Abstract
Let us assume, as is common, that a general account of what it is to have a mind must be stated in terms of intentionality and consciousness. Such an account may go like this:
Having a mind amounts to having a subjective, first-person perspective on the world. A perspective that is one’s own, and that guides one’s behaviour, often but not always by way of practical reasoning. Having a mind amounts to representing aspects of the world to oneself, having preferences and aversions about these and, normally, to make practical decisions that are (respectively) informed and motivated by these. Typically, there will be a feel to all this, a subjective phenomenal quality. These features, intentionality and consciousness, uniquely characterize the mind.
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References
Quoted from the subtitle of Dretske 1988.
See, for instance, Wiener 1948.
The originator of this concept is Grice 1957.
Expression borrowed from the title of an essay in Dennett 1989.
‘Thought’ is not a simple notion, and I use it in a more liberal way than many other philosophers of mind, for instance, Pettit 1993, Ch. 2.
What Hurley 1998, 10 calls ‘instrumental dependence of perceptual content on output.’ There is also noninstrumental such dependence, but the ‘output’ will not be plausibly called ‘action.’
It might seem that on the above definition phenomena that we call ‘psychosomatic,’ such as the alleged occasional regression of tumours caused by certain kinds of experiences (see Schilder 1996), or the wide range of psychosomatic illnesses, seem also to be actions; which conclusion should obviously be resisted. Examples like these suggest that the causal dependencies involved should be of an appropriate kind. What makes a causal dependency appropriate here may perhaps be explicable with an appeal to the notion of proper function. Another interesting suggestion is Juarrero’s (1999, Ch. 6), who argues that there must be an ‘uninterrupted flow of information from intention to behavior’ (82). I will not here try to give a watertight criterion of distinguishing perception, thought and action from ‘wayward’ forms of mental causation.
Al l on the assumption that ‘wayward causal chains’ can be barred by saying more about the precise character of the causal relations involved. Note that my discussion of causal relata earlier on may help to explicate various different forms that action may take: omissions, for instance, can be understood along the lines of my account of ‘negative’ causes; mere bodily actions, such as raising one’s arm (which do not seem to cause much of a ‘worldly event’), can be understood as the causation of a change in spatial relatedness of parts of the body; and guidance, instead of triggering, of actions by intentional states becomes intelligible once we realize that ongoing processes are causal relata just as well as events.
See, e.g., Davidson 1971.
This remark is based on Lewis’s helpful notion of ‘insensitive causation’ :’Maybe there is a time after which every death that occurs is one that would not have occurred but for my act. (...) And still I deny that I have ever killed. (...) So killing must be a special kind of causing to die. But what distinguishes this special kind of causation? Not that there must be one single step of causal dependence (...). Not that the chance of the effect must be high. (...) Not that the causal chain must be short. (...) Not that the chain must be simple. (...) Not that the chain must be foreseeable. (...) Not that the chain must pass through no later human actions. (...) Perhaps a cluster of these conditions, inadequate if taken one by one, would work to distinguish the kind of causing that can be killing. I think not. (...) I suggest a different way to distinguish the right kind of causing: by its insensitivity to circumstances. When an effect depends counterfactually on a cause, in general it will depend on much else as well. (...) Sensitivity is a matter of degree, however. (...) If a chain is insensitive enough that you can predict it, then it is insensitive enough that you can kill by it. (...) What if you are much better than I am at predicting chains that are somewhat sensitive? I am inclined to say that if so, then indeed you can kill in ways that I cannot.’ (Lewis 1986a, 184–7)
Putnam (1999) attacks the notion of such perceived qualia on the ground that it relies on an outdated epistemology of sense data.
See, for instance, Edelman and Tononi 2000 and their theory of consciousness as a ‘dynamic core’ of ‘reentrant’ neural connections.
It is sometimes argued that even awareness, taken as ‘psychological’ consciousness, is epiphenomenal. Some experiments are claimed to show that our conscious awareness is something like a ‘spokesman’ or user interface rather than a control centre, and that it is much less in charge of our doings than our intuition allows (see, for instance, Flanagan 1992, Ch. 7). But whatever can be concluded from such experiments, it is not that consciousness is epiphenomenal. As a user interface, for instance, consciousness will still be extremely useful. For a powerful argument against the alleged inefficacy of consciousness, see also Donald 2001.
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© 2003 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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De Muijnck, W. (2003). The Concept of Mind. In: Dependencies, Connections, and Other Relations. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 93. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0121-1_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0121-1_15
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