Recap: What were the issues and responses? Criticism What are the responses? 1. I can __________ of the mind separately from the body. 2. The mind is not ____________, the physical is. 3. My body and brain has a ____________, my mind doesn’t. 4. _________ and ______________ reveal things we can’t see physically. Do you think these responses are good / bad? Why?

The Big One: Multiple Realisability Imagine you meet an alien being called Bob. Bob is physically unlike any other creature you have ever seen, he does not have an obvious brain or nerves of any kind, he is completely alien to our current scientific knowledge. Bob has however, successfully learnt our language in his time on our planet, and has a good grasp of the meaning behind terms like “pain” and “happiness”. If Bob describes himself as in “pain” is it possible for us to imagine him as being in pain? Despite the fact he does not have a brain for the relevant processes to occur in?

The Big One: Multiple Realisability Now imagine you’re looking after a dog, the dog again quite clearly has different brain processes to a human being (their neurophysiology is extremely different) but the dog appears to be in pain, is it possible according to MBTIT that the dog is in the same kind of pain that humans are in? Finally consider the case of a man who loses part of his brain, is it no longer possible for him to have mental states associated with the brain processes that would have occurred in that area? If he does not have C-Fibres then how can ever describe himself as being in pain (using our previous example)? What does psychology say about this?

Multiple Realisability – Why is it an issue? The issue for Bob, the dog and the man with the damaged brain is that according to MBTIT mental processes just are referring to specific brain processes. Therefore if a being or creature does not have those specific brain processes, how can they ever have the associated mental processes? Brain Process A ====== > Mental Process A Brain Process B ====== > Mental Process B Without Brain process A or B you cannot have Mental Process A or B. If there can be different physical states who share the same mental state, then MBTIT is wrong.

A Weak Response A possible response from the MBTIT is to say that in all of these examples the creatures / people involved are having mental states but they are subtly different, enough that if we were being specific we would describe them as “alien pain”, “dog pain” or, rather disturbingly, “man with half a brain pain”. But this is not generally considered to be an effective response. Pain is pain because of how it feels to the agent involved and we would imagine a broken bone in an animal would feel the same as a human with a broken bone etc. We seem to have the same thought / feeling despite our physiology, not because of it.

A Secondary Issue If we focus for the moment on the response of “different types of pain” ( dog pain, bird pain, human pain etc.) then we encounter a second issue – there are now as many different types of pain as there are different brains. At this point what, if anything, makes each of these things pain? What do they have in common if not specific brain states? Why define them as such? If it is simply because the agent is acting as if they are in pain, then we are moving subtly away from MBTIT and towards a behaviourist approach – that mental states are simply expressions of behaviour.

Final Summary: Do you think MBTIT can successfully defend against it’s criticisms? If so, why? If not, why not?

Recap: Criticism Response I can conceive of the mind separately from the body… No, you actually can’t. You need physical references to conceive of anything… The mind is not divisible, the body is. Plenty of non-divisible physical conditions – temperature or wetness. Maybe mental states are simply a condition. Mind is actually divisible. My body and brain has a location, my mind doesn’t. Not all physical conditions have a specific location – see temperature or wetness above. Qualia and introspection reveal things we can’t see physically. Same information in two different ways – I see colour differently than how the processes appear in my body. What about different physical things sharing the same mental states?

Summary Tasks: Make sure you have a summary of MBTIT in your notes somewhere – you need to be clear on the nature of ontological reduction vs analytic reduction. Make sure you have completed your spider diagram / list / table of strengths of the theory. Ensure you are clear on why each thing is a strength, this is a key thing for essays. Read through the weaknesses and responses and check you have them in your notes / understand them. Again, ensure you are clear on why each thing is a weakness. Plan a 25 mark for the title: “The mind is ontologically reducible to the brain” Discuss If you complete your plan in lesson time, let me know and we can go through it. Extension: What similarities and differences can you identify between the different theories of mind we’ve discussed so far?