 Ok, dwi'n meddwl y cwestiynau? Felly, mae'r llwyth yn ei fod yn gynhyrch. If... if... If... If... If... Tom? Yes. Right at the beginning of the first lecture, you dismissed behaviourism. Yet what the function, function list is saying seems to be a little bit similar. For instance, any state that causes a state of believing that one is in pain, is a pain then. Ok. That seems to me quite similar to what behaviourism is. Ok, it is very similar. Can I deal with this fairly quickly? Because actually I chose not to talk about behaviourism. But behaviourism is the idea that mental states are numerically identical to behavioural patterns. So you have the input and you have the behavioural output. And the behavioural output is the mental state, psychological state. Function... Sorry, that's behaviourism. And then functionalism says that mental states are functional states drawn from a theory. So you get the input, you get the output, and there's the black box inside which you get the mental state. So whereas behaviourism identifies the mental state with the behaviour, the functionalist identifies the mental state with the cause of the behaviour. Quite a serious difference. And whereas the behaviourist says that pain is pain behaviour, it can't account for the actor who displays pain behaviour but isn't in pain. And it can't account for the stoic who is in pain but doesn't display pain behaviour. The functionalist can account for both of those because it allows things to go on in here. So when Leo is in pain but he believes that his partner thinks that men who show pain behaviour are wimps, and he wants to please his partner, these beliefs act on the dispositions to express pain behaviour to suppress it so you don't get the pain behaviour out. Now for a behaviourist if you don't get the pain behaviour you haven't got pain, for the functionalist you can have pain without pain behaviour because you can have interactions within the brain. Do you see that's the difference? Chris? Yesterday you drew a diagram showing how the science, of courseality, was driving reason outside the diagram if I understood you correctly. You drew a big circle and you said initially it was mostly occupied by reason. Now it's mostly occupied by causality. I'm going to say just go. No, I know exactly. It was blue. This is how I remember where my books are on my shelves as well. Exactly that. Now you then went on to argue by induction. No, the eliminativists go on to argue by induction. The arguments I'm giving are not my arguments there. What was argued by induction that eventually reason had been completely out of that circle? Now I thought induction was no longer a valid argument. I thought arguing by induction had been discredited. No, you're taking an argument much further than it could go. There are two sorts of arguments. There's inductive argument and there's deductive argument. Deduction gives a certainty and induction gives us only probability. For example, if you know Marianne always wears jeans on a Friday, it's Friday, then you will know that Marianne's wearing jeans. If Marianne's not wearing jeans, you know that one of those premises is false. That's deduction. You always get absolute certainty. With induction, what you get is more or less probability. Every day in the history of the world, the sun has risen. Therefore, we think it will rise again tomorrow. That doesn't give a certainty because the premise could be true and yet the conclusion false. What you have is inductive weakness or strength. If the sun has risen every day in the history of the world, you've got an inductively strong argument. Every time you've seen Marianne, she's been wearing earrings. That's certainly true of those who've only met me this weekend. Next time you see Marianne using inductive reasoning, she will be wearing earrings. That's a weak inductive argument, isn't it? If you come to my door early in the morning, I probably won't be wearing earrings. All sorts of reasons I might not be wearing earrings. Inductive arguments are either strong or weak, whereas deductive arguments are either valid or not. I would want to argue on the diagram that you've put up there. That line, I agree, is driven across to the right. I think there will come a point when it will stop. I don't think you could argue that it will drive reason. You disagree with the eliminativists. You need to find reason why. The eliminativists say, and actually it's a pretty strong inductive argument, that there was a time when we used reason explanation for virtually everything. Now we use it for very little. The eliminativists say, actually this will continue. Science will continue to find causal explanations until reason explanations are no longer needed. You disagree with that. You need to find why do you think that science will never explain the mind? I've given you perhaps one reason for thinking that, but lots of people would reject externalism. Eleanor. Eleanor, is that right? Yes, that's right. In that argument I would say I don't accept either of your explanations for a simple reason that you assume a closed system. If it is a closed system, at a certain point we will find the end of it. But if we think of known it as an open system, always expanding and we have never seen it. Eleanor, actually that's not true. Because what the eliminativist is saying is that science one day will explain everything. Now that doesn't mean it will explain every token thing. It means it will explain every type of thing. So now this is where I need to... So if science is right, sorry if eliminativists is right, the biggest problem for eliminativists is here's a type of thing and here a whole lot. This is an instance of understanding. And this is another instance of understanding. Now if science is going to explain everything in terms of physicalism, neural states, et cetera, then science will need to explain that. And it will need to explain that, et cetera. Now every time it explains it, there will be another of these that is not explained. Do you see what I mean? Science is open-ended, it will never explain everything because it explains that, but immediately that's unexplained. But if you can explain this type of thing, then that's only in practice unexplained, not in principle unexplained. And science, if it in principle can explain all these things, that isn't a problem for science. You already put a boundary around it. No, no, but that's the point. That's the point. You always restrict. It's not the science. Okay, take away my boundary. Do it like this. No boundary. I'm sorry, the paper is a boundary, but it needn't be because here are lots of different tokens of understanding. And actually we could fill this room. We could fill the world. We could fill the universe with different tokens of understanding. And if science can explain understanding as a type of phenomena, then although there'll always be tokens that science hasn't actually explained, which is the open-endedness of it, it could still explain the type, and therefore there's no principled problem for scientism. I disagree. Okay, but you need to come back on my argument. Maybe you will in a minute, but let someone else. Then you'll have to remember that. I just want to pursue just a little bit about the point I tried to make before, which some of these thought experiments have felt very uncomfortable. Felt very uncomfortable. Felt very uncomfortable. I agree. I think that there's something illegitimate about combining the language of an ordinary experiment which can give us some sort of provisional description of the world about which we can never be certain with a statement about absolute truth that we could only really know analytically. And I don't think it's legitimate to combine those two. Can I show you why we cannot not combine those two? I've done it already, but let's do it again. As a scientist, and indeed as philosophers, how do we determine the truth value of that is water? Observation statement, which is a scientist you're wanting to determine the truth value of all the time. That's what scientists do. They have theories that generate observation statements, and what they need to do is test whether those observation statements are true or not. There are two types of knowledge that go into the testing of... No, let me finish. You've asked a question and I'm trying to... It's a very important point because you're saying whether they're true or not, but that's the whole point about science. We can't decide that. It is simply a description of the world which is improved all the time. We can't decide what is true and what isn't in that sense. OK. You will at least accept it tries to decide operational truth. Maybe not absolute truth, but operational truth. So if, for example, here we have a statement, neutrinos can travel faster than light. There's a statement. Those people in CERN think that this is either true or change my word true for your word, whatever you prefer. But what we're interested in is whether neutrinos can travel faster than light. If they can, this explodes the theory of general relativity. How interesting, how fascinating, could string theory be true after all? If neutrinos can't travel faster than light, and you see that actually the word truth or some synonym of truth is going to come in here whatever you say. What we're interested in is whether neutrinos travel faster than light. What I suggest we mean by that is whether the statement neutrinos travel faster than light is true or not. It's an observation statement. I agree that by observation we're not talking about our senses, but we are talking about things that we can conduct empirical experiments at huge expense on. So any observation statement you like, that is water or neutrinos travel faster than light, there are two things that go into it. One is what does the statement mean? What is a neutrino? I mean actually if we don't understand what a neutrino is, if any minute now we discover that actually there are some neutrinos that travel faster than light, but others that don't, well okay, is that because there's a difference between the initial conditions where we set off these neutrinos to travel faster than light, or is it a difference in the neutrinos itself, in which case is neutrino a word that means neutrino or neutrino or something. Do you see what I mean? You have to understand the meaning of the sentence and you have to conduct experiments in the case of neutrinos, empirical experiments to determine whether the truth value, the truth conditions in a context are satisfied. So philosophy comes into everything a scientist does because the scientist has to assume a meaning in order to determine a truth value. That's why I believe that you can mix philosophy and science. In fact you have to. Scientists who think they don't are scientists who are assuming that they do know the meaning of what they're doing, which most of the time is fine, but when they hit a problem they might ask, sorry Eleanor, I know you want to speak, but so do other people. A philosophical statement to be true has to be internally consistent and it doesn't need... What do you mean by what's... means that one statement is balanced equally, truthfully, rationally against another, but it doesn't need an external aspect to make it true or false, does it? Well, that is water, it's only going to be true. When I point to that and I say that is water, what makes it my belief, I'm pointing inside my head, which of course maybe I shouldn't be, but let's do it for the time being, what makes my belief true is that being water. That's not a philosophical statement, it's a scientific one, isn't it? It's an observation statement, yes, I've said that any observation statement, you can determine the truth only by determining philosophically what its meaning is and then empirically what its truth value is. So the idea that that isn't a philosophical statement, well okay, true, it's a scientific statement, but there are still philosophical questions to ask about it and indeed about any, because meaning is a philosophical problem. Well, a philosophical issue, I should say. If externalism is true and wholly true. I'm sorry, I did say I'd come to you, I will in a minute. If externalism is true and true all the time, then we would not be able to make counterfactual statements truly or draw other than realist pictures and we couldn't draw us a surrealist fact. And then there must be some kind of internal state in process. Okay, I disagree with you and I think you're confusing truth conditions and truth value. Let me show you why I think this and if you think I'm wrong. So here's a counterfactual. A counterfactual is a conditional statement, the antecedent to which is false. So if Marianne, no, let's say, if it is Friday, Marianne is wearing jeans because we all know that Marianne always wears jeans on a Friday. This is a counterfactual statement because it isn't Friday, is it? The antecedent here is false. Okay, how do we determine the truth value of this statement? Well, what do we have to do to determine the truth value? It's much different. Well, if on Friday you discover I am wearing jeans, does that tell you that if it's Friday, Marianne will be wearing? I mean, you need a bit more than that actually. You need to look at the possible world. Sorry, you need to survey possible worlds to see if you can find a Friday where Marianne isn't wearing jeans and if you can't, then that's true. So it's exactly the same thing. There are two questions to ask. One is what does this mean and the other is is it true? And in this case, as this isn't an empirical question because it's involving counterfactuals, in order to determine it's true, you've got to survey possible worlds. But actually, if you think Marianne means me here, but actually it means someone else. So you've got the meaning wrong. When you survey the possible worlds, you'll be taking the wrong person through. Do you see what I mean? And you might get the wrong answer to that question, not because you've got that wrong, but because you've got that wrong. So it's completely general. If you're looking at language and the truth of sentences in that language, you've always got two things to look at. And sometimes it involves looking at possible worlds as well as this world. Or sometimes it involves looking at possible situations in this world as well as actual ones if you don't like possible worlds talk. John, I'm sorry, I did say I'd come to you. A lot of philosophers who you've talked about here seem to imply that mental states can't affect the physical worlds. Many of the theories we've looked at make it difficult to say that they do, yeah. I'm quite convinced that they do. I can think of many examples in my own experience. We all can do one. But I think one thing, externalism allows a way around this, because if my mental states originate outside of my mind and then go on to affecting the external world, then the causal problems seem to be largely resolved. Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. We're not saying that mental states are outside the head. We're just saying they're not inside the head. Even if you're an internalist, you might think that mental states have origins outside the head. But the externalist doesn't say that beliefs are outside the head. It says that they're not inside the head. And there's a big difference between saying something's not inside and saying it's outside. Actually, externalists believe that mental states aren't located in space at all. Physical objects are located in space. They have to be, because that's of the essence of being a physical object. But if you believe that mental states are not internal states, you can actually say they're not located at all. Forest of hands. I think you were next. Well, mine's also about externalism, and I think in a way it's... I think it's quite a few of them are probably about externalism. I thought that you said about externalism that I could not have a belief about Marianne, unless Marianne existed. The externalists could believe that. So, where does that leave an imagination where I can imagine something which doesn't exist? That's fine. Here's Penny. Here's Penny again. On a different occasion, let's say. Here's Marianne. I'm thinking about this as I go along. OK. I'm thinking faster than you are. Actually, Penny, this is your head. Whereas this is the whole of me. OK. In this case, Penny is having a thought about Marianne. OK. Now you've met me. You don't actually have to have met me. There are people who have never met me who can have thoughts about me. That's fine externally. Here's Penny using her imagination to think about a woman. She's five foot six. She's got short hair. She's wearing a purple jumper. It's amazing. If you could look inside Penny's head, you would think, oh, Penny's talking about Marianne. Penny's thinking about Marianne. But actually Penny has never come into causal contact with me at all. That's why it's easier to say I don't exist at all. So you've never come into causal contact with anyone who's met me or heard about me. So take someone in where were we out of Mongolia before. Somebody sitting in out of Mongolia, believe it or not, who has never heard of me and never come into causal contact with me and never come into causal contact with anyone who has heard of me. Could that person think about me? They could imagine something that by coincidence is phenomenologically indistinguishable for me. She's even got this very irritating English voice and with same inflection and same certainty. You know, there is nothing. You couldn't put a card between what this person is imagining and me, but is it me? Many people would say no, couldn't be. But how could that idea have come from the external world which I thought was what external is involved? Well, the fact is you've met people of five foot six before. You've met women before. You've met people wearing purple jumpers before. You've met all these things together in your imagination. You know, a completely bizarre area of creature. I'm sorry, I don't know where you're going with that. Well, you couldn't imagine something. I mean, all you can do is take the concepts that you have, split them apart from each other and put them back together in creative ways. So that's what it is to think. I mean, okay, you're all thinking of elephants now. You're all thinking of elephants, but there isn't an elephant within 100 miles of this place. I mean, the thing is you are not restrained in your thoughts to things that are perceptually present. Arguably, arguably, we're the only animals that can do that. And the reason we can do it is one of the reasons that we can imagine things. I mean, imagine that I'm wearing yellow, the same colour that David's wearing. Okay, you're all able to imagine that now because you're able to take the yellow that you know from there and what I'm wearing that you know from here and swap them around a bit in your imagination. You can do that because you have concepts and that's what a concept is. It enables you to think creatively. But what you can't do is come up with something completely from new. You're always putting together. You won't come up with a colour that nobody else... Sorry, that's probably wrong. You won't come up with a colour that you haven't ever experienced. Or at least I'm... Sorry, I can see cans of worms opening up there. We only create those imaginations that are already in the heart before. We see them, we observe them somewhere, then we can put creation... The thing we've never seen, we cannot create anything without the basic building blocks. There's something always present in our head before. That's why we create something new from those things to myself. So we've got the ingredients there. We pull them apart and we put them together again in different ways. That's what it is to think. That's what it is to exercise imagination. If we couldn't do that, we couldn't ever come up with new ideas. Look, there's the moon. How do we get there? We've put together different concepts and we come up with a new sort of action. John, I just can't keep up. I was going to ask you how you're talking about Lord of the Rings, but you're saying that he took existing things and just broke them up. Okay, somebody who hasn't David... Sorry, I see you, but David's first and then you. To hold an externalist view, does that mean you cannot hold an epiphenomenolist view or an eliminatist view? To hold an externalist view, you wouldn't hold externalists are realists about the mental. Eliminativists are not realists about the mental. They think the mental doesn't exist at all. And externalism is a theory about mental states. So you couldn't be both an eliminativist and an externalist. Could you be an epiphenomenolist and an externalist? Probably. Yes, I didn't see why not. I'd have to think about the implications of that, but I didn't immediately see why not. John. Could externalism conceivably rescue Cartesian substance division from extinction for many years before and after this? Sorry, could externalism? Externalism, could it re-habitize? Re-vivify. The substance dualism. But for many years before and after they can't, people believed in things called Snow and Roll Spirit. Is it possible that externalism could revive this? I think that's unlikely. Because functionalism and anomalous monism can both account for externalism. Now, I haven't got my pretty pictures, but imagine the externalist picture with the pink round the whole of the outside. You can believe that everything in that picture is physical, but the whole of it is mental. Do you see what I mean? The only ingredients that go... I can't think about you unless I've met you, but you're physical and so am I. The causal interactions between us have all been based on physical interactions. My ability to think about you is something that's emerged from the physical relations between us. I think it's unlikely that externalism will... I actually don't see how you could revivify a substance dualism. I don't know of any substance dualists. But religion believes that there aren't even amongst philosophers. You don't have to be a substance dualist to have religious beliefs. I have religious beliefs, but I'm not a dualist. Or at least I'm not a substance dualist. I mean, lots of scientists who are certainly not dualists have religious beliefs. Can you be an externalist and have a religious belief? Why not? Because I would argue that you can't have experienced God. I've never experienced various other things about which I have beliefs. I mean the beliefs of God. Well no, when you see atoms in bubble chambers, the fact that you see the track in the cloud chamber, rather than the atom itself, you might still describe your observation as having seen an atom. Because what you see is what you take to be the effects of the atom. What do I think are the effects of God? This! I see God in everything. You don't believe in a soul, do you? We're not going to get into my religious beliefs here. I've forgotten where I am. Bill, would you mind sharing this, write down the names of people or descriptions of them? We won't show anyone afterwards. No, they should. Because I'm just getting completely lost. Who hasn't asked a question and would like to ask one? That's a good start, isn't it? One of the theories of mine you haven't discussed is that you can use panpsychism. When you would like to say why you don't consider it worthy of consideration. Because I don't know anything about it, actually. I mean, Whitehead held it. Maybe they did, but I still don't know anything about it. Tell me what it is. Panpsychism is the theory where matter is the ball matter. Matter is not inanimate. All matter has some degree of mental quality. Do you remember I talked about idealism? Somebody was asking me about idealism, Mary. It was you, wasn't it? Idealism is not the same as panpsychism. But it sounds as if it has things similar. The idealist believes that everything is mental. Whereas the physicalist believes everything is physical. And all the states exist. They are some combination of physical things. The idealist believes that everything is mental. And the physical is some combination of mental things. So I haven't discussed idealism or panpsychism. But actually I have quite a lot of sympathy for idealism. But that's another lecture. So I'm certainly not putting on one side A'r ffynoddau sydd wedi bod yn fwyaf, ond rwy'n amser I'n cyfalwyr sydd y mynd yn y ddigonol iaith a'r ffynoddau sydd y mynd yn y ddigonol iaith. Mae ffynoddau. Mae'n enw i'r problemu yw'r ffynoddau sydd yn adagau yn ddigonol iaith. Mae'r ddylu yn fwyaf oedd yn gwybod a'r ddylai'r ddysgu o'n gweithio cael ei ddysgu'r sydd. Ond oes i ni'n clywed o'r problemau oedd wedi'i ddod y bydd y gallwn y fath ar hynny i ddim yn ddiddordeb llwyddiadau. Byddwn ni'n credu i gael pethau a'i ddysgu phobl. Mae'r gweithio, mae'r Llyfrgell yma, mae'r Llyfrgell wedi'i eisiau ymgredd a'r Llyfrgell hefyd, ac yn ymgyrch, mae'n ddechrau. Mae'r gweithio, mae'n ddiddordeb llwyddiadau, mae mae'n ddiddordeb llwyddiadau i ddiddordeb llwyddiadau. I discussed this very problem. Can anyone remember what the response was I gave to it? So the objection to epiphenominalism is, well hang on, mental states cause behaviours. Mary said what she said because she experienced red, therefore how can you say that mental states are not causally efficacious? What was the answer? I'll find it. Just to prove I did talk about it. It was blue again. Well done, exactly so. If we go back, the answer is, here we are. So this is Mary's experience of red, this is her, ooh goodness look at that. This is the state that causes both of them. So there's a correlation between these two, or a coincidence would say as it's a one off thing, a coincidence between these two, but that's because both of them are caused by this, not because this causes this. That was an easy one. Could I ask if in the philosophical nomenciature that knowledge is time dependent or does it have to be not, because you say it has to be true for all time, can knowledge be provisional? Okay, so there are bits of knowledge. I don't know quite what you mean by time dependent. What I really mean is, if say a lecturer talking to a group of students says, I'm telling you this now, but I don't know in ten years time half of this will be untrue, but this is what I think now. Is all of what he's saying knowledge, or is half of what he's saying not knowledge? I'm thinking of something like this Lucrino thing, a year ago nothing travelled faster than light. So was that knowledge? No, well put it this way. So we have a belief, and we've had this belief since 1905, that nothing travels faster than light. Now, this is knowledge, or at least a necessary condition for this being knowledge, is firstly it's a belief. So you can't know that nothing travels faster than light unless you believe nothing travels faster than light. Second thing is you must be justified in believing it. It is justified, so your belief can't count as knowledge unless you have a justification for it. Thirdly, it's got to be true. Now, because if it's not true, it's not knowledge, you may believe that it's knowledge, okay? You may believe that it's true, but it's still not be true. I mean, as a matter of fact, you can't have a belief that P without believing that P is true, but you may be wrong about your own belief in your belief that your belief is true. So that knowledge then can't be provisional? No, knowledge is always provisional. Knowledge depends upon truth, and as we can never get to the truth independently of our beliefs, our justifications, knowledge is always provisional. So if now it's untrue, it's not knowledge, but it was knowledge? No, we believed it was knowledge, or actually very few scientists would claim it was knowledge, because scientists are so frazzled by Popper that they never claim to know anything these days, but they really think they do know, but this has really upset them, because if they thought they knew anything, they really thought they knew this. And like clusters, you know what happens, you know all the possible words. Yes, exactly so. No, both philosophers and scientists, doesn't matter who they are, knowledge is always provisional, because knowledge depends upon truth, and truth is metaphysics, not epistemology. So the best we can say is that we're justified in believing this, and our justifications will always be other beliefs which are rationally related to whatever the belief is, but until we can show that it's true, we can't claim that we know that it's knowledge. So let's go back to the one I keep doing, and this is a thing that really I can't tell you how important it is. David, I get really irritated when pens don't work. Yeah, I don't like red. Well, I do like red, but it tends not to come over as well as black, so let's try it. Can you see it? David believes, he, David, knows nothing travels faster than light. There's an embedding sentence, David believes he knows that nothing travels faster than light, and there's an embedded sentence, David knows that nothing travels faster than light. Now, the embedding sentence might be true, David believes he knows that nothing travels faster than light, whilst the embedded sentence is false. He believes he knows it, but he doesn't know it, because it isn't true. Or for whatever the other reason. Do you see whatever you think that you can't? I mean, for example, let's have a look at David believes he remembers something. He remembers P. Well, he might believe he remembers it, but if P didn't happen, he doesn't remember it, so his belief that he remembers it is false. So you can believe that you know something and yet be wrong. You can believe that you remember something and yet be wrong. And the reason you would be wrong is because to remember something, it must have happened in the same way to know something, it must be true. These are factive states. So you don't like the false memory? No, I think false memory is badly named. If you remember it, it must have happened. What false memory is, is the belief that you remember it, where the belief that you remember it is false, because if it didn't happen, you don't remember it, but you may believe that you remember it. In fact, I assume that's what's happening in false memory is somebody falsely believes that they remember that something happened when it didn't. That's what false memory is. It's on the definition of remember. Because you can't remember P unless P happened. Same way you can't perceive P unless P exists. So when Macbeth said, is this a dagger before me? The answer is no. It may be with you as if there's a dagger in front of you, obviously it is. So Macbeth believed there was a dagger in front of him. Was there a dagger in front of him? No. So perception is factive. You don't perceive a dagger unless there's a dagger there. You don't remember stabbing Malcolm unless you stabbed Malcolm. You may falsely believe that you remember. Was it Malcolm? King of the Scots? Duncan, thank you. Malcolm's the sun. The belief is true isn't it? The belief in the original thing. I love the chance to do it again. The thing that kicks it all off. I've seen the embedded thing. Macbeth believes he sees a dagger. That's true. Does Macbeth perceive a dagger? No. That's fine. Macbeth believes. That's true. The embedding sentence is true. But the sentence embedded is false. So Macbeth has a... It's true that Macbeth has this belief. The belief that Macbeth has is false. Shall I do that again? No, no, no. It just seems very sort of relativist somehow. Keep going back to something that eventually you can say is true. I honestly don't know what to say about that. There is nothing relativist about what I've been saying here. What I'm doing is I'm pointing out the logic of the fact that there's a difference between the world that we picture and our picture of that world. We tend to think only of the world that we picture. That's what we're conscious of. We're conscious of this table, not our beliefs about this table. Do you remember what I said yesterday about we become conscious of our belief when something goes wrong? So when I put my glass down on the table and it crashes to the floor, I realised that my belief the table was there was false. But when it's not false, when I put it down and therefore don't even think about the table, doesn't mean my belief wasn't there. Just means it was true. And as long as our beliefs are true, we don't notice them at all. But they're always there. If I say I believe that ducks are mammals, it's very easy to say you're wrong. No, I'm not wrong. I do believe that ducks are mammals sometimes. Yes. What you're wrong about is ducks being mammals. Yes. In the worthage encyclopedia of philosophy, I'll recall that you recommended, it starts off in the entry of philosophy of mind. Philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology are two terms in the same general area of the thoughtful inquiry. It's just interesting to follow through, I asked you this yesterday at dinner, about the ongoing interface between philosophers of mind and people in the world of psychology. Well, some philosophers are very purely philosophers. They're not terribly interested in what psychologists do. Some psychologists are very interested in psychology. They're not particularly interested in what philosophers do. And then there's a continuum coming right up to the middle where you get philosophers and psychologists who are working together on things. And there's the whole spectrum. Because whenever you get a philosophy of physics, it's exactly the same thing. You get philosophers of physics who are not interested in physics. Not many of them, but you do. There are physicists who are not at all interested in philosophy of physics, and then there are ones in the middle who are very interested in both and work together quite closely, and everything in between. So philosophy of maths is the same, philosophy of religion. Just following on from that, that one of the things psychologists are interested in is collaboration or madness. So that most of us here have only been hearing your voice, but there may be some people in the room who are hearing St. Michael and St. Peter and Engels talking also at the same time. Now, we would say that's because there's this framework where they have a dysfunction. And I wondered whether how philosophers deal with this sort of... I don't know, because I'm not that sort of philosopher of mind. I'm interested in what the mind is. I'm less interested in the malfunction of the mind that we called schizophrenia if we stopped calling it schizophrenia, didn't we? But anyway, I'm not particularly interested in that, so I don't know. But there are philosophers who are very interested in that. I can think of one right now. And he would be able to answer that in a way I can't. Yeah, it's your next. I think I've got a simple one. I'm a bit uncomfortable about the split between internalism and externalism. Could you be an externalist with elements of internalism? If I understand you correctly, and I might not, every externalist has elements of internalism because you can't be in a state unless you have a state inside you. So, do you remember the externalist pictures I had up here? In each case, inside the head, there was something going on. No externalist would think that somebody could have a belief unless there's something going on in here. The only thing they're denying is that what's going on in here is the belief. But are they not saying externalists that it all starts outside? No, there's no start about it. We're looking at the idea of a state, the state of believing pee. The state of believing pee, or the... Okay, the state of my believing that John's wearing grey rather than red is a state that if I didn't have anything going on in my head, I couldn't have that belief. But nor could I have that belief unless John exists. So, two necessary conditions, neither of them sufficient for belief, are what's going on in my head and my relation with John. So, externalism doesn't deny that there's things going on in the head. It only denies that it's the things going on in the head that are the belief. Okay, I've got that distinction. Later on, you look at the... Actually, you've had all your handouts done in black and white, haven't you? Sorry, that's my fault, and you won't be able to see my pretty pink. But you will be able to see the circle and the pink all round the outside, which is externalism, and the pink with the circle. But if you look at the externalist one, there is something going on inside the head. We don't have beliefs unless we have things going on inside the head. Nobody would deny that. If you're members of the Philsoc, you can get those by going online to the Philsoc and requesting them, and they'll get sent to you by email. This is called blackmail. Yep. A consciousness, in my opinion, has a genuine role in behaviour. It's not just an... Most of us believe that mental states have a genuine role. That's part of my question. Secondly, I believe the physical world is causally closed. Now, I haven't yet been able to marry up these two beliefs, but I do think some synthesis could be possible. So what I want to ask you, you've answered profoundly already, whether you shared those beliefs, and if so, could you give some indication about how you personally, you personally attempt to combine them? Right. Okay. So the first belief was mental states are causally efficacious. I mean, you said consciousness, but I'm just going to put mental states, and I can't spell efficacious, but don't worry. And you think that physics is causally closed. In other words, any event that interacts with a physical event is itself a physical event, okay? So you believe both those things, and you want to know how is this possible, okay? And you're asking me what I believe, okay? I'm not going to tell you what I believe. The answer is I'm not sure, actually. I suspect that this is false, actually, but I certainly don't know that, even by David's standards. In other words, I don't even believe I know that. I'm open on that. I find it very difficult to deny that, but actually unless you're an epiphenomolist, you would find it very difficult, and the reason we're not epiphenomolist if we're not is because we believe that. Most physicists would believe that. Most of us in this room probably believe this. How is this possible? Well, this is exactly what we're asking. We want to know the answer to this question, and what I'm saying is if you're an identity theorist, it's dead easy because mental states are physical states, and therefore the fact that physics is causally closed is not a problem. This is entirely consistent with this. So identity theory is one possibility. Another possibility, functionalism, says that mental states are physical states. They're functional states, but the functional is always paid by a physical state. So that's not a problem. So functionalism can answer that, but it's a very different answer. Anomolist monism, the objection is it can't answer that, but the anomolist monism will come back and say, actually that's because you've got the wrong theory of causation. So anomolist monism claims to be able to answer that. Does it? We've been looking at that this week. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's what we've spent the whole weekend, if you like, looking at. We want to believe that. We really want to believe that. Mostly we do believe this. That gives us this problem. What's the answer to this problem? Take your pick. But you would not pick, I assume, since you've said nothing about anything to do with complexity theory, chaos, quantum mechanics. Well, because I don't think any of those theories can answer this question. No, the only theories that can answer this question are philosophical theories like the ones we've been through. This is a philosophical question. It's not a scientific question. It's not an empirical question. Many problems have been called not scientific and later proved to be so. If the eliminativists are right and there aren't any mental states, then they're not causally efficacious, then this is false and science will have shown us that this is false. I'm not denying that science could easily... No, I take that back. Science could show us that this isn't possible by showing that there are no mental states or by showing us that mental states are not causally efficacious or indeed that physics is not causally closed. Science could answer this question for us, but if it does, it would do it in a very different way. I suspect it would do it by showing that mental states don't exist. I think eliminativism might be the way science would answer this question. Of course, actually, it answers this question by saying that's false rather than by showing that these two are consistent. As externalism brings part of the thought outside these individuals, I'm wondering if any of them have made a huge leap to say that that has any implications for life after death, so can you move the individual from it and continue with that body? Well, somebody, I can't remember who it was. John, I think, asked me if externalism could make Cartesian souls and Cartesian dualism respectable again, and I said I thought not. I don't see why externalism would have anything to say about life after death either, because if you think that everything external to your body is physical in the way that everything... sorry, internal to my body is physical, I can continue believing that as an externalist. I could, in addition, believe that there's life after death, but my belief in life after death wouldn't necessarily come from my belief. I'm not entirely sure why it would have to. In fact, I don't think it would have to come from my belief that mental states are external states. Without a body, they could still believe in life after that, so thought continuing without a body? No, because I've said that externalists believe that without something going on inside the head, you don't have a belief, so I assume if you don't... You were saying that they could believe then, it wouldn't prevent them from believing in life after death or not after death. I do. I could believe both. Mental state... Let's just get rid of it. Mental states are external states. There is life after death. I see where you're going. What you're saying is after death, I wouldn't have a body, and therefore there wouldn't be... Okay, yes, that's interesting. Maybe I couldn't be... Or if I were an externalist and I believed that, I would have to deny that external states involved neural states, perhaps. I can see where you're coming from on that one. If you're asking me whether I agree, I'd like to think more about it. Beliefs are beliefs until proven truth. Sorry, tell us again. Beliefs are beliefs until proven truth. In the case of light, nothing travels faster than light. In the first case, it's a belief. In the second, it's justified. In the third, it's true. So the beliefs are beliefs until proven truth. So I have questioned that. There are two terms used. I often read them like hypnotism and telepathy. They are considered able to be a mental state of hypnotism and telepathy. So if we change, nothing travels faster than light to naseem, did you say? Spellt, thus? A-S-A-M, okay. Can you pretend that I've spelt your name correctly? Beliefs? No, actually let's change that. Let's just say that hypnotism works. How do you spell hypnotism? I've really... Okay, hypnotism works. Actually, let's not make it a complex belief because that just makes it more complicated. We can do telepathy work separately. If that counts as knowledge, so naseem believes hypnotism works, let's say. He's got to have the belief hypnotism works. Well, we know he has that. He presumably believes he's justified a belief in hypnotism works. So the second one's in. But if it's going to be true, if naseem knows that hypnotism works, then it's got to be the case that hypnotism works. Now, I completely accept that. I completely accept that. I would like to say, actually, we don't know that. But that's the thing. If it works sometimes, do we accept it as true? Well, yes, if it works, sometimes it works, doesn't it? Yeah. I mean, if hypnotism ever works, then... Actually, sorry, hypnotism probably does work. I'm told there have been some quite good experiments about this. Maybe we should try it with the other one. Telepathy. In that case, we've got the situation I've got there. I think telepathy is less likely to work than hypnotism. But that's what I believe. Maybe I'm wrong. Sorry. Externalists believe that mind is not in the head, if I understand you correctly. It's not necessarily in the head. Not only in the head. Do they make any statement about where you might find it in the physical world other than in the head? No, they don't think it's located. So physical states are located. This pen is located in space-time. To describe the location, you'd have to relate it to me and to John and to everything else, etc. Anything physical must be located in space-time. The mind we thought before when we were internalists is located inside the head. If you're an externalist, you believe there is stuff located inside the head without which there wouldn't be any mental states. But mental states themselves are not located in space at all. I think I struggled with that. That's because you model mental states on physical states. As long as you model mental states on physical states, mental states have to be located in space. You will think that mental states have to be located in space. But if you scrap your model of mental states as physical states, you'll see that my belief if it isn't located inside my head, perhaps isn't located anywhere. Instead, it spreads over the world. My belief that John is wearing a grey coat is a belief that's a function of a relation that's six-foot between me and John. But when John goes home and I go home, there's going to be a lot more than that. So the belief sort of... A bit like Dawkins' memes, are they? Really? Could one not compare them a little bit? Certainly not. I do. Oh, I'm sorry. No, no. Could Colin McGinn possibly have been right in suggesting... No. in suggesting that we shall never crack the mind-body problem because our brains haven't got the capacity to do it? Or is Don Snake a better bet in suggesting that give us 50 years and we shall crack it? No. Depends on what you mean by crack it, doesn't it? Well, understand... Colin McGinn is saying that we will never understand the mind and Nagel is saying physics will understand the mind. That's one way of understanding that. If Colin is saying we will never understand the mind, in other words, leaving it open that perhaps we understand it but not as a physical theory, and Nagel is saying we will understand the mind though not necessarily as a physical theory, do you see that the distinction becomes too different? I can tell you where I stand on that one. I think we will understand the mind but we won't understand this as a physical state. So I'm... depending on which way you understand them, I'm with either of them. Even Colin. It's a case I think that there are some instances where somebody can control the movement of an artificial limb just by thinking about it. Yes. Really interesting stuff. Doesn't that have something to say about whether physics is constantly closed or whether mental states can be kept? No, because we don't know what a mental state is. That's what we're asking. In that case, if it really was in the brain it would actually make the limb work. But as an externalist we know that there's something in the brain and presumably in this case this something in the brain is having an impact on the... and we know that nothing I do I would be able to do if I didn't have a working brain. But that doesn't mean that the bits of the brain that are working my behaviour are thoughts. I mean if the epithelophthalmosis is right maybe they're not. But if I'm thinking I want that leg to move is that not a thought? That's a thought but whether that thought causes your leg to move is a question that we might... I know you think it does but that's what we've been looking at haven't we? So if you're an identity theorist you would say of course the mental state that's causing the limb to move is a mental state the mental state is causing the limb to move if you're an epithelophthalmolist you think there's a mental... sorry a physical state that is both causing you to think that you're moving the limb and is moving the limb but your thought is not moving the limb do you see what I mean? So I can answer that question in any way I like depending on what my theory of mind is and people assume that it's the thought that's moving the limb but that's because they don't know anything about these theories or if they do they're ignoring them Two more questions because I'm enjoying myself Might we call a collection of mental states a culture if you don't like memes? I think that's a more I don't like memes and I do prefer culture I mean actually I do think there's something quite interesting if we say that our thoughts aren't located inside our head that would make sense of the fact that we share thoughts so when we communicate we actually think the same thought now obviously there's different things going on in my head to your head as you're having what's going on in your head and I've got what's going on in my head but the thought that we have is the very same thought and we do actually talk like that don't we and if we both have the very same thought then that thought isn't located either in your head or in mine so that would be assuming that thoughts are we share the same token thought not just the same type thought you with me? but actually when you take externalism on board it makes sense of a lot of the way that we talk about thoughts and a lot of these thoughts if we share the same thought in a culture a community shares a picture of the world maybe that's what a culture is maybe that's what a community is so the prevailing ideas right now are externalism whether they're prevailing I've said nothing about that what I'm asking is where do you think we're going now what is the most critical question now asked by what is the mind that's still the question every single one of the theories I've been through this weekend is an attempt to answer that question none of them have worked very well but in the same way when we say is the theory of general relativity correct or is string theory correct they can't both be correct there are consequences well it doesn't look as if they can both be correct because on the theory of general relativity neutrinos cannot travel faster than light on string theory I understand they can so she sounding as if she knows something about physics but she doesn't think it's impressive thank you okay we're going to stop there we're going to the bar so thank you