may not
even be a definite number. Or how many different qualia
do I have when I look at a quality changing smoothly over
time, say, the reds across the spectrum? The point is that
the same difficulty does not attack concepts like a color,
or being colored, for example in the claim that the bread
is brown in color, even though specks of it are white, say,
or gray. Color and being colored are more tolerant concepts
than the quale.

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the Mind–Body proBleM 9

I shall use the words “qualia” and “quale” when the
context or the author I am discussing calls for them, and
“phenomenal property” when the emphasis is more on
the quality that is the object of experience. I regret to say
that the history of the terminology is sufficiently confused
to allow such latitude. The term “qualia” has an interest-
ing and one might say chequered history. In the past the
phrases and words “cogitationes,” “ideas,” “experiences,”
“sense data,” “qualities,” “perceptions,” “sensations,”
“properties of sensations,” “percepts,” “raw feels,” “nomo-
logical danglers,” “phenomenal properties,” and “qualita-
tive properties” have been used to try to get at something
approximately like the same idea. The confused history of
the different terminologies is enough to alert the thought-
ful student of recent philosophy to the fact that all is not
as it should be in the kingdom of the qualia. Why the fre-
quent changes in terminology, and the zigzag of compli-
cated arguments to try to get across what ought to be a
fairly straightforward idea, or set of ideas?

There is a well-known story about Herbert Feigl giving
a lecture about the mind and the brain at UCLA in 1966,
in which he discussed a part of the problem of the relation
of mind and brain to which he simply couldn’t see the so-
lution, in spite of his materialism, namely the problem of
“raw feels.” The distinguished philosopher Rudolf Carnap
was in the audience, and he announced in the Q&A that
he had a solution to the problem of raw feels. Feigl was

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10 Chapter 1

excited, and asked what it was. “The solution to your prob-
lem, Herbert,” replied Carnap, “is the α-factor.” Feigl got
even more excited and wanted to know what the α-factor
was, as, in spite of his scientific education, the concept was
new to him. “Well, Herbert, you tell me what a raw feel is,
and I’ll tell you what the α-factor is,” Carnap responded. It
was a fair point.

The conceptual and linguistic difficulties of describing
qualia or phenomenal properties are formidable enough,
yet it remains a fact that though a scientist can take a scan
of my brain, say, recording my blood flowing or my neu-
rons firing, there is no equivalent scan for my experiences.
There do seem to be two different worlds here that are re-
lated—but how are they related?

It is also important to be aware that the mind–body
problem is about the relationship between the human
mind and the human physical body. (It is also about the
relationship between animal minds, if there are any, and
animal bodies, but in this book I will restrict discussion
to the human case.) The relationship between mind and
body exists with or without qualia. If I am in the mental
state involved in unconsciously seeing a cup of coffee, or
unconsciously thinking about a problem, one might very
well wonder how that mental state is related to the physi-
cal body, even if no qualia attach to it.

It is easier to see what the problem is if we consider
the mind–body problem going in the opposite direction.

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the Mind–Body proBleM 11

Consider the body again. There are my arms, outside the
blankets, and I reach out with my right hand and take hold
of my cup of coffee, because I want to have a sip of coffee.
How did I do that? How did my mental desire for a sip of
coffee get my physical arm to reach out to the cup? Well,
we know the answer, at least partly. My muscles moved
my arm. But how did my mental desire move my physical
muscles? Did my mind somehow reach into my arm and
move the muscles?

Again, we know the answer, or think we do. Electri-
cal signals from the brain moved the muscles, not mental
energy directed at them. Yet the question persists. How
did my mental desire cause the physical electrical signals
to start up and then to run down my arms and move the
muscles? Again, physiology provides an answer. It was
not my mind—“the mental”—that produced the physical
electrical signals, but the neurons firing in my brain. All
right, but now we get to the nerve of the problem (so to
speak). How did my mental desire, carrying its associated
quale along with it, cause my physical neurons to fire? We
seem to have some form of telekinesis here, the moving of
objects by mental energy alone. If the response is that it is
other neurons, rather than my mental want, that caused
the neurons to fire, then the question has been avoided
rather than answered. How does my mental desire cause
those other neurons to fire?

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12 Chapter 1

There might be no qualia associated with this desire.
Or there might be an unconscious mental desire. But the
question remains of how it causes the neurons to fire and
to initiate the moving of my arm. So qualia are part of the
mind–body problem, but the problem also involves any re-
lationship between the mind and the body, including un-
conscious states of mind and physical states.

Matter or the physical can somehow affect the mind;
and the mind can somehow move the physical body. These
“somehows” are difficult to understand, though, because
we cannot see either how there could be aspects of mental
experience or qualia floating around amid the neurons, or
desires trailing clouds of their attendant qualia, physically
digging into the neurons and making them fire.

Descartes and the Discovery of the Problem in 1641

There is a very common view which states that, in the Med-
itations on First Philosophy of 1641, and also in the Treatise
on Man, written some years earlier, the French philosopher
René Descartes discovered, or invented, the problem that
today we call the mind–body problem.

Our mind–body problem is not just a difficulty about
how the mind and body are related and how they affect one
another. It is also a difficulty about how they can be related
and how they can affect one another. Their characteristic

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the Mind–Body proBleM 13

properties are very different, like oil and water, which sim-
ply won’t mix, given what they are.

According to Descartes, matter is essentially spatial,
and it has the characteristic properties of linear dimen-
sion. Things in space have a position, at least, and a height,
a depth, and a length, or one or more of these. Areas are
two-dimensional, and lines are one-dimensional, but both
have a place in space. Objects are three-dimensional, ap-
parently, at least in ordinary experience. Mental entities,
on the other hand, do not have these characteristics. We
cannot say, of a mind, or any part of it, that it is a two-
by-two-by-two-inch cube or a sphere with a two-inch ra-
dius, for example, located in a position in space inside the
skull. This is not because it has some other shape in space,
but because it is not characterized by space at all. What is
characteristic of a mind, Descartes claims, is that it is con-
scious, not that it has shape or consists of physical matter.
Unlike the brain, which has physical characteristics and
occupies space, it does not seem to make sense to attach
spatial descriptions to the mind. We can ask, “How much
space does the mind occupy?” or “What shape is it?” or “Is
it three-dimensional or two-dimensional?” or “Where is it
in physical space?” But these questions have no answers, as
the questions make no sense.

There is no need to claim, as Descartes did, that the
essence of the physical is space; we need merely that
something’s being in space is a necessary condition for its

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14 Chapter 1

being physical at all. It is interesting that this straightfor-
ward test of physicality has survived all the philosophical
changes of opinion since Descartes, almost unscathed.
Even some strange entity in physics that is said not to be in
space does not automatically count as a counterexample,
for there is nothing to prevent us from saying that, with
such entities, physics is dealing with something nonphysi-
cal—nonphysical just because it does not have a position
in space. And typically, entities that are said not to have
a position in space are more the creatures of mathemat-
ics than of physics. To drive this point home, we should
ponder Noam Chomsky’s celebrated view that we do not
even know what the mind–body problem is because we do
not have a clear concept of the physical or of body: “Lack-
ing a concept of ‘matter’ or ‘body’ or ‘the physical,’ we have
no coherent way to formulate issues related to the ‘mind–
body problem.’”3 But we do have a concept of space laid out
before us, and of physics as dealing with whatever it con-
tains. Our bodies are certainly in space, and our minds are
not, in the very straightforward sense that the assignation
of linear dimensions and locations to them or to their con-
tents and activities is unintelligible.4

Such issues aroused considerable interest following
the publication of Descartes’s Meditations, starting with
the “Objections” to Descartes. The “Objections” were writ-
ten by a group of distinguished contemporaries, and in
return Descartes wrote his “Replies.” The “Objections and

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the Mind–Body proBleM 15

Replies” were included in the first edition of the Medita-
tions. Though we do find in the Meditations itself the dis-
tinction (the “real distinction”) between the mind and the
body, drawn very sharply by Descartes, in fact he makes
no mention of our mind–body problem. Descartes is un-
troubled by the fact that, as he has described them, mind
and matter are very different: one is spatial and the other
not, and therefore one cannot act upon the other. Something
lacking a position in space cannot act upon something in
space, say at a point. The problem is simply not there in
his text. Descartes himself writes in his Reply to one of the
Objections:

The whole problem contained in such questions
arises simply from a supposition that is false and
cannot in any way be proved, namely that, if the soul
and the body are two substances whose nature is
different, this prevents them from being able to act
on each other.5

Descartes is surely right about this. The “nature” of a baked
Alaska pudding is very different from that of a human be-
ing, no doubt about this at all, since one is a pudding and
the other is a human being, but the two can “act on each
other” without difficulty. The human being can eat the
baked Alaska pudding, for example, and the baked Alaska
can give the human being a stomachache.

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16 Chapter 1

The difficulty, however, is not merely that mind and
body are different. It is that they are different in such a way
that their interaction is impossible because it involves a
contradiction. It is the nature of bodies to be in space, and
the nature of minds not to be in space, Descartes claims.
For the two to interact, what is not in space must act on
what is in space. Action on a body takes place at a position
in space, however, where the body is. So mind, or a bit of
it, must get up next to the space inhabited by the body. But
(to repeat) minds are not in space and nor are they spatially
related to it, so they cannot even get near it.

Apparently Descartes did not see this problem. It was,
however, clearly stated by two of his critics, his correspon-
dent Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, and his respondent
Pierre Gassendi. They pointed out that if the soul is to af-
fect the body, it must make contact with the body, and to
do that it must be in space and have extension. In that case
the soul is physical, by Descartes’s own criterion.

In a letter dated May 1643, Princess Elisabeth wrote
to Descartes,

I beg you to tell me how the human soul can
determine the movement of the animal spirits in the
body so as to perform voluntary acts—being as it is
merely a conscious substance. For the determination
of the movement seems always to come about from
the moving body’s being propelled—to depend on the

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the Mind–Body proBleM 17

kind of impulse it gets from what it sets in motion, or
again, on the nature and shape of this latter thing’s
surface. Now the first two conditions involve contact,
and the third involves that the impelling [thing]
has extension; but you utterly exclude extension
from your notion of soul, and contact seems to me
incompatible with a thing’s being immaterial.6

Propulsion and “the kind of impulse” that set the body
in motion require contact, and “the nature and shape” of
the surface of the site at which contact is made with the
body require extension. We need two further clarifications
to grasp this passage. The first is that when Princess Elisa-
beth and Descartes mention “animal spirits” (the phrase is
from Galen) they are writing about something that plays
roughly the role of signals in the nerve fibers of modern
physiology. For Descartes, the animal spirits were not spir-
its in the sense of ghostly apparitions, but part of a theory
that claimed that muscles were moved by inflation with
air, the so-called balloonist theory. The animal spirits were
fine streams of air that inflated the muscles. (“Animal”
does not mean the beasts here, but is an adjective derived
from “anima,” the soul.)

The second clarification is that when Princess Elisa-
beth writes that “you utterly exclude extension from your
notion of soul,” she is referring to the fact that Descartes
defines mind and matter in such a way that the two are

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18 Chapter 1

mutually exclusive. Mind is consciousness, which has no
extension or spatial dimension, and matter is not con-
scious, since it is completely defined by its spatial dimen-
sions and location. Since mind lacks a location and spatial
dimensions, Elisabeth is arguing, it cannot make contact
with matter. It cannot possess a contacting surface or an
impulse that operates on an extended surface. Here we
have the mind–body problem going at full throttle.

Pierre Gassendi was one of the philosophers and sci-
entists who wrote one of the so-called Objections to Des-
cartes’s Meditations. He puts one of his criticisms this way:

For how, may I ask, do you think that you, an
unextended subject, could receive the semblance or
idea of a body that is extended?7

By “semblance” Gassendi means something like what we
would call an image. It is worth noting that images, in a
perfectly precise photographic sense, are carried by light
to the eye. The sense is that a photograph of the object
can be taken from anywhere between us and the object, or
from any other place at which light carries the information
of the image.

Descartes himself did not yet have the mind–body
problem; he had something that amounted to a solution to
the problem. It was his critics who discovered the problem,
right in Descartes’s solution to the problem, although it is

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the Mind–Body proBleM 19

also true that it was almost forced on them by Descartes’s
sharp distinction between mind and body. The distinc-
tion involved the defining characteristics or “principal at-
tributes,” as he called them, of mind and body, which are
consciousness and extension.

Though Descartes was no doubt right that very dif-
ferent kinds of things can interact with one another, he
was not right in his account of how such different things
as mind and body do in fact interact. His proposal, in The
Passions of the Soul of 1649, was that they interact through
the pineal gland, which is, he writes, “the principal seat of
the soul” and is moved this way and that by the soul so as
to move the animal spirits or streams of air from the sacs
next to it. He had his reasons for choosing this organ, as
the pineal gland is small, light, not bilaterally doubled, and
centrally located. Still, the whole idea is a nonstarter, be-
cause the pineal gland is as physical as any other part of the
body. If there is a problem about how the mind can act on
the body, the same problem will exist about how the mind
can act on the pineal gland, even if there is a good story to
tell about the hydraulics of the “pneumatic” (or nervous)
system.

We have inherited the sharp distinction between mind
and body, though not exactly in Descartes’s form, but we
have not inherited Descartes’s solution to the mind–body
problem. So we are left with the problem, minus a solution.
We see that the experiences we have, such as experiences

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We see that the experi-
ences we have, such as
experiences of color, are
indeed very different
from the electromag-
netic radiation that ulti-
mately produces them,
or from the activity of
the neurons in the brain.

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the Mind–Body proBleM 21

of color, are indeed very different from the electromag-
netic radiation that ultimately produces them, or from
the activity of the neurons in the brain. We are bound to
wonder how the uncolored radiation can produce the color,
even if its effects can be followed as far as the neurons in
the visual cortex. In other words, we make a sharp distinc-
tion between physics and physiology on the one hand, and
psychology on the other, without a principled way to con-
nect them. Physics consists of a set of concepts that in-
cludes mass, velocity, electron, wave, and so on, but does not
include the concepts red, yellow, black, pink, and the like.
Physiology includes the concepts neuron, glial cell, visual
cortex, membrane potential, and so on, but does not include
the concept red and all the other color concepts. The color
red is something that we see. In the framework of current
scientific theory, “red” is a psychological term, not a physi-
cal one. Then our problem can be very generally described
as the difficulty of describing the relationship between the
physical and the psychological, since, as Princess Elisabeth
and Gassendi realized, they possess no common relating
terms.

Was there really no mind–body problem before Des-
cartes and his debate with his critics in 1641? Of course,
long before Descartes, philosophers and religious think-
ers had spoken about the body and the mind or soul, and
their relationship. Plato, for example, wrote a fascinating
dialogue, the Phaedo, which contains arguments for the

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22 Chapter 1

survival of the soul after death, and for its immortality. Yet
the exact sense in which the soul or mind is able to be “in”
the body, and also to leave it, is apparently not something
that presented itself to Plato as a problem in its own right.
His interest is in the fact that the soul survives death, not
how, or in what sense it can be in the body. The same is true
of the religious thinkers. Their concern is for the human
being, and perhaps for the welfare of the body, but mainly
for the welfare and future of the human soul. They do
not formulate a problem with the technical precision that
was forced on Princess Elisabeth and Gassendi by Des-
cartes’s neatly formulated dualism.

Something important clearly changed in our intel-
lectual orientation during the mid-seventeenth century.
Mechanical explanations had become the order of the day,
such as Descartes’s balloonist explanation of the nervous
system, and these explanations left unanswered the ques-
tion of what should be said about the human mind and hu-
man consciousness from the physical and mechanical point
of view. What happens, if anything, for example, when we
decide to do even such a simple thing as to lift up a cup and
take a sip of coffee? The arm moves, but it is difficult to
see how the thought or desire could make that happen. It
is as though a ghost were to try to lift up a coffee cup. Its
ghostly arm would, one supposes, simply pass through the
cup without affecting it and without being able to cause it
or the physical arm to go up in the air. It would be no less

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the Mind–Body proBleM 23

remarkable if merely by thinking about it from a few feet
away we could cause an ATM to dispense cash. It is no use
insisting that our minds are after all not physically con-
nected to the ATM, and that is why it is impossible to af-
fect the ATM’s output—for there is no sense in which they
are physically connected to our bodies. Our minds are not
physically connected to our bodies. How could they be, if
they are nonphysical? That is the point whose importance
Princess Elisabeth and Gassendi saw more clearly than
anyone had before them, including Descartes himself.

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DUALIST THEORIES OF MIND
AND BODY

Interactionism and Substance Dualism

Mind–body dualism was a popular view until roughly the
1960s, though it is less and less so these days, at least with
professional philosophers. They have for the most part
thrown in their lot with those scientists who have adopted
a materialistic or naturalistic worldview—nature is all
there is.

Dualism is the antinaturalist claim that the mind
and the body are two separate and very different things.
The two sorts are the nonphysical and the physical. The
nonphysical sort of thing, the mind or soul, is not part of
nature. “The mind is a nonphysical thing” was our first
proposition, and “The body is a physical thing” the next.
The essence of dualism is the claim that both these propo
sitions are true, and that the mind is not part of nature.

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Page 3

1—

Two Concepts of Mind

1—

What Is Consciousness?

Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious. There is nothing we know about more directly than consciousness, but it

is far from clear how to reconcile it with everything else we know. Why does it exist? What does it do? How could it possibly arise from lumpy gray matter? We

know consciousness far more intimately than we know the rest of the world, but we understand the rest of the world far better than we understand consciousness.

Consciousness can be startlingly intense. It is the most vivid of phenomena; nothing is more real to us. But it can be frustratingly diaphanous: in talking about conscious

experience, it is notoriously difficult to pin down the subject matter. The International Dictionary of Psychology does not even try to give a straightforward

characterization:

Consciousness: The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what

consciousness means. Many fall into the trap of confusing consciousness with selfconsciousness—to be conscious it is only necessary to be aware of the external world.

Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it.

(Sutherland 1989)

Almost anyone who has thought hard about consciousness will have some sympathy with these sentiments. Consciousness is so intangible that even this limited attempt

at a definition could be disputed: there can arguably be perception and thought that is not conscious, as witnessed by the notions of subliminal perception and

unconscious thought. What is central to conscious

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AN: 55770 ; David J. Chalmers.; The Conscious Mind : In Search of a Fundamental Theory
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Page 4

ness, at least in the most interesting sense, is experience. But this is not definition. At best, it is clarification.

Trying to define conscious experience in terms of more primitive notions is fruitless. One might as well try to define matter or space in terms of something more

fundamental. The best we can do is to give illustrations and characterizations that lie at the same level. These characterizations cannot qualify as true definitions, due to

their implicitly circular nature, but they can help to pin down what is being talked about. I presume that every reader has conscious experiences of his or her own. If all

goes well, these characterizations will help establish that it is just those that we are talking about.

The subject matter is perhaps best characterized as ”the subjective quality of experience.” When we perceive, think, and act, there is a whir of causation and

information processing, but this processing does not usually go on in the dark. There is also an internal aspect; there is something it feels like to be a cognitive agent.

This internal aspect is conscious experience. Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experiences of the faintest background aromas; from hard

edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one’s tongue; from mundane sounds and smells to the encompassing grandeur of musical experience;

from the triviality of a nagging itch to the weight of a deep existential angst; from the specificity of the taste of peppermint to the generality of one’s experience of

selfhood. All these have a distinct experienced quality. All are prominent parts of the inner life of the mind.

We can say that a being is conscious if there is something it is like to be that being, to use a phrase made famous by Thomas Nagel. 1 Similarly, a mental state is

conscious if there is something it is like to be in that mental state. To put it another way, we can say that a mental state is conscious if it has a qualitative feel—an

associated quality of experience. These qualitative feels are also known as phenomenal qualities, or qualia for short.2 The problem of explaining these phenomenal

qualities is just the problem of explaining consciousness. This is the really hard part of the mindbody problem.

Why should there be conscious experience at all? It is central to a subjective viewpoint, but from an objective viewpoint it is utterly unexpected. Taking the objective

view, we can tell a story about how fields, waves, and particles in the spatiotemporal manifold interact in subtle ways, leading to the development of complex systems

such as brains. In principle, there is no deep philosophical mystery in the fact that these systems can process information in complex ways, react to stimuli with

sophisticated behavior, and even exhibit such complex capacities as learning, memory, and language. All this is impressive, but it is not metaphysically baffling. In

contrast, the existence of conscious experience seems to be a new feature from this viewpoint. It is not something that one would have predicted from the other

features alone.

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That is, consciousness is surprising. If all we knew about were the facts of physics, and even the facts about dynamics and information processing in complex

systems, there would be no compelling reason to postulate the existence of conscious experience. If it were not for our direct evidence in the firstperson case, the

hypothesis would seem unwarranted; almost mystical, perhaps. Yet we know, directly, that there is conscious experience. The question is, how do we reconcile it with

everything else we know?

Conscious experience is part of the natural world, and like other natural phenomena it cries out for explanation. There are at least two major targets of explanation

here. The first and most central is the very existence of consciousness. Why does conscious experience exist? If it arises from physical systems, as seems likely, how

does it arise? This leads to some more specific questions. Is consciousness itself physical, or is it merely a concomitant of physical systems? How widespread is

consciousness? Do mice, for example, have conscious experience?

A second target is the specific character of conscious experiences. Given that conscious experience exists, why do individual experiences have their particular nature?

When I open my eyes and look around my office, why do I have this sort of complex experience? At a more basic level, why is seeing red like this, rather than like

that? It seems conceivable that when looking at red things, such as roses, one might have had the sort of color experiences that one in fact has when looking at blue

things. Why is the experience one way rather than the other? Why, for that matter, do we experience the reddish sensation 3 that we do, rather than some entirely

different kind of sensation, like the sound of a trumpet?

When someone strikes middle C on the piano, a complex chain of events is set into place. Sound vibrates in the air and a wave travels to my ear. The wave is

processed and analyzed into frequencies inside the ear, and a signal is sent to the auditory cortex. Further processing takes place here: isolation of certain aspects of

the signal, categorization, and ultimately reaction. All this is not so hard to understand in principle. But why should this be accompanied by an experience? And why,

in particular, should it be accompanied by that experience, with its characteristic rich tone and timbre? These are two central questions that we would like a theory of

consciousness to answer.

Ultimately one would like a theory of consciousness to do at least the following: it should give the conditions under which physical processes give rise to

consciousness, and for those processes that give rise to consciousness, it should specify just what sort of experience is associated. And we would like the theory to

explain how it arises, so that the emergence of consciousness seems intelligible rather than magical. In the end, we would like the theory to enable us to see

consciousness as an integral part of the natural world. Currently it may be hard to see what such a theory would be like, but without such a theory we could not be

said to fully understand consciousness.

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Before proceeding, a note on terminology. The term ”consciousness” is ambiguous, referring to a number of phenomena. Sometimes it is used to refer to a cognitive

capacity, such as the ability to introspect or to report one’s mental states. Sometimes it is used synonymously with “awakeness.” Sometimes it is closely tied to our

ability to focus attention, or to voluntarily control our behavior. Sometimes “to be conscious of something” comes to the same thing as “to know about something.” All

of these are accepted uses of the term, but all pick out phenomena distinct from the subject I am discussing, and phenomena that are significantly less difficult to

explain. I will say more about these alternative notions of consciousness later, but for now, when I talk about consciousness, I am talking only about the subjective

quality of experience: what it is like to be a cognitive agent.

A number of alternative terms and phrases pick out approximately the same class of phenomena as “consciousness” in its central sense. These include “experience,”

“qualia,” “phenomenology,” “phenomenal,” “subjective experience,” and “what it is like.” Apart from grammatical differences, the differences among these terms are

mostly subtle matters of connotation. “To be conscious” in this sense is roughly synonymous with “to have qualia,” “to have subjective experience,” and so on. Any

differences in the class of phenomena picked out are insignificant. Like “consciousness,” many of these terms are somewhat ambiguous, but I will never use these terms

in the alternative senses. I will use all these phrases in talking about the central phenomenon of this book, but “consciousness” and “experience” are the most

straightforward terms, and it is these terms that will recur.

A Catalog of Conscious Experiences

Conscious experience can be fascinating to attend to. Experience comes in an enormous number of varieties, each with its own character. A farfromcomplete

catalog of the aspects of conscious experience is given in the following pretheoretical, impressionistic list. Nothing here should be taken too seriously as philosophy,

but it should help focus attention on the subject matter at hand.

Visual experiences. Among the many varieties of visual experience, color sensations stand out as the paradigm examples of conscious experience, due to their pure,

seemingly ineffable qualitative nature. Some color experiences can seem particularly striking, and so can be particularly good at focusing our attention on the mystery

of consciousness. In my environment now, there is a particularly rich shade of deep purple from a book on my shelf; an almost surreal shade of green in a photograph

of ferns on my wall; and a sparkling array of bright red, green, orange, and blue lights on a Christmas

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tree that I can see through my window. But any color can be aweprovoking if we attend to it, and reflect upon its nature. Why should it feel like that? Why should it

feel like anything at all? How could I possibly convey the nature of this color experience to someone who has not had such an experience?

Other aspects of visual experience include the experience of shape, of size, of brightness, and of darkness. A particularly subtle aspect is the experience of depth. As a

child, one of my eyes had excellent vision, but the other was very poor. Because of my one good eye, the world looked crisp and sharp, and it certainly seemed three

dimensional. One day, I was fitted with glasses, and the change was remarkable. The world was not much sharper than before, but it suddenly looked more three

dimensional: things that had depth before somehow got deeper, and the world seemed a richer place. If you cover one eye and then uncover it, you can get an idea of

the change. In my previous state, I would have said that there was no way for the depth of my vision to improve; the world already seemed as threedimensional as it

could be. The change was subtle, almost ineffable, but extremely striking. Certainly there is an intellectual story one can tell about how binocular vision allows

information from each eye to be consolidated into information about distances, thus enabling more sophisticated control of action, but somehow this causal story does

not reveal the way the experience felt. Why that change in processing should be accompanied by such a remaking of my experience was mysterious to me as a ten

yearold, and is still a source of wonder today.

Auditory experiences. In some ways, sounds are even stranger than visual images. The structure of images usually corresponds to the structure of the world in a

straightforward way, but sounds can seem quite independent. My telephone receives an incoming call, an internal device vibrates, a complex wave is set up in the air

and eventually reaches my eardrum, and somehow, almost magically, I hear a ring. Nothing about the quality of the ring seems to correspond directly to any structure

in the world, although I certainly know that it originated with the speaker, and that it is determined by a waveform. But why should that waveform, or even these neural

firings, have given rise to a sound quality like that?

Musical experience is perhaps the richest aspect of auditory experience, although the experience of speech must be close. Music is capable of washing over and

completely absorbing us, surrounding us in a way that a visual field can surround us but in which auditory experiences usually do not. One can analyze aspects of

musical experience by breaking the sounds we perceive into notes and tones with complex interrelationships, but the experience of music somehow goes beyond this.

A unified qualitative experience arises

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Image not available.

Figure 1.1.

Effability and ineffability in olfactory

experience.

(Calvin and Hobbes © Watterson. Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.

from a chord, but not from randomly selected notes. An old piano and a faroff oboe can combine to produce an unexpectedly haunting experience. As always, when

we reflect, we ask the question: why should that feel like this?

Tactile experiences. Textures provide another of the richest quality spaces that we experience: think of the feel of velvet, and contrast it to the texture of cold metal,

or a clammy hand, or a stubbly chin. All of these have their own unique quality. The tactile experiences of water, of cotton candy, or of another person’s lips are

different again.

Olfactory experiences. Think of the musty smell of an old wardrobe, the stench of rotting garbage, the whiff of newly mown grass, the warm aroma of freshly baked

bread. Smell is in some ways the most mysterious of all the senses, due to the rich, intangible, indescribable nature of smell sensations. Ackermann (1990) calls it ”the

mute sense; the one without words.” While there is something ineffable about any sensation, the other senses have properties that facilitate some description. Visual

and auditory experiences have a complex combinatorial structure that can be described. Tactile and taste experiences generally arise from direct contact with some

object, and a rich descriptive vocabulary has been built up by reference to these objects. Smell has little in the way of apparent structure and often floats free of any

apparent object, remaining a primitive presence in our sensory manifold. (Perhaps animals might do better [Figure 1.1].) The primitiveness is perhaps partly due to the

slotandkey process by which our olfactory receptors are sensitive to various kinds of molecules. It seems arbitrary that a given sort of molecule should give rise to

this sort of sensation, but give rise it does.

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Taste experiences. Psychophysical investigations tell us that there are only four independent dimensions of taste perception: sweet, sour, bitter, and salt. But this four

dimensional space combines with our sense of smell to produce a great variety of possible experiences: the taste of Turkish Delight, of curried blackeyed pea salad, 4

of a peppermint Lifesaver, of a ripe peach.

Experiences of hot and cold. An oppressively hot, humid day and a frosty winter’s day produce strikingly different qualitative experiences. Think also of the heat

sensations on one’s skin from being close to a fire, and the hotcold sensation that one gets from touching ultracold ice.

Pain. Pain is a paradigm example of conscious experience, beloved by philosophers. Perhaps this is because pains form a very distinctive class of qualitative

experiences, and are difficult to map directly onto any structure in the world or in the body, although they are usually associated with some part of the body. Because

of this, pains can seem even more subjective than most sensory experiences. There are a great variety of pain experiences, from shooting pains and fierce burns

through sharp pricks to dull aches.

Other bodily sensations. Pains are only the most salient kind of sensations associated with particular parts of the body. Others include headaches (which are perhaps

a class of pain), hunger pangs, itches, tickles, and the experience associated with the need to urinate. Many bodily sensations have an entirely unique quality, different

in kind from anything else in our experience: think of orgasms, or the feeling of hitting one’s funny bone. There are also experiences associated with proprioception, the

sense of where one’s body is in space.

Mental imagery. Moving ever inward, toward experiences that are not associated with particular objects in the environment or the body but that are in some sense

generated internally, we come to mental images. There is often a rich phenomenology associated with visual images conjured up in one’s imagination, though not nearly

as detailed as those derived from direct visual perception. There are also the interesting colored patterns that one gets when one closes one’s eyes and squints, and the

strong afterimages that one gets after looking at something bright. One can have similar kinds of auditory ”images” conjured up by one’s imagination, and even tactile,

olfactory, and gustatory images, although these are harder to pin down and their associated qualitative feel is usually fainter.

Conscious thought. Some of the things we think and believe do not have any particular qualitative feel associated with them, but many do. This ap

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plies particularly to explicit, occurrent thoughts that one thinks to oneself, and to various thoughts that affect one’s stream of consciousness. It is often hard to pin down

just what the qualitative feel of an occurrent thought is, but it is certainly there. There is something it is like to be having such thoughts.

When I think of a lion, for instance, there seems to be a whiff of leonine quality to my phenomenology: what it is like to think of a lion is subtly different from what it is

like to think of the Eiffel tower. More obviously, cognitive attitudes such as desire often have a strong phenomenal flavor. Desire seems to exert a phenomenological

”tug,” and memory often has a qualitative component, as with the experience of nostalgia or regret.

Emotions. Emotions often have distinctive experiences associated with them. The sparkle of a happy mood, the weariness of a deep depression, the redhot glow of a

rush of anger, the melancholy of regret: all of these can affect conscious experience profoundly, although in a much less specific way than localized experiences such as

sensations. These emotions pervade and color all of our conscious experiences while they last.

Other more transient feelings lie partway between emotions and the more obviously cognitive aspects of mind. Think of the rush of pleasure one feels when one gets a

joke. Another example is the feeling of tension one gets when watching a suspense movie, or when waiting for an important event. The butterflies in one’s stomach that

can accompany nervousness also fall into this class.

The sense of self. One sometimes feels that there is something to conscious experience that transcends all these specific elements: a kind of background hum, for

instance, that is somehow fundamental to consciousness and that is there even when the other components are not. This phenomenology of self is so deep and

intangible that it sometimes seems illusory, consisting in nothing over and above specific elements such as those listed above. Still, there seems to be something to the

phenomenology of self, even if it is very hard to pin down.

This catalog covers a number of bases, but leaves out as much as it puts in. I have said nothing, for instance, about dreams, arousal and fatigue, intoxication, or the

novel character of other druginduced experiences. There are also rich experiences that derive their character from the combination of two or many of the components

described above. I have mentioned the combined effects of smell and taste, but an equally salient example is the combined experience of music and emotion, which

interact in a subtle, difficulttoseparate way. I have also left aside the unity of conscious experience—the way that all of these experiences seem to be tied together as

the experience of a single experiencer. Like the sense of self, this unity sometimes

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seems illusory—it is certainly harder to pin down than any specific experiences—but there is a strong intuition that unity is there.

Sad to say, we will not again be involved this closely with the rich varieties of conscious experience. In addressing the philosophical mysteries associated with

conscious experience, a simple color sensation raises the problems as deeply as one’s experience of a Bach chorale. The deep issues cut across these varieties in a

way that renders consideration of the nature of specific experiences not especially relevant. Still, this brief look at the rich varieties of conscious experience should help

focus attention on just what it is that is under discussion, and provides a stock of examples that can be kept in mind during more abstract discussion. 5

2—

The Phenomenal and the Psychological Concepts of Mind

Conscious experience is not all there is to the mind. To see this, observe that although modern cognitive science has had almost nothing to say about consciousness, it

has had much to say about mind in general. The aspects of mind with which it is concerned are different. Cognitive science deals largely in the explanation of behavior,

and insofar as it is concerned with mind at all, it is with mind construed as the internal basis of behavior, and with mental states construed as those states relevant to the

causation and explanation of behavior. Such states may or may not be conscious. From the point of view of cognitive science, an internal state responsible for the

causation of behavior is equally mental whether it is conscious or not.

At the root of all this lie two quite distinct concepts of mind. The first is the phenomenal concept of mind. This is the concept of mind as conscious experience, and of

a mental state as a consciously experienced mental state. This is the most perplexing aspect of mind and the aspect on which I will concentrate, but it does not exhaust

the mental. The second is the psychological concept of mind. This is the concept of mind as the causal or explanatory basis for behavior. A state is mental in this

sense if it plays the right sort of causal role in the production of behavior, or at least plays an appropriate role in the explanation of behavior. According to the

psychological concept, it matters little whether a mental state has a conscious quality or not. What matters is the role it plays in a cognitive economy.

On the phenomenal concept, mind is characterized by the way it feels; on the psychological concept, mind is characterized by what it does. There should be no

question of competition between these two notions of mind. Neither of them is the correct analysis of mind. They cover different phenomena, both of which are quite

real.

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I will sometimes speak of the phenomenal and psychological ”aspects” of mind, and sometimes of the “phenomenal mind” and the “psychological mind.” At this early

stage, I do not wish to beg any questions about whether the phenomenal and the psychological will turn out to be the same thing. Perhaps every phenomenal state is a

psychological state, in that it plays a significant role in the causation and explanation of behavior, and perhaps every psychological state has an intimate relation to the

phenomenal. For now, all that counts is the conceptual distinction between the two notions: what it means for a state to be phenomenal is for it to feel a certain way,

and what it means for a state to be psychological is for it to play an appropriate causal role. These distinct notions should not be conflated, at least at the outset.

A specific mental concept can usually be analyzed as a phenomenal concept, a psychological concept, or as a combination of the two. For instance, sensation, in its

central sense, is best taken as a phenomenal concept: to have a sensation is to have a state with a certain sort of feel. On the other hand, the concepts of learning and

memory might best be taken as psychological. For something to learn, at a first approximation, is for it to adapt its behavioral capacities appropriately in response to

certain kinds of environmental stimulation. In general, a phenomenal feature of the mind is characterized by what it is like for a subject to have that feature, while a

psychological feature is characterized by an associated role in the causation and/or explanation of behavior.

Of course, this usage of the term “psychological” is a stipulation: it arises from identifying psychology with cognitive science as described above. The everyday concept

of a “psychological state” is probably broader than this, and may well include elements of the phenomenal. But nothing will rest on my use of the term.

A Potted History

The phenomenal and the psychological aspects of mind have a long history of being conflated. René Descartes may have been partly responsible for this. With his

notorious doctrine that the mind is transparent to itself, he came close to identifying the mental with the phenomenal. Descartes held that every event in the mind is a

cogitatio, or a content of experience. To this class he assimilated volitions, intentions, and every type of thought. In his reply to the Fourth Set of Objections, he

wrote:

As to the fact that there can be nothing in the mind, in so far as it is a thinking thing, of which it is not aware, this seems to me to be selfevident. For there is nothing that we can

understand to be in the mind, regarded in this way, that is not a thought or dependent on a thought. If it were not a thought nor

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dependent on a thought it would not belong to the mind qua thinking thing; and we cannot have any thought of which we are not aware at the very moment it is in us.

If Descartes did not actually identify the psychological with the phenomenal, he at least assumed that everything psychological that is worthy of being called mental has

a conscious aspect. 6 To Descartes, the notion of an unconscious mental state was a contradiction.

Progress in psychological theory rather than in philosophy was responsible for drawing the two aspects of mind apart. As recently as a century ago, psychologists such

as Wilhelm Wundt and William James were recognizably Cartesian in that they used introspection to investigate the causes of behavior, and developed psychological

theories on the basis of introspective evidence. In this fashion, phenomenology was made the arbiter of psychology. But developments soon after established the

psychological as an autonomous domain.

Most notably, Sigmund Freud and his contemporaries solidified the idea that many activities of the mind are unconscious, and that there can be such things as

unconscious beliefs and desires. The very fact that this notion seemed coherent is evidence that a nonphenomenal analysis of thought was being used. It appears that

Freud construed the notions causally. Desire, very roughly, was implicitly construed as the sort of state that brings about a certain kind of behavior associated with the

object of the desire. Belief was construed according to its causal role in a similar way. Of course Freud did not make these analyses explicit, but something along these

lines clearly underlies his use of the notions. Explicitly, he recognized that accessibility to consciousness is not essential to a state’s relevance in the explanation of

behavior, and that a conscious quality is not constitutive of something’s being a belief or a desire. These conclusions rely on a notion of mentality that is independent of

phenomenal notions.

Around the same time, the behaviorist movement in psychology had thoroughly rejected the introspectionist tradition. A new ”objective” brand of psychological

explanation was developed, with no room for consciousness in its explanations. This mode of explanation had only partial success, but it established the idea that

psychological explanation can proceed while the phenomenal is ignored. Behaviorists differed in their theoretical positions: some recognized the existence of

consciousness but found it irrelevant to psychological explanation, and some denied its existence altogether. Many went further, denying the existence of any kind of

mental state. The official reason for this was that internal states were supposed to be irrelevant in the explanation of behavior, which could be carried out entirely in

external terms. Perhaps a deeper reason is that all mental notions were tainted with the disreputable odor of the phenomenal.

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In any case, these two developments established as orthodoxy the idea that explanation of behavior is in no way dependent on phenomenal notions. The move from

behaviorism to computational cognitive science for the most part preserved this orthodoxy. Although the move brought back a role for internal states, which could

even be called ”mental” states, there was nothing particularly phenomenal about them. These states were admissible precisely on the grounds of their relevance in the

explanation of behavior; any associated phenomenal quality was at best beside the point. The concept of the mental as psychological thus had center stage.

In philosophy, the shift in emphasis from the phenomenal to the psychological was codified by Gilbert Ryle (1949), who argued that all our mental concepts can be

analyzed in terms of certain kinds of associated behavior, or in terms of dispositions to behave in certain ways. 7 This view, logical behaviorism, is recognizably the

precursor of much of what passes for orthodoxy in contemporary philosophy of psychology. In particular, it was the most explicit codification of the link between

mental concepts and the causation of behavior.

Ryle did not put this theory forward as an analysis of just some mental concepts. He intended all of them to fall within its grasp. It seemed to many people, as it seems

to me, that this view is a nonstarter as an analysis of our phenomenal concepts, such as sensation and consciousness itself. To many, it seemed clear that when we talk

about phenomenal states, we are certainly not talking about our behavior, or about any behavioral disposition. But in any case, Ryle’s analysis provided a suggestive

approach to many other mental notions, such as believing, enjoying, wanting, pretending, and remembering.

Apart from its problems with phenomenal states, Ryle’s view had some technical problems. First, it is natural to suppose that mental states cause behavior, but if

mental states are themselves behavioral or behavioral dispositions, as opposed to internal states, then it is hard to see how they could do the job. Second, it was

argued (by Chisholm [1957] and Geach [1957]) that no mental state could be defined by a single range of behavioral dispositions, independent of any other mental

states. For example, if one believes that it is raining, one’s behavioral dispositions will vary depending on whether one has the desire to get wet. It is therefore

necessary to invoke other mental states in characterizing the behavioral dispositions associated with a given sort of mental state.

These problems were finessed by what has become known as functionalism, which was developed by David Lewis (1966) and most thoroughly by David

Armstrong (1968).8 On this view, a mental state is defined wholly by its causal role: that is, in terms of the kinds of stimulation that tend to produce it, the kind of

behavior it tends to produce, and the way it interacts with other mental states. This view made mental states fully internal and

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DUALIST THEORIES OF MIND
AND BODY

Interactionism and Substance Dualism

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AN: 1365616 ; Jonathan Westphal.; The Mind-Body Problem
Account: s4264928.main.edsebook

Dualism is the anti
naturalist claim that the
mind and the body are
two separate and very
different things. The
two sorts are the non-
physical and the physical.

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Dualist theories of MinD anD BoDy 27

In addition, one important form of dualism tells us that
mind and body are distinct things that can exist indepen
dently of one another. Such independently existing things
have been called “substances” in the history of philosophy.
A substance is an individual thing that can exist by itself,
independently of other substances. Accordingly, substance
dualism is the view that mind and body are distinct in the
sense that they can exist independently of each other, or
are substances.

Interactionist substance dualism is the view that these
two substances or things exist and can interact causally.
So, for example, when the body takes in too much beer,
the mind becomes confused, and one’s mood may change.
Here the interactionist substance dualist will say that the
physical substance or thing called “the body” is interacting,
or certainly seeming to, with the nonphysical substance or
thing called “the mind.”

The body can exist without the mind, after burial. But
what about the other way round? We can imagine the mind
existing in the darkness after death, just as it exists in the
darkness after bedtime. Just as vividly as we are aware of
our mind in the darkness after lightsout, perhaps work
ing on little mathematics problems, or perhaps saying its
prayers, or thinking about this or that, so we can imagine
activity of these sorts continuing and going on after we
die. To some this is a comforting thought, to others un
nerving and alien.

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28 Chapter 2

There is also a thought experiment that we can per
form that is suggestive of dualism. Imagine that I wake
up, as usual, and open my eyes, or think I do. To my left
I see my cup of coffee in a clean white mug, steaming a
bit and smelling good. “Great,” I say to myself, “time for
coffee.” I glance down the bed, and I am surprised, be
cause it looks unrumpled and perfectly made, as it was
the night before. Things begin to get even odder when
I notice that where my feet should be sticking up under
the covers, the cover is completely flat. The next odd
thing I see is that my torso also does not make a lump
under the covers. When my wife pulls back the cov
ers and asks whether she can hand me the coffee, I be
come most alarmed: I see no body at all where my body
should be. Is this a nightmare? No, I am fully awake, but
my body seems to have vanished in the night. It is not
merely that it is invisible. It simply isn’t there. It has dis
appeared. Perhaps it no longer exists. Have I turned into
a pure consciousness? What philosophers call my mind
or consciousness (though these most certainly are not
the same thing), including my thoughts and visual and
tactile sensations, and all the other sensations, of mo
tion and action, is still there, unchanged. I still have the
chronic feeling of pain in my back, where my back ought
to be, but seem to be missing the back itself. What am I
supposed to think? It seems natural to say that my body
has gone, but that my mind is still there. I now see that

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Dualist theories of MinD anD BoDy 29

my mind and my body are distinct, then, for my mind
can exist without my body.

I can imagine all this; and, more importantly, it is all
possible, in the sense that a story of waking up without
a body does not seem to be a contradictory story. Free
dom from contradiction, rather than imaginability, is the
proper test of possibility. If there is no contradiction in the
description of an event, then the event is possible. Sup
pose that it is possible that I shall win the lottery. I can
imagine that I shall win it, but that is not the important
thing. The important thing is that I can describe myself
winning tomorrow, going to the office of the lottery, pre
senting my lottery ticket, picking up my winnings, and so
on, and among the descriptions of all these happy events
there is no contradiction. Imaginability may be an indica
tion of describability, but it does not guarantee it, whereas
describability—in the sense of description genuinely free
from contradiction—does demonstrate possibility.

By this test we should conclude that it is possible that
the mind and body should exist without one another. It
is possible that I should wake up with my mind and con
sciousness intact and my body gone. That possibility is the
central claim of dualism. It is significant that the initial
claim is not that they do exist without one another, since
for the moment anyway they are somehow stuck together,
but that they can. If they can exist independently, it does
not follow that both do, or that they will not exist at the

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30 Chapter 2

same time. We can imagine that mind and body can exist
independently of one another, but that at death both of
them get destroyed at once, though by two different sets of
forces, one physical and one nonphysical, assuming we can
make sense of the idea of nonphysical forces.

The main difficulty for interactionism is one that
stumped Descartes. How can the mind and body interact, if
one is physical and therefore spatial, and the other is non
physical and therefore nonspatial? Of course, it is possible
to deny that the mind is nonphysical, and I will discuss this
important option in the next chapter. But for the moment
we are considering the view that the mind is nonphysical
and the body is physical, and that the two interact. The
question is, how? How can mind and body interact if one is
physical and the other is not, given that physical and non
physical things cannot interact? This is the objection to in
teractionist substance dualism made by Princess Elisabeth
and Gassendi, and it is hard for interactionist substance
dualism to meet it. Perhaps it is impossible.

There have been some contemporary attempts to
make dualism work, but on the whole they have been a bit
disappointing. E. J. Lowe, for example, argues for what he
regards as a new picture of psychophysical dualist interac
tionism.1 He notes that the structure of the causal chains
of events is a branching structure, but since the chains get
intertwined the structure as a whole has no ends. So men
tal events cannot interact or indeed fail to interact with

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Dualist theories of MinD anD BoDy 31

the tips and initiate causal action, since there are no tips!
When I make to lift my arm, the tree structure as a whole
is activated, or some significant part of, but it is as a result
not of this but of the desire or wish or intention to move
my arm that my arm moves. The activation of the neuro
physiological causal tree explains the exact way in which
the movement of my arm occurs, say, jerkily or smoothly,
but it does not explain that it occurs in the first place. The
tree “mediates” the relationship between mind and action.
But mediation is a causal relationship. It remains true that
what explains the fact that I raise my hand is the decision
to raise it. So there is a direct action of the mental on the
physical that still needs explaining. Lowe claims that my
mind communicates not with the tips of the tree of causal
events in the brain, since there are none, but with the
whole tree, and explains the existence of the whole tree
structure of neurophysiological events. But the problem is
just the same. How does the mind activate the whole tree?
If interacting with the tips of the tree is impossible, so is
interacting with the tree as a whole.

Another odd feature of this account is that the inten
tion and the activation of the tree of events take place
at the same time, the one responsible for the how of the
movement, and the other responsible for the fact of it. This
seems fishy.

Moreover, Lowe’s version of dualist interactionism
also does not eliminate the charming “pairing problem”

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32 Chapter 2

that arises for dualism.2 My mind issues the wish for my
arm to rise, and the wish instructs my treestructure of
events to begin. Suppose you are standing next to me. How
is it that my mind doesn’t go into the wrong tree struc
ture—yours—and not mine? Or how come it doesn’t go
into both, like a radio broadcast? If mind and body are
genuinely distinct, then how is my mind paired with my
brain and your mind with yours? Why does my arm rise
and not yours?

Property Dualism

There is an answer to the pairing problem, but it means
abandoning substance dualism. For dualists who are
daunted by the problems facing substance dualism, an
other kind of dualism may seem to afford some relief. It is
called property dualism.

The property dualist sees clearly the difficulties of two
interacting but distinct substances, and proposes instead
a dualism not of substances or things but of their proper-
ties. There is only one substance, says the property dualist,
but it has two sorts of properties, physical and nonphysi
cal. In one version of property dualism—the physical
ist version—the mind is physical. It is the relevant part
of the brain for causal interaction. But it has two sorts of
properties.

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Dualist theories of MinD anD BoDy 3

Consider the fact that a piece of art such as a painting
is physical, but it can be said to have nonphysical proper
ties. Though it is made of paint and wood and canvas, the
painting can be said to be: accurate; a bit of a caricature;
witty; slightly derivative though stylistically effective; and
a bit dark. These are aesthetic properties, not physical
ones. But there are not two things or substances, a can
vas and a work of art. If someone attacks a painting with a
knife, as people sometimes do, then it might lose some or
all of its aesthetic properties. And we cannot say that the
higherlevel properties of being witty or being a bit dark are
identical with the paint and wood and canvas, though they
are dependent on them.

Mental properties, such as having a thought, are
grounded in the physical brain or mind, says the physicalist
property dualist, but they are not themselves reducible to
physical properties. If my brain is damaged, my capacity
for thought can be impaired. But according to the property
dualist, it does not follow that mental properties, such as
my having a thought, are physical.

Now the property dualist is in a position to respond to
the pairing problem that attacks substance dualism. Why
do my mental activities, if detached from my body, not
cause things to happen in your body? How do my mental
activities reach the correct destination? Why is this mind
connected with this body and not some other?

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34 Chapter 2

The property dualist denies that the mind and the
body are distinct, since the mind is a physical thing. Mind
and body can then interact nicely. Though physical and
nonphysical substances cannot interact, the mind is not
nonphysical; it is physical. But it does have nonphysical
properties. These properties, however, do not themselves
have effects on the body.

Everything seems to be in order. But there is a large
fly in this ointment. Although it may be true that abstract
triangles and aesthetic properties do not have actual ef
fects, in the case of the mind, mental properties, such as
thoughts and feelings, most certainly do initiate effects.
Intent, premeditation, or mens rea, the “guilty mind” which
is presumably something mental (since “mens” is just the
Latin word for mind, and from which the English “mind”
and “mental” are derived), is an element that is necessary
to demonstrate certain classes of crimes, most notably
murder. The evil intentions in the mind are taken to be the
properties of the guilty mind that result in the unlawful
deed. And the physicalist property dualist has no way to
account for these.

Parallelism

There is another dualist possibility, however: parallelism.
On this view, mind and body are distinct, but they do not

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Dualist theories of MinD anD BoDy 35

interact. We can accept dualism, including the proposition
that the mind and body can exist independently of one an
other, along with the proposition that one is physical and
the other is nonphysical, and at the same time reject the
proposition that they interact. One good reason we can
give is that “Physical and nonphysical things cannot inter
act,” and we have seen exactly why this is such an appeal
ing proposition, starting with the arguments offered by
Princess Elisabeth and Gassendi. We simply deduce “Mind
and body cannot interact” from “Physical and nonphysical
things cannot interact,” given the further premises that
the mind is a nonphysical thing and that the body is a phys
ical thing. We arrive at:

(1) The mind is a nonphysical thing.
(2) The body is a physical thing.
(4) Physical and nonphysical things cannot interact.

As solutions go, this one is as logically appealing and as
successful as any other. From (1), (2), and (4), it certainly
does follow that mind and body cannot interact, and hence
that they do not interact. But how then are we to account
for the appearance that they do interact? It strains belief
to suppose that they do not, one might think, because the
fact of mind–body interaction is so common and famil
iar as to be undeniable. There is the effect of alcohol on
mental state, for example, not to mention drugs of various

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36 Chapter 2

sorts. There is the effect of the mind on the body, most
obviously of cases of intentional action, but also in cases,
say, of a mental state such as blind rage leading to unhappy
physical consequences. Psychiatry and psychology are full
of examples of interactions, in both directions.

What does parallelism have to say to all this? It is per
haps surprising, but these examples represent no threat
whatsoever to the parallelist view. The parallelist can
simply assert that though there is no interaction between
mind and body, there is a correlation between what hap
pens in the body and what happens in the mind wherever
we thought there was an interaction. The drinking of beer
is followed by the fogginess of the mind, or correlated
with it. And this is a wellestablished empirical fact that
is neutral with respect to interactionism and parallelism.
What we must not do, says the parallelist, is to imagine
the body emptying beer into the mind, or, what is equally
absurd, getting the neurons to fire into the mind, or in
some literal sense sending physical messages directly into
the mind, so that we have the ridiculous picture of electri
cal signals going off in the mind as well as in the body. We
have no way at all of picturing such an event, as the mind
is nonphysical and the signals are physical. We would
then be imagining something that does not have a posi
tion in space (the mind) containing objects that do have
positions in space (signals from the neurons). As A. J.
Ayer has observed,

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Dualist theories of MinD anD BoDy 37

The physiologist’s story is complete in itself. The
characters that figure in it are nerve cells, electrical
impulses, and so forth. It has no place for an entirely
different cast, of sensations, thoughts, feelings, and
the other personae of the mental play. … Nor are there
such temporal gaps in the procession of nervous
impulses as would leave room for mental characters
to intervene. In short, the two stories [mental and
physical] will not mix. It is like trying to play Hamlet,
not without the Prince of Denmark, but with Pericles,
Prince of Tyre. Each is an interpretation of certain
phenomena and they are connected by the fact that,
in certain conditions, when one of them is true, the
other is true also.3

The impossibility of physical and nonphysical things
interacting, asserted in proposition (4) of the initial tetrad,
does not prevent the correlation of the events within the
physical body and the nonphysical mind. What the paral
lelist objects to is the idea that the electrical impulses or
neural activity do in any literal sense sidle right up along
side the mind, and, from their close proximity, interact.
There can be no literal proximity to the mind, if “literal
proximity” is spatial contiguity.

In the history of the mind–body problem, parallelism
arose partly as a result of a vivid awareness of the reasons
for which Descartes’s interactionist dualism could not

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38 Chapter 2

work. The dualism made the interaction impossible, and
behold: the mind–body problem was born. The parallelists
were committed to dualism. So what was left? Mind and
body could not interact, just because dualism was true, they
thought. But mind and body do seem to operate in tan
dem—synchronized, as it were. When the desire for cof
fee enters the mind, it is then that the body, or part of it,
reaches out and picks up the cup of coffee. Then the mind
says to itself, “Enough. No more,” and the body stops pour
ing the coffee into its throat, and puts the cup down. But
why does it do it then, at exactly that moment? How has
the mind made it come to pass that the body stops pouring
coffee down its throat?

Causal interaction, said the parallelists, just is syn
chronization. The most celebrated and extraordinary met
aphor for this idea to appear in the postCartesian wave
of parallelism in seventeenth and eighteenthcentury
France was the image of two clocks beating and striking in
synchrony, satisfying the very French desire for order and
harmony that existed at that time. The parallelists invite
us to imagine two synchronized clocks, keeping perfect
time together. When one strikes three o’clock, say, so does
the other. If we were to imagine a slight time lag between
them, it might seem tempting to think that the clock that
strikes first makes the second clock strike. That would be a
false inference, a fallacy that actually has a name: post hoc
ergo propter hoc, or after this therefore because of this.

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Dualist theories of MinD anD BoDy 39

Leibniz was the most celebrated of the parallelists in
the seventeenth and eighteenth century. He may have
been struck by a wellpublicized phenomenon observed by
his teacher Huygens (himself a pupil of Descartes), who
was the inventor of the pendulum clock. Huygens had been
ill in bed, and while lying there had noticed that the pen
dulums of two clocks mounted in one case always ended
up synchronized, though in opposite directions (“antisyn
chronized”) irrespective of their starting points, displaying
what he called an “odd kind of sympathy.” The clocks were
somehow regulating one another, but just how remained
a mystery until 2002. In that year a team of scientists
from Georgia Institute of Technology were able to explain
the phenomenon with a sophisticated mathematical and
physical model based on small vibrations in the case that
interfere with one another.4 After ruling out air motion ex
perimentally, Huygens had himself suspected but not been
able to prove that the phenomenon was caused by small
motions in the clock case, and the Georgia team proved
him right.

Leibniz went considerably further with the thought,
however. Mind and body do indeed act as though they
were synchronized, and although they do not affect one
another in a literal way, for him synchronization is causa
tion. Nothing could go into or out of a “substance,” in the
terminology of early modern philosophy, or a genuinely
unified individual thing, which in this respect is rather

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40 Chapter 2

like an indivisible atom. The individual thing is “window
less,” in Leibniz’s metaphor. According to him the “mental
pendulum” and the “physical pendulum” are synchronized
in their behavior—fortunately not antisynchronized—
though not by interaction. The synchronization comes
with their initial creation by God from the substances’
“complete individual concepts,” which detail everything
that will happen to them throughout their futures. This
view, of course, has implications for freedom of the will,
in which Leibniz was keenly interested. What concerns us,
however, is the fact that the whole universe is arranged so
that what we observe of it manifests all sorts of remark
able synchronizations. These include but are not limited
to the synchronizations of the mind and the body, which,
along with all the other synchronizations that constitute
the laws of universe, are designed to bring about the best
possible universe over time.

There is a big difference between Leibniz’s views and
those of the socalled occasionalists. The occasionalists
took the view that parallelism is true, but that physical
events in the body are the occasion for God to act in the
mind, and vice versa. The occasionalists, such as Geulincx,
who before Leibniz had used the simile of the two clocks
to illustrate parallelism, were impressed by the absolute
power of God, and wanted to make all our actions and ev
ery other action in the world into actions whose motive
or moving power is God. That this uncommonsensical and

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Dualist theories of MinD anD BoDy 41

implausible view survived as long as it did is a testament
to the religious faith of the time, and to the dedication
of the occasionalists in following their reason through to
where it led, or seemed to lead. On the other hand, as Leib
niz pointed out, the continuous need for action on God’s
part every time mind and body interact makes for a very
hardworking God, and it is itself unacceptable on religious
grounds as well as the ground of philosophical economy
and the theological drive toward simplicity and piety.

The Role of the Conservation Laws

Another historically important point about interaction
needs to be made on behalf of those who, like the paral
lelists, wish to deny that mind and body interact. It has to
do with the laws of conservation in physics. Among these
laws, which seem to be about as well established as any
thing could be in physics, the conservation of mass and en
ergy tells us that in a “closed” system changing over time,
the net total of mass or energy in the system stays the
same. The system as a whole neither gains nor loses mass
or energy. (There are particles with no mass, but they must
have some energy, since energy is a function of frequency.)

Suppose that the human body is a closed physical sys
tem. In other words, it acts as it does because of the physi
cal energy and mass that it contains, and it is insulated

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42 Chapter 2

from the effects of outside energy. This has been called
“the causal closure of the physical.” If we want to change
anything within the system, we will either have to use the
energy that is already within the system, or we will have to
introduce energy from the outside. If we use the energy in
the system, then the mind, since it is not within the body,
can have no effect on the body. If we do not use the energy
already in the system, then mass and energy are not con
served, or the system is not closed.

However, if the mind is to effect a change in the body,
then it must presumably introduce physical energy into
the body. But according to our first proposition, the mind
is nonphysical, and so it cannot expend physical energy.
Here we can see that the conserved mass and energy are
playing the same role as linear dimensions did in our first
formulation of the mind–body problem. Lack of linear di
mensions and spatial location on the part of the nonphysi
cal is what makes the physical and nonphysical unable to
interact. But the same result is obtained if we make mass
or energy the defining characteristics of physical things.
Physical and nonphysical things cannot interact. The body
will not accept nonphysical energy, and the mind will not
accept physical energy, in both cases because of the causal
closure of the physical.

Versions of the four propositions are often if not al
ways there when the mind–body problem is discussed. A
specialized form is present when conservation laws are at

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Dualist theories of MinD anD BoDy 43

issue. Ernie Lepore and Barry Loewer,5 for example, ex
press the mind–body problem as the difficulty of fitting
together the following three propositions:

(5) The mind and the body are distinct.
(3b) The mental and the physical causally interact.
(4b) The physical is causally closed.

Roughly speaking, (1) (“The mind is a nonphysical
thing”) and (2) (“The body is a physical thing”) give us (5),
proposition (3b) works like proposition (3) (“Mind and
body interact”), and (4b) implies (4), that the mental and
the physical cannot interact. The problem is that the physi
cal world cannot reach out of itself into anything else that is
nonphysical, but it must somehow interact with the men
tal, which is nonphysical. Similarly, the mental world can
not reach out of itself into anything else that is nonmental,
but it must somehow interact with the physical, which is
nonmental. Describing the inability of the mind to reach
into the physical and of the body to reach into the mental is
a way of stating the existence of the law of conservation of
mass and energy, which has (4b) as a consequence. “Caus
ally closed” means that energy or mass from causes outside
the physical world, or outside the closed physical system,
cannot get into it, and that it cannot contribute energy and
mass to outside and nonphysical systems in such a way as
to deplete the net total of its own energy and mass.

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44 Chapter 2

Naturally, if the mind is physical, then the body plus
the mind can function as a closed system, and there is no
difficulty with the laws of conservation. This amounts to
denying (5), that the mind and body are physically distinct,
which they are not, according to the physicalist.

The only option that does not seem available, given
what physics has to say about conservation, is the denial
of (4b). So a physicalist will deny (5) and affirm (3b). This
involves the interesting claim that the mental is physical,
or a denial of the claim that the mind is nonphysical. A
parallelist, on the other hand, will affirm (4b) and deny
(3b), telling us that the mind and the body are indeed dis
tinct, but that they occupy parallel and noninteracting
realms.

The lesson so far is that we should be either parallelists
or physicalists, but not interactionists.

Epiphenomenalism, Emergentism, and Supervenience

There is another form of dualism that was especially
popular at the end of the nineteenth century. It has seen
a modest resurgence recently, in much more sophisticated
forms, though more as an object of study, perhaps, than
as a view actually to be believed. Known by its formidable
Greekderived name, epiphenomenalism, it is the claim that
mental events and the mind are “epiphenomena.” “Epi” is

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Dualist theories of MinD anD BoDy 45

a Greek prefix that means “on the occasion of” or “in addi
tion” to. “Phenomena” are the things that appear, or hap
pen, so epiphenomena are things that appear in addition to
what might be called the basic phenomena. For most epi
phenomenalists, if not all, the basic phenomena are those
of the physical world, and mental phenomena and events
are attendant on physical phenomena. Epiphenomenalism
is the view that physical events cause mental events but
mental events do not cause physical events.

There is an obvious comparison to be made with shad
ows. My hands curled up in the right way can be made to
cast a shadow that looks like an eagle’s head onto a wall or
screen. The shadow is dependent on my hands, but what
my hands do is not dependent on what the shadow does.
It would be amusing but physically difficult for the eagle
on the screen to open its beak, say, and force my fingers to
move. The image of the eagle projected onto the screen is
just a shadow.

Almost nobody holds or has held the reversed epiphe
nomenalist view that mental events cause physical ones
but not the other way round, and it is, I think, fairly obvi
ous why. For one thing, there are the obvious phenomena
to think about, such as brain damage. But at a deeper level
the epiphenomenalists are those physicalists who want to
be strict physicalists but who cannot quite see their way
to deny the existence of fully mental events, though they
also find it hard to see how mental events can exist at all. In

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Epiphenomenalism is
the view that physical
events cause mental
events but mental
events do not cause
physical events.

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Dualist theories of MinD anD BoDy 47

conformity with their physicalism, they then downgrade
the importance and causal power of mental events as far
as possible in the physical scheme of things.

Still, if epiphenomenalists are really physicalists un
der the skin, they are inconsistent ones, since epiphenom
enalism admits the existence of genuinely mental events.
There are mental events, it claims, but they have no causal
power, unlike physical events.

According to the Victorian biologist Thomas Henry
Huxley, our consciousness is a “collateral product” of the
“mechanism of the body” and “as completely without any
power of modifying the working of the body as the steam
whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive en
gine.”6 Volition too is an emotion that “indicates” physical
changes but does not “cause” them.

There is something clearly wrong with Huxley’s simile
of the steamwhistle, since nothing prevents us from rig
ging up a steamwhistle so that every time it blows, the
steam activates a fan rigged to an electrical circuit that
brakes the train, and that when the whistle is not blowing,
the train resumes its normal speed. The whistle then has
definite and specifiable physical effects, and there is noth
ing in the nature of the physical world to prevent this sort
of causal loop.

In the case of the mind or consciousness or soul, Hux
ley would rule out the causal loop. Yet why is it impossible?
Why is the mind causally inert? Huxley does not address

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48 Chapter 2

the question, but it certainly seems to push epiphenom
enalism hard in the direction of property dualism. For it
is an odd thing indeed, an odd substance, that can have no
effects whatsoever. Properties seem more suited than sub
stances to causal inactivity. Even so, one might think that
the property of being hot can cause me to have the property
of wanting a drink. Why do I have the property of wanting a
drink? Because I have the property of being hot.

We should keep clearly in mind the fact that epiphe
nomenalism is a form of dualism. It allows interaction
between mind and body in one direction, from mental to
physical, but not the other. But there is still a contradiction
here. Epiphenomenalism has cut the mind–body problem
down to half its original size, so to speak, but what re
mains is every bit as intractable as the original fullscale
version. We don’t have to deal with the mind acting on the
body, but how can the body act on the mind, if the mind is
nonphysical, and physical things cannot act on nonphysi
cal things? In fact I think epiphenomenalism counts as a
roughandready philosophy of mind, but not as a genuine
solution to the mind–body problem. This may explain why
philosophers have on the whole been less than interested
in it, and why it has been referred to as “the curse of epi
phenomenalism” by one writer (Stephen Law) in the phi
losophy of mind.7

Emergentism is a view of the relation between mind
and body of roughly the same kind as epiphenomenalism,

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Dualist theories of MinD anD BoDy 49

in the sense that the physical is dominant and the mental
is a sort of byproduct, but it is important to see what the
difference is between the two. Epiphenomenalism is a kind
of dualism, in which two separate kinds of events exist and
are causally related. With emergentism, the relation be
tween the mental and the physical is much closer. It should
perhaps be discussed later, in the next chapter, as a form of
physicalism, but it seems to me that the comparisons and
contrasts between epiphenomenalism and emergentism
are interesting ones.

There is a mystery, very much at the center of the
modern mind–body problem, of why it should be pain that
emerges from the brain areas that are activated by Aδ or C
fiber stimulation. (The Aδ fibers are associated with acute
and sharp pain, the C fibers with dull or burning pain.) But,
according to the emergentist, there simply is no answer to
the question why it is pain that ultimately emerges from
the brain areas that are activated by Aδ or C fiber stimula
tion, and not something else entirely. Pain does not emerge
from the stimulation of the fibers in the way that sixteen
ounces just turns into one pound; but then one wonders
how on earth it is related to the stimulation of the fibers.
Well, it emerges from them, comes the answer.

The emergentists both accept and deny (1), that the
mind is nonphysical. On the one hand, the mind is physi
cal, because it is really driven by the structures from which
it emerges. On the other hand, the mind is nonphysical,

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50 Chapter 2

because it has “emerged” from the physical. But how can
truly novel properties, such as pain, emerge from the stim
ulation of the fibers? If they “emerge” from the physical,
then they are nonphysical. But if they are genuinely non
physical, how can they “emerge,” and why do they need to?

It seems to me that the emergentists must make up
their minds. If with the mind we have a genuinely new
phenomenon, a nonphysical and nonspatial one that has
emerged like a butterfly out of the chrysalis of matter, then
it cannot affect the body, since the body has exclusively the
wrong kind of properties to interact with the mind, that is,
physical and spatial ones. From this point of view it is hard
to see how mind could emerge in the first place, since in
emerging it makes itself spatial. If, on the other hand, the
new phenomenon has a complete dependence on the phys
ical and spatial phenomena, and can engage with them, it
is hard to see how it is anything but them, and therefore
not a new and emergent property at all.

Emergentists accept the fact that mind can turn
around and do things to matter, but they do not explain
how this can happen if the mind has “emerged” and is not
physical. If the mind has emerged as nonphysical, we need
to understand the way in which it can then interact with
the physical. And that is the mind–body problem.

There is a concept that may seem to help with under
standing how something can both be nothing but its base
properties, and at the same time something emergent,

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Dualist theories of MinD anD BoDy 51

something in addition to the base properties. Many, even
most, emergentists have used the concept of supervenience
and been grateful for the light it casts on the relation be
tween mind and body. According to these emergentists the
mind supervenes on the body.

The concept of supervenience is a difficult one, but the
main idea is something like this. Suppose a property A su
pervenes on a property B. For example, some geometrical
or aesthetic property A supervenes on the properties, col
lectively B, for “base,” of a spatial figure or of painting, such
as being thusandsuch a closed figure, or having thusand
such colors, lines, and forms. We say that A supervenes on
B when there cannot be a change in A without there also
being a change in B. One cannot suppose the aesthetic
properties of the painting changing without the physical
properties having changed as well. If the aesthetic proper
ties are to differ, so too must the physical properties. In
this sense it can be said that the A-properties are generated
by the base properties.

The emergentists who make use of the concept of su
pervenience believe that (2) the proposition “The body is
physical,” but will reject (3), the proposition “Mind and
body interact.” Instead they will say that mind supervenes
on body, or more particularly on the part of the body with
the right kind of tissue, namely, the brain.

And yet there does seem to be a kind of causal
power possessed by the human mind and consciousness,

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52 Chapter 2

recognized in (3). Mind interacts with body, which is to
say it has effects in the physical world. Emergentism, even
with the more refined concept of supervenience on board,
cannot do justice to this causal power. The reason is that
emergentism is actually a form of physicalism, and it at
tempts to deny the existence of the nonphysical except in
a very diluted form that cannot accomplish what philoso
phers call “mental causation.”

The reason emergentism is not a very popular view is
that it is not a very clear one. On the one hand, the mind
“emerges” and engages in mental causation. On the other
hand, it is the creature of the forces from below on which it
supervenes, and cannot attain to any sort of causal power.

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PHYSICALIST THEORIES OF MIND

Behaviorism

Given the troubles of dualism, one may be tempted by what
is easily the most straightforward solution to the mind–
body problem: physicalism. On this view, everything that
exists is physical; so the mind is a physical thing, if it is a
thing. If proposition (1), that the mind is a nonphysical
thing, is false, which it is if everything is physical, then
the mind–body problem is solved. The mind is a physical
thing, and so there is nothing to stop it from interacting
with other physical things, including the body. It remains
true, however, that physical and nonphysical things, on
this view, cannot interact. But it doesn’t matter, since
there are no nonphysical things.

Well and good, but in what way is the mind supposed
to be a physical thing? There are a number of different
possibilities.

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54 Chapter 3

Behaviorism is the view that the mental is the behav-
ioral. Mind is behavior. The mind is the body, considered
from the point of view of its behavior. Some hardline be-
haviorists actually went so far as to deny the existence of
the mind and mental events, over and above behavior.
There is no mind, but only behavior. This is a very simple
but pretty extreme point of view that has not found much
favor among philosophers or scientists recently. Part of the
problem is that we do seem to be acquainted with our own
mental states, our thoughts and feelings, and they are not
nothing at all. Another part of the problem is that there do
seem to be obvious examples of an interaction from mind
to body.

A second and more reasonable version of behaviorism
took the line that, from a scientific point of view, we should
not study the mind and mental events, because they can-
not be directly observed; their existence must be inferred
from the external behavior of human subjects. This is not
the strongest line of thought, it has to be said, since many
entities studied in science cannot be observed directly, but
we infer their existence from their effects. Electricity is an
example. We know about it by watching lightning, for ex-
ample, or by understanding Maxwell’s equations, or how a
radio works.

Nevertheless, one can understand how, in the atmo-
sphere of the religiously oriented dualism that prevailed
in philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century,

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physiCalist theories of Mind 55

and which many scientifically oriented people found un-
congenial, the bold claim could be advanced, on behalf
of psychology, that science should allow as its subject
matter only what can be directly observed. This is cer-
tainly very different from saying that its subject matter
does not exist.

An even more reasonable variant of behaviorism is
that mind as such is not interesting or important, and its
study should be replaced by the study of behavior. There
is no mention in this view of what is directly observable.
It is almost like saying, “I am more interested in behavior
than I am in mind.” This is, of course, an impossible view to
rebut, if it is true that you are more interested in behavior
than in mind; but the question remains whether you should
be more interested in mind as such, or whether its study
would offer you some benefit.

This third and more reasonable line of thought, how-
ever, would make it impossible to solve the mind–body
problem in a way that is satisfactory for science, or even
to state it. We should not study or talk about minds,
so we will never be in a position to say either that the
mind is a nonphysical thing with any scientific authority,
or, for that matter, that it is a physical thing. Our first
proposition, that the mind is nonphysical, is one whose
truth or falsity we should not actively pursue, because its
truth or falsity is something that should not be talked
about!

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56 Chapter 3

There is a fourth form of behaviorism, however, that
is more appealing than any of the first three forms. It is
the view that the mind is behavior in the sense that any
proposition about the mind can be “translated” into a
proposition about behavior. So, for example, if I say “I am
tired,” I am reporting not the presence of an inner feeling
of drowsiness, but rather of a tendency or disposition to
stop work, to lie down, to close my eyes perhaps, to rest,
and so on. All of these things are external behavior, observ-
able by others and fully within the purview of science and
of common observation.

Gilbert Ryle wrote in his influential 1949 book The
Concept of Mind that

when we describe people as exercising qualities of
mind, we are not referring to occult episodes of
which their overt acts and utterances are effects;
we are referring to those overt acts and utterances
themselves.1

It is hard to believe, reading the admittedly rather few pas-
sages like this in his book, that Ryle was not a behaviorist,
and indeed he himself remarked of the book that when
he wrote it, “certainly one of my feet was pretty firmly
encased in this boot.”2 Nevertheless, there is more to the
story. Ryle writes in the passage above that when we talk
about minds, “we are not referring to occult episodes” (my

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physiCalist theories of Mind 57

emphasis); but there is a case to be made that all the same
he does not deny the existence of these episodes. Perhaps
he means that when we say publicly that a person is tired,
we are “referring,” not to that person’s private and inner
feeling of tiredness hidden from others, but rather to his
tendency or disposition to stop work, to lie down, to close
his eyes, to rest, and so on. This is not to deny that the in-
ner feeling exists. In chapter 6 I describe the other side of
Ryle’s view, his “dissolutionism” as it has been called, and
again take up the question whether he is to be considered
a full-blooded behaviorist.

What is wrong with the idea that the mind just is some
sort of behavior? One difficulty is that this view seems to
leave out what we think of as the “inner” life of thoughts
and feelings—the mind! Behaviorism solves the mind–
body problem by denying the mind in one way or another.
We can produce behavior without it, and without its rich
experience of sensation and perception, colors, sounds,
and tastes, for example, or qualia. We can easily imagine
a machine that reacts to red things just as we do, picking
them and eating them, perhaps, but which has no experi-
ence of the colors. It behaves as if it saw red, but it does not
have the experience. This has been called the “problem of
absent qualia.”

There are other twentieth-century philosophers who,
like Gilbert Ryle, might also seem to be offering behav-
iorist arguments but are not. A famous example is the

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58 Chapter 3

“beetle-in-the-box” part of the so-called private-language
argument in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
Wittgenstein is arguing that there could be no language
in which we could report our own private sensations.
Suppose, he writes, that everyone has a box with some-
thing in it, or perhaps nothing at all. There is a rule that
no one is allowed to look inside anyone else’s box. Every-
one calls what is in his own box a “beetle.” But where no
checking is allowed about what is in anyone else’s box,
the word “beetle” would not come to mean “an organ-
ism of the order Coleoptera, with hard fore-wings,” but
rather “whatever is in anyone’s box.” Yet Wittgenstein
explicitly denies that he is trying to deny the existence
of sensations, somethings in the boxes. The issue is one
of meaning.

Behaviorism does indeed solve the mind–body prob-
lem, very easily, by denying that the mind is a nonphysical
thing. Behaviorism simply denies proposition (1). So the
discussion at this point should turn to the question of how
plausible behaviorism itself is. The judgment of history, it
is fair to say, is “Not very.” One powerful reason is the prob-
lem of absent qualia, mentioned above. Another objection
is the possibility of the inverted spectrum and its analogues
in other sensory modalities. We can imagine people behav-
ing systematically in the right way, but having the “wrong”
experiences. Their “inner experience” might be of all the
colors, but with their positions in the visual field reversed

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Behaviorism does
indeed solve the
mind–body problem,
very easily, by denying
that the mind is a
nonphysical thing.

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60 Chapter 3

from ours. The subjects with inverted color experiences
would see a cyan green-blue color where we see red, a blue
where we see orange, and so on throughout color space.
But the behavior of these people would be the same as ours.
When we see red, and call it “red,” they see what we call
“cyan,” and call it “red,” and when we see cyan, and call it
“cyan,” they see red and call it “cyan.” Accordingly, having
the experience of red cannot be a matter of producing the
right behavior. Our subjects suffering from an inverted
spectrum behave around red just as we do, even calling it
“red,” but actually experience a green-blue cyan color. Ac-
cording to behaviorism, the subjects are experiencing red;
but this is false. Therefore, behaviorism is false.

There are other overwhelming arguments against be-
haviorism, but perhaps the biggest has been the realization
from psychiatry, psychology, and physiology that events in
the brain can explain behavior. If the relevant parts of the
visual cortex are absent or damaged, for example, color vi-
sion can be affected, and our behavior will not be the same
as the behavior of someone with a properly functioning vi-
sual cortex. During the two World Wars the evidence from
neurology and from the hospitals mounted up. It began
to look as though the state of the brain is what is mak-
ing us behave in the way we do, or at the least allowing
us to—though these are hardly the same thing. When in
the 1950s the evidence for a causal explanation of behavior
in the brain, or anyway a causal explanation of abnormal

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physiCalist theories of Mind 61

behavior, became too telling, behaviorism started to lose
almost all its popularity, and very quickly at that.

It was especially troubling that if, according to behav-
iorism, a mental state is a disposition to behave, then if
what explains the behavior is the mental state, as we would
ordinarily think, we have to say that what explains the behav-
ior is the disposition to behave in that way! Thus behaviorism
amounts to a tautology—a trivial truth—if there is such a
thing as an explanation of the body’s behavior by mental
causes.

The Identity Theory

By the mid-1950s, when things began to change, they
changed completely. Starting with a pioneering paper in
1956 by U. T. Place, more and more philosophers and sci-
entists were persuaded that the explanation both of what
people do and of what they experience lies in the brain.
American and Australian philosophers in particular began
to advance what became known as the “mind–brain iden-
tity theory,” or the “identity theory,” as it is called for short.
This view, as its name suggests, is the claim that mind and
brain, or anyway the relevant bits of the central nervous
system, are identical, one and the same. Here too, the
mind–body problem is solved at a stroke, by physicalism,
by the denial that the mind is a nonphysical thing. Every

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62 Chapter 3

mental event is a physiological event within the nervous
system. Accordingly, the theory that the mind is the brain
has sometimes been known as “central-state” materialism,
a materialism making the mind into the central nervous
system, distinguishing it from the “peripheral-state” ma-
terialism of the behaviorists.

In its favor, the theory can be said to be commonsensi-
cal, given the facts of neurology such as the effects of brain
damage, and it makes a great simplification in the philoso-
phy of mind. But it is hardly an “astonishing hypothesis,”
as Francis Crick claimed in a book of that title published
in 1994. It is important and interesting, certainly, but not
so astonishing. Like behaviorism, it solves the mind–body
problem at a stroke, by denying that the mind is nonphysi-
cal. If this proposition about the mind is true, then the
solution is, as before, impeccable. The mind is the brain
and the brain is a physical thing, so the mind can interact
with the rest of the body without difficulty. Yet we miss the
essential thing needed for a solution: how has the physi-
cal, which has physical properties, turned into the men-
tal, which has properties incompatible with being a part of
the physical? What do neurons have when they fire that
produces mind rather than electrical signals, or soap bub-
bles, for that matter?

Against the theory are also certain logical and philo-
sophical difficulties. The central-state materialists do not
claim and are bound not to claim that the word “mind”

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physiCalist theories of Mind 63

means “brain,” which is fortunate for them, as “mind” as
a matter of fact does not mean “brain.” If it did, the claim
about the meanings of the words would make the main
claim of central-state materialism (that the mind is the
brain) into a necessary truth generated by the meanings of
the two words. Its truth could have been discovered simply
by looking in the dictionary. However, what the mind is
was taken by the central-state materialists to be an empiri-
cal and factual question, not one of meaning. Central-state
materialists, including Crick, took the question to be scien-
tific, in just the same way as the question of what the gene
or unity of heredity is was empirical and factual, to use the
central-state materialists’ own favorite example. The gene
turned out to be DNA, but this could not have been known
from the meanings of words “gene” and “deoxyribonucleic
acid.”

So far so good. But then there appeared an unpleas-
ant proof from the world of logic. Identity, as it turns out,
is always necessary. Suppose a = b. a has the following in-
teresting property. It is necessarily identical with itself, a.
Take this last statement, that a is necessarily identical with
a. Substitute b for the second a; we are entitled to do this,
since we have supposed that a = b. But now it follows that a
is necessarily identical with b. Accordingly, if central-state
materialism is going to claim that the mind and the brain
are not necessarily identical, it must itself be false. This
proof was published by Saul Kripke in lectures given in

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64 Chapter 3

1970, and he developed extraordinarily interesting related
arguments in the same work.3

Proofs of this sort, it should be noted, rely on the fact
that the terms on either side of the identity sign, here “a”
and “b,” are fixed names (“rigid designators,” as Kripke
called them) and not descriptions that can be applied
to different things. “The human mind” and “the human
brain” are names, and so are “pain” and “events a in the
thalamus, b the pre-frontal cortex, or c the primary and
secondary somatosensory cortex (S1 and S2).”4 So the
proof does not imply that it is somehow necessary that the
Queen is Elizabeth II, which is true as I write. “Elizabeth II”
is a name, but “the Queen,” even “the Queen of England”
is really a compressed description that can apply to differ-
ent persons, as it has done in the last hundred years. It is
not a rigid designator because the place of the object of its
description can be different objects.

Furthermore, the claim that the mind is the brain also
turns out to be equivalent to the claim that the brain is
the mind, since identity is what logicians and mathemati-
cians call “commutative.” If a = b then obviously b = a. But
the claim that the brain is really at bottom the mind could
hardly be expected to appeal to a hard-headed central-
state materialist, since it makes a claim more suggestive of
idealism (everything is mind) than of materialism (every-
thing is matter).

What is a central-state materialist to do?

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physiCalist theories of Mind 65

One answer was to take advantage of a distinction that
had existed for some time in general philosophy, including
metaphysics and the philosophy of art: the distinction be-
tween types and tokens. Take, for example, Edward Elgar’s
Cello Concerto in E minor. It has been played many times,
including its disastrous premiere in 1919, Jacqueline du
Pré’s triumphant and elegiac performances in the 1960s,
and hundreds of others. How many Elgar Cello Concertos
are there? Could one say that there are hundreds? In that
case, since Elgar wrote the work or works, he wrote hun-
dreds of Cello Concertos. But he didn’t. He was enormously
hardworking, but not that hardworking. Or is there only
one concerto? But then how could it appear in all sorts of
different places and at all sorts of different times with so
many different soloists? The answer developed by philoso-
phers is that there is one concerto type and many concerto
tokens or instances, in much the same way that there is
one book called Pride and Prejudice, but many copies of the
book. The copy both is and is not the work; it is a token
of the work, but it is not the type. There is a difference
between the Cello Concerto case and the case of the book,
though, because there is nothing that could be regarded as
the performance of Pride and Prejudice. But though what
is played is “the music,” as it is written, all the same it can
be said that the glorious sound that is the Cello Concerto
is not the sheet music, whereas the printed copies of the
book are the novel.

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66 Chapter 3

The distinction has its difficulties, clearly, but it was
used advantageously to distinguish two forms of the iden-
tity theory. There is the type pain, and there is the indi-
vidual pain that is a token of the type. In the stronger and
less plausible form of the theory it was the type or property
mental state that was said to be identical with the type or
property brain state. In the less sweeping and more con-
vincing version, it was instead said to be just the one par-
ticular instance of a mental state that was identical with
a particular instance of a brain state. It might be that two
organisms both feel the same or a similar pain, but that
they are not in the same brain state. They are in some brain
state; and since it is implausible that everyone’s physio-
logical and psychological systems work in the same way,
especially when we consider different organisms that have
very different kinds of brains, it is much more plausible to
identify this pain with this brain state, and accept the con-
sequence that two individuals in the same psychological
state may not be in the same physiological state. But they
must be in some physiological state, with which the pain
state is identical. So one is bound to wonder what makes
all the tokens into tokens of the same type. Why are they
all instances of pain?

In any case, it was suggested that the logical arguments
against central-state materialism only worked against
identities of types. That turned out not to be the case. The

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physiCalist theories of Mind 67

arguments, as it was soon realized, worked equally well
against identities of tokens.

Even before the logical proofs against central-state
materialism were worked out and made public in the
1970s, however, it was already too late; central-state ma-
terialism was dead in the water. This came about not be-
cause of the intricate logical argumentation against it, but
because a much more powerful view had arisen to take the
place of central-state materialism, more in keeping with
the science of the time.

Functionalism

The new view that took the place of central-state mate-
rialism was functionalism. It came upon the philosophi-
cal scene in 1967 with Hilary Putnam’s “Psychological
Predicates” and other subsequent papers.5 Putnam ar-
gues that pain is not a brain state, but another kind of
state entirely. It is a state of a probabilistic automaton or
a Turing machine. A Turing machine is in essence a com-
puter, and it computes, having computational or functional
states that are not its physical states. They are described
completely differently, for one thing, and for another the
computational states are not made of matter, but rather
of a kind of functionality, if they can be said to be made
of anything at all. One can also imagine that two Turing

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68 Chapter 3

machines could happen accidentally to be in just the same
physical states, but in the process of performing differ-
ent computations. So their computational states at that
moment at which they are physically identical would not
be the same states. So if mental states are computational
states, as functionalism suggested, they are not the physi-
cal states of the organism.

The power of functionalism came from the interesting
fact that it deployed to full effect the distinction between
computer hardware and computer software. What is going
on with functionalism is that the mind is compared to ac-
tive software, not to rigid hardware. Even with ordinary
computers, one can imagine that two laptops computing
the same function, say, the multiplication 7 × 9, might do
it in very different physical ways. One might even consider
an optical computer that does not work in the same way as
an electronic computer, by electrons slowly pushing one
another around through the different gates that make up
the central processing unit. Clearly the two computers,
optical and electronic, are not in the same physical state,
since photons are not electrons. But the output (63) will
always be the same given the same input (7 × 9). One can
think of the function of the two machines as the same; for
even their logical architecture might be quite different.
Again, even two electronic computers might be running
very different programs yet happen coincidentally at some
instant to be in the same physical state.

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physiCalist theories of Mind 69

Putnam had discovered the multiple realizability thesis,
the proposition that one mental state can be realized in
multiple and very different ways. Goats, birds, reptiles,
and mollusks all feel pain, depending of course what your
philosophy of animal minds is. But it is completely implau-
sible to think that when they do, they are all in the pre-
cisely the same physiological brain state.

One might have thought, as Putnam pointed out, that
the effect of the development of computers on the philoso-
phy of mind was going to be materialistic, but in the event
it was the reverse. The distinction between hardware and
software allowed computing systems to be considered in
abstraction from their physical states, and to highlight the
difference between the computational or Turing-machine
state, and the physical.

The time was right for functionalism, and it swept
through the philosophy of mind in spite of some rear-guard
action by central-state materialists. It rapidly became the
preferred philosophy of mind of the artificial intelligen-
tsia, those working in artificial intelligence, but also of
many philosophers, especially philosophers of mind, and
scientists in fields other than cognitive science.

How does functionalism solve the mind–body prob-
lem? The most obvious interpretation is that function-
alism denies that the mind is a nonphysical thing, not
because it takes the line that the mind is a physical thing,
but because it takes the line that it is as wrong to think of

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