Philosophy 7 is an introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. All quarter we'll be thinking about a single profound and puzzling question: how does the mind emerge from the physical world? In Unit 1: The Mind in Nature, we will examine the question of how and whether the mind can interact with the natural environment. In Unit 2: The Mechanical Mind, we'll evaluate the hypothesis that the mind is a kind of computer-- a biological, information processing machine. And in Unit 3: Consciousness we'll investigate the rich sense of "awareness" associated with subjective conscious experience, and ask whether consciousness can be understood within the limits of cognitive science. Readings will be drawn from the fields of philosophy, computer science, and cognitive science, starting from Descartes up through contemporary debates.
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Syllabus
The syllabus is subject to revision. Please check back every week.
Unit 1: The Mind in Nature
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0 Soul, Mind, and Brain
Thursday Sept. 25 |
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1.1 Mind vs Body
Tuesday Sept. 30 |
Reading guide
The short passage from Ibn Sina poses the question: if you came into existence without any perception or contact with the outside world, or without your body, what could you know? His answer, roughly, is that you could still know that you had a "self" or "soul" (for our purposes, a "mind"). From this he concludes that the soul must be distinct from the body. Even though the text is old, the argument Ibn Sina makes here still has force today. Read it very carefully, and understand the argument. The longer reading from Descartes is one of the most famous passages in Western Philosophy. This text is very difficult. Even though it is only 6 pages, leave several hours to read this, and read it completely at least twice. You'll want to make sure you understand what Descartes is saying at every stage. Descartes sets himself the task of trying to doubt everything that he thinks he knows. The only beliefs left will be the absolutely certain truths. His first move is to imagine that his entire waking life is actually an illusion creating by a deceiving demon (think of the Truman Show or the Matrix). After doubting the existence of the external world, he turns his attention to his own mind. Can you doubt the existence of your own mind? After pondering this question he points out that at least he can be certain of this: the mind and the body are not the same thing. He offers several different arguments for this conclusion, and we'll discuss these in class. (Note: Descartes uses the terms "soul” and "mind” pretty much interchangeably.) As you read, try to answer the following questions:
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1.2 Interactionist Dualism
Thursday Oct. 2 |
Required: First Survey on Philosophical Views
Read: "The Passions of the Soul" Descartes (1649) --- [selections]
Reading guide
In this selection, Descartes is explaining his overall view about how the soul, body, and brain interact. Terminology: for Descartes, a "passion" is merely a perception (like seeing, hearing, or tasting)--- nothing romantic. And "animal spirits" were Descartes' best guess about what we now call the nervous system. They were supposed to be a very thin liquid, traveling in the bloodstream, which communicate signals between the brain and the rest of the body--- they are entirely physical, nothing to do with "spirits" or spirituality. As you read, focus on understanding this big picture, and don't worry about the fussy details. For example, don't bother trying to figure out exactly how the heart, blood, or muscles work, according to Descartes. On the other hand, do pay attention to Descartes' views about...
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2.1 Mental Causation
Tuesday Oct. 7 |
Read: "Princess Elisabeth against Descartes", Kim (2011)
Read: Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth and Descartes (1643) Reading guide
In these letters, Princess Elisabeth and Descartes debate the claims, made by Descartes, that (a) the soul is immaterial; (b) the soul and body causally interact. Elisabeth is skeptical and Descartes tries to answer her skepticism. (The first reading is a short overview of the debate; the second reading is the actual correspondence.) As you read the correspondence, consider...
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2.2 Free Will
Thursday Oct. 9 |
Read: "Free will and determinism", Sider (2005)
Reading guide
This article discusses the problem of free will: can people have free will even if some form of determinism is true? The central theme of the article is three basic approaches to free will. According to libertarianism, free will is incompatible with determinism, and can only be explained through interactionist dualism. According to compatibilism, free will is compatible with both dualism and physicalism. And according to hard determinism, there simply is no such thing as free will.
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3.1 Causal Closure of Physics
Tuesday Oct. 14 |
Read: "Arguments Against Dualism", Papineau and Selina (2000)
Read: "An Argument from Mental Causation", Kim (2011) Optional: "Difficulties for the Dualist", Smith and Jones (1986) Reading guide
These two readings describe an argument for physicalism (aka "materialism") based on the idea of the causal completeness of physics. (Kim calls this "the causal closure of the physicalism".) The argument claims that causal completeness, when combined with downward causation, implies physicalism. The Papineau and Selina reading gives an overview of the argument, then describes an alternative response: a non-interactionist form dualism known as "epiphenomenalism." (Focus on the core argument; don't worry about the historical asides or the stuff on quantum mechanics.) The Kim reading zooms in on the argument itself; after you've read it, go back and look at the two key premises on p. 111 and p.112, and see if you can reconstruct how they lead to the conclusion on p. 113.
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3.2 ESSAY EXAM #1 (IN-CLASS): Mind-Body Interaction
Thursday Oct. 16 No quiz. |
Unit 2: The Mechanical Mind
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4.1 Mind-Brain Connections
Tuesday Oct. 21 No quiz due to internet outage.
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Read: "The Emerging Landscape", Carter (1998)
Listen: Interview with Patricia Churchland Watch: "Brain Story: All in the Mind", BBC Documentary (2000):
Reading Guide
The article "The Emerging Landscape" is a short overview of contemporary brain science that focuses on the idea that various mental abilities correspond to specific regions of the brain. This is a phenomenon known as "functional localization"--- in other words, mental functions have locations in the brain. It is one of the signature discoveries of modern neuroscience
The interview with Churchland (a prominent contemporary philosopher of mind) explores physicalism and its implications. Topics of discussion include: causal objections to dualism, the significance of mind-brain correlation, meaning and morality, and the role of the environment. (Churchland is an ardent physicalist, and she is sometimes dismissive of dualism. What are her reasons? How might a dualist reasonably respond?) The BBC documentary "Brain Story" pursues the idea that that the brain "maps" the mind in various ways. It shows how a range of specific psychological problems arise from disruptions in specific parts of the brain. Examples include open brain surgery, phantom limb syndrome, amusia, degeneration of the substantia nigra, frontal lobe damage, and epilepsy.
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4.2 The Cognitive Mind
Thursday Oct. 23 |
Read: "The Robot Challenge" and "Reverse-Engineering the Pscyhe" (from How the Mind Works), Pinker (1997)
Read: "Desert Ants Are Better Than Most High School Students at Trigonometry", Goldman (2012)
Reading Guide
Together, these two readings will introduce you to the idea of cognition as a kind of problem solving, and to the computational theory of mind, which is the topic of Unit 2. The first half of the chapter by Pinker walks you through the challenges involved in designing a thinking robot. This will give you a concrete sense of the kind of problems which cognitive scientists think the human brain solves. The second half of the chapter describes the key commitments of the computational theory of mind, and begins to talk about how it is related to the brain.
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5.1 Mind as Machine
Tuesday Oct. 28 |
Read:
Reading guide
These readings introduce the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM), the idea that the brain is a kind of biological computer which gives rise to the mind. CTM is contemporary form of physicalism, and it is the motivating idea behind contemporary cognitive science. The first reading, from Pinker, describes the idea in intuitively vivid terms and gives you a sense of its historical context.
The second article, by Ravenscroft, provides more of a cut-and-dry statement of CTM, including a formal definition of computation. Note on terminology: "syntax" refers to the shape of a symbol or a sentence, "semantics" refers to its meaning. Consider the sentence (A): cats are not green. Facts about syntax of (A) include: it has four words, each word contains 3-5 letters, there are 2 "a"s and 3 "e"s, and so on. Facts about the semantics of (A) include: it's a sentence about a kind of animal, it implies that cats are not dark green or light green, it leaves open the question of whether cats are red, and so on.
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5.2 The Problem of Meaning
Thursday Oct. 30 |
Read: "Can computers think?" Searle (1983)
For class: If you haven't already tried an AI chat bot, please do so before class. I recommend Anthropic's Claude AI. Reading guide
In the article for today, Searle presents what has become a famous objection to computationalism. He argues that computationalism fails, but not because computers lack any specific trait like creativity or emotion. Instead, he uses a thought experiment, called "The Chinese Room" to argue that simply manipulating symbols could never give those symbols meaning. He concludes that a purely computational theory of mind will never explain how our thoughts mean anything or how we understand language. (As you'll see, Searle is a physicalist, even though he is anti-computationalist. But dualists might want to use the same argument to support dualism.) Terminology: "syntax" refers to the shape of a symbol or a sentence, "semantics" refers to its meaning. Consider the sentence (A): cats are not green. Facts about syntax of (A) include: it has four words, each word contains 3-5 letters, there are 2 "a"s and 3 "e"s, and so on. Facts about the semantics of (A) include: it's a sentence about a kind of animal, it implies that cats are not dark green or light green, it leaves open the question of whether cats are red, and so on.
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6.1 The Emergent Mind (Systems Reply)
Tuesday Nov. 4 |
Read: Compiled Readings on Systems Reply
Reading guide
This set of readings deals with issues relevant to the "Systems Reply" to the Chinese Room Argument. The first reading (Braisby and Gellatly) reviews the key commitments of CTM, and elaborates on the idea of mental meaning (what the authors call "aboutness" or "content"). The second reading (Quinland and Dyson) describes a classic view in cognitive science about the relationship between different kinds of science. According to Marr's theory of levels, a complex information processing system, must be described at three distinct levels of abstraction, starting from low-level biology and leading up to high-level cognitive descriptions. The third reading (Bermudez) returns us to the scene of the Chinese Room, and discusses two objections to it; in class we will focus on the Systems Reply. This is the idea that, even if the person inside doesn't understand Chinese, the whole room (including the file cards and the person inside) does.
Recommended: Oppenheim and Putnam "Th Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis" |
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6.2 The Embodied Mind (Robot Reply)
Thursday Nov. 6 |
Read: "Searle and the Robot Reply", Anderson (2006)
Read: "Information-theoretic semantics", Dretske (2009) Reading guide
The first reading, by Anderson, examines the Robot Reply to the Chinese Room Argument. This the position that, if the Chinese Room were suitably positioned within an embodied robot, than it would after all understand Chinese and have genuine mental representations. The article relates this reply to the broader philosophical idea of externalism, the idea that the content of our thoughts depends in part on the way we interact with the environment.
The second reading, by Dretske, introduces information semantics. This is a developed version of externalism. It holds that meaning is derived from informational relations between states in the brain and states in the external world.
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7.1 NO CLASS: Veterans day holiday
Tuesday Nov. 11
Tuesday Nov. 11
7.2 ESSAY EXAM #2 (IN-CLASS): Computational theory of mind
Thursday Nov. 13
Thursday Nov. 13
Unit 3: Consciousness
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8.1 What is Consciousness?
Tuesday Nov. 18 |
Read: "Introducing Consciousness", Papineau and Selina (2001) -- pages 3-22
Read: "Facing up to the problem of consciousness", Chalmers (2010) -- Sections 1-3 Reading guide
These two readings introduce the problem of consciousness, the subject of our last unit. "Consciousness" is sometimes called "conscious experience" or "phenomenal consciousness." ("Phenomenal" means "having to do with appearances.") It is distinguished from mere "awareness" which has to do with processing information from the environment. The first article by Papineau and Selina introduces the key concepts. The second article by Chalmers refines this description and distinguishes the easy problem of consciousness from the hard problem.
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8.2 The Explanatory Gap
Thursday Nov. 20 |
Read: "What is it like to be a bat?", Nagel (1974) --- skip the last section, as marked
Reading guide
This article is profound and historically important, but also quite difficult. There is a lot going on. For our purposes, there are three main points to watch for: (1) The idea that consciousness is "what it's like" to be something. (2) The idea that, in some sense, we cannot imagine what it is like to be a bat. And (3), the idea that consciousness is inherently subjective, while scientific explanations are inherently objective.
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9.1 The Knowledge Argument
Tuesday Nov. 25 |
Read: "Epiphenomenal qualia", Jackson (1982) -- one page excerpt.
Read: "The Knowledge Argument" and "Subjectivity", Fesser (2005) Optional: "Knowledge Argument", Alter (2014) Reading guide
The short excerpt from a paper by Jackson introduces the "Knowledge Argument", which is one of the best known arguments for Dualism. The two sections from Fesser discuss the argument in more detail. The Knowledge Argument relies on the claim that there is an explanatory gap, and uses this claim in the context of a thought experiment to argue for Dualism. As you read, focus on the Knowledge Argument itself, and its relation to Nagel's ideas about subjectivity and objectivity. Fesser also describes a number of somewhat technical objections to the argument. Try to understand these as best you can; most importantly, keep track of what is part of the argument itself, and what is merely a response to the argument.
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9.2 NO CLASS: Thanksgiving holiday
Thursday Nov. 27
Thursday Nov. 27
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10.1 Dualism vs. Physicalism, Redux
Tuesday Dec. 2 |
Reading guide
These two articles introduce and discuss a new form dualism, which we'll call "naturalistic dualism" in class. The first article, by Chalmers describes the key commitments of naturalistic dualism from positive perspective. Naturalistic dualism is (more or less) a form of "epiphephenomenalism," the view that the (conscious) mind has no causal effect on behavior. The second article by Ravonsuo describes epiphenomenalism from a critical perspective.
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10.2 Science and Subjectivity
Thursday Dec. 4 |
Read: "Type-A Materialism" and "Type-B Materialism", Chalmers (2003) -- focus on Type-B
Read: "Critique of the Knowledge Argument", Horgan (1984) (from "Jackson... ") Required: Survey on Mind-Body Relations Required: Phil 7 Online Evaluation Required: UCLA course evaluation for lecture and section [+1% on final grade; access through MyUCLA] |
ESSAY EXAM #3 (FINAL EXAM): Consciousness
Wednesday, Dec. 10, 8:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Wednesday, Dec. 10, 8:00 AM - 11:00 AM