 Hi guys, good afternoon So today we wrap up on the Today we wrap up on the foundation section of the class So we've looked to dualism We Have been looking at behaviorism and today we're going to wrap on behaviorism and look at central state materialism The idea that the mind is identical to the brain And we'll look at one article by Hillary Putnam brains and behavior that was designed to kill off behaviorism and On Thursday we move on to looking at functionalism and one of a handful of the most important papers in philosophy of mind since the 1960s Putnam's the nature of mental states That was really one of the first papers that articulated functionalism Which is still I think the dominant philosophy of mind Okay, today I'm going to present a way of reading the model of Putnam's Brains and behavior article that takes it towards saying that the mind is the same thing as the brain Which is not quite the same as functionalism, but we'll come on to these distinctions in just a little bit Okay, everyone should have a copy of the topics for the first essay Everyone have them. You presumably all have a quick look at them. I hope they're all well, they won't you yes, I Won't all make sense as yet, but Are there any questions about them so far any questions comments Okay, I would just draw your attention to the thing that says right at the head of the thing The first paragraph of your essay must state the main thesis for which you wish to argue in the essay The last paragraph must restate the main thesis Summarize the way in which you have argued for it and indicate any outstanding problems Somehow the psychology of it is that when you're writing this kind of essay is very natural to Have your main point your main conclusion coming as a kind of surprise to the reader. So you think How agreeably startled the reader will be when they get to the end and find out what you really think in this topic and Reading these things is someone who's writing it like that It is like listening to someone who's trapped you in a corner and is telling you a very long story And you really don't know if there's going to be a point to this or not So for the point of view of the reader the way you have to train yourself to write is to do it backwards Start out with your main point Think of it like a newspaper article a newspaper article has the main point already there in the headline Right, so your first paragraph should be like a headline for the rest of your essay saying what the take home message is So whoever's grading your essay will already by the end of the first paragraph be saying, okay What's the main thesis? What's the point going to be and then right at the end? You restate your main point go over how you argued for it And it's okay if you think there are problems for your view. I mean your main point might be look I think dualism is just fine. I think dualism is right. That's great. I believe in it I mean, you don't have to say it's but one option would be to say I believe in ectoplasm. That's fine. That's your first paragraph I think the ectoplasmic view of the mind is correct and Then at the end Restate your belief in the ectoplasmic view and indicate any problems you think there are for that view Okay, so reasonably clear what was being asked for there in the way you structure the essay So you're looking for a thesis and a defense of that thesis against possible objections Okay, Jackson Austin. Do you want to say anything? Yes Yes, I do what will I do want you to refer to texts. It's not The important point is the next one Let me just make a remark about this because this is about reference to texts But I guess you've all come across the idea of plagiarism at some point already You know, hopefully the this this class in the university in general is a very supportive environment Everybody wants you to do well the one place for the the environment turns nasty is With plagiarism plagiarism being when you take text or ideas from someone else Without saying that that's what you've done and pass it off as your own I mean it happens now and then it happens every other term or so someone just Usually, I think someone just gets in a jam They have no idea what to write about this is seeing the due date is here So you lift something off the web or something and it's kind of natural to do that but The thing is that's very easy to detect and if it happens you automatically get an F for the course And a note is sent to student judicial affairs So basically the roof falls on you. It's really a very disagreeable business so Taking ideas from other people that's the whole point of the class right you're reading these texts and You're talking to the GSIs and you're hopefully getting ideas from other people the whole time But you have to say what you're doing Is that completely clear? Yeah, yeah Anything that's clear Yeah, I mean you can use a bibliography at the end and citations along the way to references to the bibliography Or you can put the full citation in the body of the text or you can use a footnote. I don't really do the GSIs Yeah, yeah anything that's clear Yeah Is that completely clear? I mean this becomes like airport Airline, you know fasten your seatbelt messages after a while But you presumably all had this kind of message before and you know what I'm talking about Is that right? Anything in this not completely clear. So yes references to the text. I mean, hopefully you're getting something out of the class and There is there are some texts you want to refer to in the essay, okay, and so today I want to start out by just going over what analytical behaviorism is and Then Putnam's alternative view of words for mental states as cluster concepts And then what he thinks is his key argument the argument about super Spartans and the general point I want to keep getting at is that What makes the mind so puzzling is the ways in which we know about it It's very difficult to think of what the mind can be How the mind can be physical or how it can be made of anything else Given the ways in which we know about it and the ways in which we understand our own minds and other people's minds so Here's dear old corner Presumably in a state of high excitation That explaining what excited means so this is kind of explaining the meaning of saying that someone's excited, right? So here it is that physical structure Or microstructure of mysteries body especially of a central nervous system that is characterized by a high pulse and rate of breathing Which on the application of certain stimuli may be made even higher the pulse rate and the rate of breathing By vehement and factually unsatisfactory answers to questions by the occurrence of agitated movements on the application of certain stimuli Etc. So that's what it is to be excited. So you're giving a definition there of excited and he's connecting Being excited to behaving a particular way So you could try doing the same for being angry being upset being in a state of deep joy Always states This isn't this is analytical behaviorism if you look at the second essay It's talking about the second essay prompt is talking about analytical behaviorism. It's a view about the meaning of words for mental states That's a little bit confusing if you know about Behaviorism in psychology where the whole idea of behaviorism in psychology where I'm skinner in these guys Oh, we're talking about behaviorism was we don't want to talk about mental states at all the idea was Psychology is a scientific study of behavior and we should drop out talk of the mind as a lot of mumbo jumbo That's best left in the Dark Ages You should describe and explain behavior without making any reference to mental events or other internal processes So that was behaviorism as a scientific movement in psychology also now gone out of the window I mean nobody in their senses now thinks that You should try and describe and explain behavior without talking about brains or mental states right into internal states Yeah, I mean Any holdouts from behaviorism? No scientific. Yes. Yes No, the idea was to explain behavior. You should not talk about what's going on in the head at all You should simply look at The environment that the animal is in and how it's responding to that environment and you shouldn't have internal constructs the idea was that these are invariably just confusing and Don't really make sense can't really be Given clear definitions Was the objection? It really is I think I think it's fair to say it's of mainly historical interest now that scientific movement Okay, so analytical behaviorism is the idea. Have you guys come across the notion of an analytic truth? Okay, the idea of analytic is just This true in virtue of the meanings of the words that the statement just kind of spells out Some of the meanings of the words involved. So after Monday comes Tuesday Orange is in between yellow and red I mean you didn't just notice that after it's not like in the in the history of the world, you know back in the cavemen discovered that month Tuesday comes right after Monday and then they said by God look at this regularity You know it's happening again. I bet you know do We can build a system of thought here and you know some eccentrics. You say no no every seventh day every seventh week It's um you got a Wednesday right after Monday that that Yeah, that there was never such a state. I promise you there was never such a stage in human history Right, but you just explaining what you mean Monday Tuesday Wednesday and so on you just explain what the system is That's the meaning of Monday. It's the one right in between Sunday and Tuesday. That's the meaning of Tuesday it's the one right in between Monday and Wednesday, right? Yes Okay So these things are analytic in the sense that they're not really reflections in how the world is They're just spelling out the meanings of the words you're using. Yep societal knowledge Right, the thing is this isn't really it's not explicitly a statement about words this if you see what I mean It's a little bit Suckler than that though the statement about the meanings of the words. That's just a regular empirical fact the word Monday Yeah, that could be different but the word Monday could have been used for Sunday. Are you following me here? We could have used the word Monday to stand for Sunday. Yeah, but um, that's not what this is talking about This is talking about the day Monday, and that's saying that day comes right after comes right before Tuesday You see what I mean So the societal knowledge would be knowledge of the arbitrary meanings of the signs of the language But this is when you're actually using the language and you're saying something in it And the thing is this isn't giving anybody any news if you understand what that's saying you already know it's true Right, so just if you understand what any of these are saying, you know, you know that these are true Yeah So contrast There's a green fly on my roses Right, is that true and virtue of the meanings of the words? No, that would be the wrong answer right because there's I mean, I don't know idea if there's a green fly on your roses Um, the whale is a mammal. Yeah, you didn't know that just by knowing the meaning of the word well Here comes the cook. I mean Might be true and it might not it could nothing to do with the meanings of the words Well, there is something to do with the meanings of the words You see what I mean Is that reasonably clear? I'm not quite sure how to put this on a scale of one to ten How clear is that? Yeah, well, is that right? I mean, I see what you're saying, but um The the whale is a mammal that's something about the thing right you're saying is really part of what that thing is that it's a mammal Yeah, that's very plausible, but you didn't you didn't know that just by knowing that it's a whale For all you knew Whales might intrinsically be fish You had to find out Yeah, the mammals rather than fish to find out what their actual internal nature is Um, but with bachelors being unmarried if you know that he's a bachelor You know that he's unmarried If you it doesn't follow that being unmarried is part of what he intrinsically is Because in the tourist way that changes You see what I mean, um, you know, there are these stories about people who really are intrinsically unmarried, but You don't have to be as it were intrinsically unmarried just to be a bachelor That's right. Uh, the the mama one is one you have to find out. Yeah Uh, yeah An analytic truth if you just know what it's saying if you know what the words mean Then you understand what it says then you know that it's true Right if you just know what these mean these sentences you already know that they're true You don't really have to go and take a look Yeah, but you could know perfectly well what it means to say the whale is a mammal But really not be sure whether it's true You might think but no they're surely they're fish You see what I mean tomatoes or veg tomatoes or vegetables tomatoes or fruits At the moment of speaking you actually don't know which they are. Um, let's see fruit. Are they okay? Well, I'll take Sorry They've seen oh, okay. Well, you're ahead of me. Okay. Um, but you see what I mean You could know what it means to say a tomato's a fruit or well or tomatoes are vegetable But not know which way it goes which one is true Yeah, that okay okay, so What analytical behaviorism is saying well with car naps thing what he was saying was is excited That just means that's like this is a complicated version of that whale of that Bachelors are unmarried thing and there was a general idea that that really can't be true I mean some people I could be having a nervous breakdown and if I'm really keeping my cool You just might not be able to tell I might not give My answers to questions might be factually satisfactory. Even if I was having a nervous breakdown so great is my cool Right Um, I mean there are people like that, right? You could be standing at the bus stop when they could be going through hell And you just wouldn't know about it their answers to questions are never vehement Um, yeah, you so that's too tight. You know, that's too close. You can see what car naps means there but people said that must be um A little bit too strict what car naps trying to do that So analytical behaviorism says there are entailments between this is a quote from a putnam article that we're looking at today There are entailments between mind statements and behavior statements entailments that are not maybe analytic In the way that all bachelors are unmarried is that is analytic? But nevertheless they follow in some sense from the meanings of mind words So it's a little bit loose what behaviorists were after um, but what you want is that um Well, what I want right now is a bit of chalk, but oh well. Oh, yeah, um Is that you got a word like angry? Say You got that mental term angry and then you've got a whole kind of cloud of behavior talk um Behavior talk, you know stuff about thumping the table shouting um looking for revenge That kind of stuff about the ways people behave and it's kind of loose It's not really very tightly defined that way But you only understand what angry is when you understand the connections between anger and behavior There's no more to the anger than the behavior Even though it's not really possible to specify in a very precise way which behavior is needed for someone to be angry So these entailments between mind talk and behavior talk these entailments might not let you translate mind talk Into behavior talk, but this is true for such superficial reasons as the greater ambiguity of mind talk as Compared with the greater relatively greater specificity of overt behavior talk Which so when you talk about someone's behavior Um explicitly you're usually saying something fairly definite about it Whereas when you say someone's really grumpy this morning you say look out He's on the warpath Then um what you are saying is you know a kind of behavior to expect though It's not saying something particularly definite about that behavior, but that's analytical behaviorism. Is that okay for analytical behaviorism? You see what it's saying Plain as day Okay Well the the mental terms specific in that it's one particular mental state rather than any other particular mental state But a bunch of different behaviors could um constitute you being in that mental state Yeah, you can show grumpiness in lots and lots of different ways You can smile sweetly as you dig the knife in to express your grumpiness. Yeah Okay, now the thing about this is the striking thing about one striking thing about this is Um, if that's right then you have to find out about your own mental states in the same way that other people find out About them that you find out about other people's mental states by observing their behavior, right? That's just kind of obvious The old all you've got to go on and find out about someone else's mental states is how they're behaving But on this view according to analytical behaviorism You'd have to find out about your own mental states by observing your own behavior too And last time I was arguing that uh, that's actually not as unreasonable as you might think at first Um, it's natural to think that well, I know about my own mind. All right, that's easy. I just look inside And what I was arguing is that knowledge of yourself is often very difficult It's not just a matter of glancing inside. That was um, Benjamin Franklin's insight that uh, knowing oneself is extremely hard as hard as steel or diamond um And when you think of knowledge of your own emotions, am I really in love or is it just a passing boyish infatuation? Well, I don't know. I mean you you know about these kind of things about yourself Um, in pretty much the same way that you know them about other people You you observe yourself closely. You reflect on how you tend to behave um And last time I was trying to give a whole bunch of examples that are like that Do I have a good sense of humor? Well, you know that about yourself in pretty much the same way You know about other people. So what I was arguing last time was that there isn't really a different basis For knowledge of your own mind from knowledge of other people's So that part of behaviorism is really pretty plausible Yeah, you don't really you I mean you're very expert in yourself But you don't really know about your own mind in a way that's different to the way you know about anybody else You happy with it Yes, that's right. Well That's right. There's going to be lots of different ways you're tending to behave um Your way of being excited might be very different from my way of being excited. You see what I mean that um You jump for joy and I um, I tap my nose significantly I raise an eyebrow And that but that's it Yeah, that's all it is to you being excited and me being excited is those behaviors even though they're different for both of us Okay. Well, this is saying there's no more to being angry. There's no more to being excited than tending to behave in those ways So you don't know about your own anger in a different way to the way you know about my anger That's the view. I mean similarly for headaches, you know, how do you know about my headache? Because I tell you because I I can play and write. How do you know about your own headache? Ah, no, not in this view in just the same way You know about your own headache because um, you hear yourself complaining You see that you're not managing to focus on your tasks Right. Yes Well, what I've been arguing is that that's not right that um, you slice your arm The knife divides the flesh Um, and um, you cry out Yeah, you cry out in agony And then you hear yourself crying out and you say boy, that really hurt me You don't look inside at something Yeah The way I'm using mental state. It's a really broad term. It covers just everything that goes on in your mind So a headache is a mental state anger is a mental state Um, discovering a theorem is a mental state You see what I mean? Anything this to do with the mind is a mental state the way I'm using mental state. Yeah So what I'm saying is any of those sensations you find out just by observing your own behavior Okay, you comfortable with that? Yes That's right. You observe your yeah, that's right. Um, I mean, how do you teach someone the meaning of pain? You stick a pin in them and you say now, you know what pain is, right? Um, I mean Well, I mean, that's very popular with small children, but that's not That's not really the recommended way What you do is you point to someone who's undergoing agony You point to someone who's had an accident and saying boy, that really hurt them Yeah, and then when you find yourself with a physical injury and yelling at the top of your voice Then you say, oh, I'm in pain too, right because I'm just behaving just the way that kid was It's because it's a similarity in your behavior that lets you know you've got the same mental state. Yeah The way I'm the way I'm talking right now. The yelling is the behavior Yeah, and and the behaviorist is saying there's no more to being in pain than doing the yelling That's at the level of the behavior talk. Yeah So all there is to finding out that someone's in pain is observing them yell So in particular knowing that you're in pain is just a matter of hearing yourself yell Yeah, it's a little bit more radical in that it's not that the body interprets the mind It's that there is no more to the mind than the body There's no more to the mind than the behavior Yeah, so just to go back to how we got here. Remember there was this stuff about is the mind made of ectoplasm or what on earth is the mind And uh, then if you say well, I just don't believe this stuff about ectoplasm And then you say well, what could the mind be what could it be to be intelligent? Well, it's a matter of behaving in a particular complicated way. Yep Oh, sir Do conscious people unconscious people suffer pen? I would have thought not but I'm not dogmatic in the point. Yeah Oh, their brain is that something's going on in their brain Also, the pain was there all along but they didn't know it Yeah, that's fine. I'm not unhappy with that. Remember we were talking last time about uh Soldiers in battle that are just like that, you know, they come to and they say good My arm Yeah That's right. That's what I mean that Oh, I see so, but they So the You're thinking that the soldiers in the battlefield might be yelling or whatever But saying I don't feel pain. I don't think that was actually the the situation. I mean this was um The Historically the first time this was noses was um at Anzio when um, uh, surgeons saw guys who had really bad injuries Refusing medication and just coming on and we're just amazed by this Um, and the idea the natural idea is it something about the focus of your attention? Well, you're in the very kind of high stress situation that these guys were in your attention is all focused on keeping alive Making your way in this difficult environment and you just don't focus on anything internal at all Yeah, so this fits with what you're saying about uh sleep, right that you could be having the pain But just not realize it. Isn't that what you're saying? behavior Without consciousness This is a different issue, but isn't isn't pain just a conscious state? Okay, Jackson. Oh, I thought you were raising your Are you coming in this? Yeah. Yeah good. Yeah Okay, um, this is interesting, but I'm not uh, anyone want to come in in that? Uh, no Okay, yep. Yes That's what he's saying. Yeah I guess what I think is very intuitive is if you can have pain without realizing that you have pain Right. Um, that's the one that I find harder. Yeah. I mean if consciousness has shut down Could there be dead people with pain? I mean how far would you push it? Very good. Yes. Yes Okay, okay. It's an interesting issue and really I mean pain is a difficult case for a behaviorist I hope that some of you are feeling that what I'm saying about pain can't be right And it can't is crazy, right It can't possibly be right But anyway Therefore I'm in pain Right I think that's a very good question I mean the behaviorist has to say well, that's just the way your body works It's nothing to do with the sensation of pain And Well, it's not ectoplasm. It's just talking about your brain It's kind of the opposite of an ectoplasmic answer actually It's saying your mind isn't involved at all in causing you to scream Your mind is only comes in in recognizing your the existence of your behavior Of your screaming the mind just is the screaming If you think that view is crazy, then I think you're completely correct, right? But historically it's been a very important view and the Yes, sure Yes If you fake it completely Then you have the mental state. That's right. Yeah Um If you deny cancer, yeah, well cancer was a mental state that would work if you denied it then there would be none of it Yeah Yes That's right Okay, so there are going to be discriminations you want to make among pens that you wouldn't be doing on the basis of your reaction Yeah, I mean if I'm a masochist and I'm really a connoisseur of pens Yeah, so I you got the paper cut you got the dividing of the flesh and you got the what was the injury to the arm Yeah, so and these are different kinds of pens that I might be you're right I might react in pretty similar ways, but when I say about the paper cut. Oh my Let's do that one again, right? What I mean, I mean I'm not I'm not suggesting you try this at home or anything Um, but if that's what I'm doing I say, oh my let's do that paper one thing again Um, then um, it seems to me very implausible of what I'm doing is observing my own behavior with great relish That's what you're saying Yes, right Then you're in a lot of pain no matter what even if it's a paper cut that makes you go Right, okay, okay good. I what you guys are basically doing is shaping up for putt to putt and I'm super spartans argument Yeah, I mean Another second and someone is going to do this. Yeah, uh, okay one two Yes That's right. So riles making this is really like riles you that I'm setting out here So riles argument was you think you naturally think of the mind as a kind of ectoplasm And then you think well, how does that connect up to all the behavior and so on and riles answer was That is so puzzling and the mind seems like such a deep mystery when you think of it like that But that is a mistake All that there are here are various ways of classifying complex behaviors That's all there is to the mind Yeah, that's that's why there are these connections there. You just get different classifications of behavior Yeah, and the great advantage of a great liberation is that it gets you away from all the stuff about ectoplasm Yeah, the unfortunate fact is that it's bunkers Yeah, I mean I I don't mean that in a technical sense Right Strongly agree. Yeah, I mean a friend of mine who watched in the city said when my mother died No one in the office could have told Yeah, you can be absolutely churned up, but I'm not sure a bit of it. Yeah, that's difficult Yeah, you might be bottling it up, but there's something being bottled up here and when the Um, when the restraints come off It's all going to pour out That's the point. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, whereas If if I'm not bottling something up, then when the strengths come off, I don't behave any differently You see what I mean? So I I guess if you think the behaviorist could say these kind of cases Where you're just faking it really well, you are bottling up Some behave you you're cock cocking up some behavior here And when you take out the cork when you're left alone or whatever then boom Out comes this um, you start yelling or sobbing or um biting the carpet or whatever you do Yeah Okay, last last one. Yeah well, uh That this view has to say all there is to being stressed is Tending to behave in lots of different ways You know, someone says to you Watch out for bill. He's under a lot of stress right now You don't know exactly what to expect, but you know the kind of thing Yeah, his sense of humor might not be that good and so on. Yeah So it's loosely connected to behavior is what that theory says Okay So that's analytical behaviorism So I want to sketch out Putnam Putnam's got a quite different way Of thinking about the connection between the mind and behavior Which is that these words like anger or pain or whatever or what he calls cluster concepts So um He says there are a million and one different ways of saying what pain is All cluster of behaviors that exhibit pain So pain is that feeling which you can Normally events by saying ouch by wincing or in a variety of other ways Or you might not even sit at all So if your kid's learning what pain is the way they have to do it is by seeing each other when they're in pain You do have to learn what kind of behavior is connected to pain And the picture is Suppose you think Yeah, well, you're when you're sorry Yeah, when you're learning the meaning of the word pain You need someone to clue you in as to which state it is that we're talking about Uh-huh the one what? Folds Oh falls. Yes, right. Yes, right. Yes. Sure. Sure Yes, well Yeah, I I I they wouldn't know what the word the word pain means Well, not because they know what the word pain means Um, right. That's not why they're crying Yeah, they feel it, right There's two things here. There's having it and there's knowing what it is Yeah, so remember this is why I went through that stuff about analytic. We're talking really here about the meanings of words The meaning Not whether you have the state but what the word for the state means Yeah Yeah, um So yeah, okay. So you newborn infants. Yeah, they can have pain. All right But knowing the meaning of the word pain is something that comes a little bit later Yeah, it's not exactly that's how you're supposed to feel but but yeah, there's actually there's something right about that. Yeah that um You're learning the meaning of the word pain by some you've been taught the meaning of the word pain by someone who knows When your behavior is indicating pain Yeah, and then you have to be able to use other people's behavior to tell when they have in pen have pen Yeah You you really got to have that to know what pain is That's the idea Yeah, yeah No question about that animals and very young children could still have the pains. All right. They just don't know what it is What it is. Yeah, yeah Okay, so platinum's picture is I think this is a way of putting what platinum's picture is Suppose you think about a doctor in a country practice Who gets a whole bunch of strange symptoms? And people come to the surgery and they say things like I've got a strange cough and I'm really sensitive to light I just can't bear bright light and um, you get a whole People keep coming in with these strange symptoms. They're getting headaches and um The after a bit the doctor says look something's going on here Um, these guys are all minors. Let's suppose that have these symptoms. They are all working deep underground So you say what we've got here is no we're not just good isolated symptoms here The coughing and the sleeplessness and the light and the headaches And these are all part of a single disease There's a there's a syndrome here I mean that's usually what happens with things like legionnaires disease Or aids that you find out the symptoms first and then you say well, I guess there's a single disease here And and it's not straightforward to know when you're right to do that and when not because sometimes it might turn out Like in this example it might turn out that the cough really has nothing to do with it That there is really a new disease here But that these guys all having a cough is just a kind of accident They're getting that as a result of them all being minors, but that's not really what they what what what they're really getting here is some kind of um Migraine or something um, and it's a different kind of uh, uh disorder than What's responsible for the cough so when you've got A real syndrome here You've got a set of symptoms where if someone comes in and says well I'm getting the headaches and I'm getting the sensitivity to light and you can predict you can say to them Well, are you having trouble sleeping and they say yeah, I'm having trouble sleeping too That's when one set one of the symptoms when some of the symptoms predict the rest You regularly get these symptoms as a group then you say there's a real single disease here There's an underlying virus that is causing all these symptoms Right, that's how it goes in that that's how it went with Legionnaires disease or with AIDS that you say we bet There's a virus there. We bet. There's some underlying thing that is causing all these symptoms so I'm pertinence example is polio um, if you've got polio that having polio is not a matter of having the symptoms of polio I mean there is a virus and to have polio is to have the polio virus But the only way the virus get tracked down was by knowing what symptoms it generally produces um, so you could have the symptoms of polio But for some quite different reason some other awful thing had happened to you not polio not that virus So you had the symptoms But not the virus thing you wouldn't have polio And Putnam's idea is pain is like that all the terms for mental states are like that If Martians came down and were observing us and they saw things like um, look look at this guy He's um banging a nail into the wall with a hammer. He hits his thumb with a hammer What happens? He hops he sucks his thumb. He cries out He winces um that happens again and again you get these symptoms And you say there's something going on here. This is the way these humans work There is something happening that is causing that cluster of symptoms Just as there can be something happening that causes a disease or the symptoms of a disease Um, similarly with something like jealousy the Martians say look, what is human love? um, how does human love work and um, you look at these symptoms and jealousy the symptoms of jealousy the part card at 3 a.m. The um The phone taps the the opening the email account all that stuff is right in there and the Martians observing this say Something's going on here. We've got a syndrome here. Let's call that jealousy now. You could have asymptomatic jealousy if you see what I mean Just as someone could be lucky and have the polio virus without having any of the symptoms You know you can have a disease asymptomatically Um, you could have the pain asymptomatically if i'm pronouncing that correctly Um, and so you have the pain, but you don't do any of that stuff But you still identified what pain is by saying if it's the it's the thing that is usually causing those symptoms Yeah one two Yeah, it implies a lot of similarity between people in their mental states Yeah, I wouldn't push it as far as saying that we don't exist as individuals or something like that Um, but just that jealousy is jealousy whether it occurs in you or in me It's yeah, it is certainly not unique. Sometimes people have ideas, you know, when you look inside yourself Your own mind is as distinctive as the taste of pitch You know, there's that Indefinable meanest that accompanies every mental state I have yeah, but makes it quite alien to anything you could have So this is contradicting that and saying no, you can have the same kind of state in many people. Yeah, yeah Yeah Yeah, okay. Well, you could have the virus, but um, the virus is I don't I mean I don't really have the technical vocabulary to explain what's going on But you have the virus, but it's just not active It's just not I mean there's a process by which the virus has to generate paralysis for example I mean here your hands out here For the virus to get to them Um, there's a process that has to go through So the virus could be there though. It doesn't go through that process Oh, well, this is this is I mean this to be a simple example um It seems complex that's unintentional. Um, uh, I mean, I think that is how words for diseases work, right? Yeah, I mean some I mean there is aren't these there are these famous cases of people with hiv Where um, they've got the virus all right, but it's just not showing up in symptoms anymore Yeah, it's not right. There are people who live for 10 years or more with Yeah, they're right. They're right. You don't have any symptoms for the first while. Yeah Yeah, so there's a process by which the virus generates the symptoms and you could have the virus without that process being gone through Yeah, yeah, you still needed the symptoms to get on to the virus Yes, exactly to identify it in the first place. Yep That's right So the idea is that's like someone who has the symptoms but without having the virus No, it fits very well with it because um, that sort of thing about someone could have the um Uh, if you've got all the symptoms of polio, but you don't have the virus. That's not polio So if you're faking it with pain you've got all the usual symptoms Right, you hope you suck your thumb. You say oh my god all that stuff, but um, you don't have the pain If the use if the right cause isn't there So pain is the cause of all those symptoms, but you only manage to identify that thing by knowing what the symptoms were So what we this is putting them what we mean by pain is not the presence of a cluster of symptoms But rather the presence of an event or condition that normally causes those responses Right, so this is what you guys are saying really. It's not the behavior. That's the important thing is the feeling that is underlying the behaviors Yeah, so behavior is still important because behavior is how you Diagnose the thing in the first place the Martians looking at us Um, I'm saying there's such a thing as love. There's such a thing as jealousy There's such a thing as being really grumpy These are useful classifications that let you get on to that let you target the underlying causes and human beings So that's Putnam's theory of mental state concepts as cluster concepts Right the pain the behavior is diagnostic of the underlying mental state And the thing is what is the underlying mental state? It's a brain state. I mean, we all know what causes behaviors. There's different aspects of your brain So if you think of it like that, the the pain must be a brain state Because we know the causes of behavior Okay Yep Yes, it throws it out. Yeah, this is throwing out analytic behaviorism This is saying analytic behaviorism was right to give some importance to the behaviors But the behaviors are important as symptoms Not because they actually define what the thing is Yep Okay So here's Putnam's killer argument The argument about super Spartans And really this is a very simple argument and he is basically amping up what a lot of you guys were saying If you guys amped up what you had been saying just 10 minutes ago Then you get this argument The idea is that you have a people who think is very I don't know undignified or shows low breeding to Exhibit any signs of pain. Let us suppose they are a warrior people And if the steel divides their flesh, do they wince? Do they hop? They do not Do they even so much as raise an eyebrow or flare an astral? They do not They don't behave in any of those ways And let's suppose that if you do behave in those ways, you are very unpopular You are not going to mate If you behave in those ways When you have pain if you exhibit pain in any way then Your line dies out So people might say they're in pain, but they don't do any of that undignified stuff of yelling or shouting or whatever Bangy in the floor pleading And eventually after many centuries these people are born that way So after a few centuries when these people feel pain They're not it's not even that they have to bottle it up And the tendency to express the pain has just been bred out of them So they feel pain all right. They can be undergoing the agonies of the damned But in no way do they exhibit it to each other or even when they're alone And they don't have any tendency to exhibit it Putnam's point is that makes perfect sense I mean, I'm not saying it's likely, but it could perfectly well happen. Yep That's a great example you could have a race of um I don't know what the opposite of a Spartan would be. Um, yeah, super super hypochondriacs who are always exhibiting pain behaviors Yeah, who exhibit pain behaviors more or less continuously or at any rate at random. Yeah, that could be too Yeah, and the pain behavior has just lost any connection to the sensation of pain You can make sense of that too. Yeah, absolutely. That yeah, that has never occurred to me, but of course you're right. Yeah, um Okay So if you have these super Spartans then the analytical behavior picture isn't true Analytical behaviorist picture isn't true of them at all. They have the pain all right But they don't have the slightest tendency to express it in their behavior And many of you guys were saying things more or less along those lines This is a very simple example that makes the point There is an x world where these people don't even talk about pain anymore So the I mean, they don't do anything as low-bread as talk about pain Um, but they still have the pain if you divide their flesh They still suffer We were talking earlier about whether someone in a coma or someone asleep could feel pain And um, yeah anesthetics are actually pretty interesting. Uh, there was a case of an anesthetic that was found to combine um An analysis of how the anesthetic worked was that it combined a muscle relaxant And an amnestic that is by an amnestic. I mean it had something in it that made you lose your memory For the time during which it had been administered. Yeah, so it was used for surgical operations this thing um, and when you think about how that's working um, well There you are on the operating table. You've got this muscle relaxant So whatever is going on as they cut open your ribcage Um, you're not going to be able to move at all because you have the muscle relaxant And afterwards they'll say to you you're okay. You're saying fine because you have the amnestic But just between you and me would you want to take that anesthetic if you're going in for the operation? Yes, yeah Is it a painkiller a hypnotic and a relaxant, right? Okay, suppose you missed out the painkiller And you had only the relaxant and an amnestic Yeah, people would wake up from their operations And say that was fine That's your guess. Yeah, they might feel worse, but they wouldn't be able to pinpoint it and say I was suffering Yeah, that's the whole point of having the saying there's an amnestic in there. Yeah, yeah Exactly. You don't have the slightest tendency to behave anyway Yeah, because that ability has been taken away from you But the terrifying thing is you could still be feeling every moment of it as they saw went through your ribcage This was actually used It depends what you mean by awake if someone who's can't move an inch Awake Presumably. Yeah. I mean that's the thing Um, you couldn't have told by looking at them. You couldn't have told from their behavior Yeah Sorry, I do. I hope this is not too horrific You okay? Okay, but you wouldn't want to use that right so Pain and your knowledge of pain there's a little bit indirect the connection Um, I mean these soldiers in the battlefield or the football players or whatever Um, they also suggest that you've got to be attending to to um to know that you've got the pain If you're not attending then it seems entirely possible that you could have the pain but not know about it I mean we had that example of um, you've got a headache and then you're watching a movie that is very gripping And uh, you get caught up in the movie and then the minute the movie slows down You notice the headache again Um, I mean sure that that happens the whole time right that um, but it seems kind of strange to say well the headache went away It's not that the headache went away. You just weren't noticing it. So now consider um Putnam's x world again. So you had these super Spartans who bred never to express pain Now you could if you can imagine that you could also imagine that the super Spartans are bred Never to attend to their own pain right, it could be that um It's just it's just thought of as self-indulgent. This is a warrior people. They do not bother Indulging in noticing their own pain. They just get on with stuff Um, yeah, there are some parts of the present-day world for you might think is kind of like that. Um I was once I once talked to somewhere from new york about um, what was so awful about pain and he said well I kind of get it gets in the way You can't you can't get on with life if you have pain and really that Anyway, um, that's the kind of new york attitude. Don't attend to your pain, right? Don't even notice it yourself. So you can imagine that going on her generation after generation It's not just that you don't express your pain to other people You don't even attend to it when you have it yourself Maybe now and then it accrues on you, but basically you just blank pain. You just get on with stuff um now It seems to me you could imagine a why a world like that It's not just that other people don't know about your pain. You don't even know about it except now and then and the thing is That could be our world It could be that this room right now Is an ocean of suffering It's just that for generations of breeding You don't have the tendency to express it in your behavior anymore You don't even have the tendency to attend to it yourself It's only with great difficulty that you could be brought to attend to your pain So this room right now Though everyone looks outwardly calm And some are frankly asleep Despite there's calm surface It makes perfect sense to suppose that everyone is suffering enormous physical agony Yeah, the exiles He he yes Yes, uh Yes, well, okay If you don't like it happening in a few centuries it could happen over many many thousands of years I see what you mean. Yeah. Yeah Well, I guess what we'd have to suppose is that there are some genetic tendencies I mean people differ genetically in how much they tend to express their pain or attend to their own pain And that those genetic differences are gradually amplified Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, yeah Yeah, the um The the analytical behaviorist is going to say that's not a contradiction. It doesn't make any sense. So, yeah, okay Okay, so you are you all I've gone backwards Um Okay So we all happy with that an ocean of suffering Okay, um So here here's part i'm stating his theory what we mean by pain is not the presence of a cluster of responses But rather the presence of an event or condition that normally causes those responses And then you can go further and say well, what is that cause? I mean what causes you to hop and suck your thumb and wince and all that? Well, it's your brain, right? Your brain makes you do that stuff That's what they do over in the psychology buildings the neuroscience buildings They look at how your brain makes you do stuff So if what's causing the hopping and wincing is the state of the brain Um, and pain is just whatever that cause is then pain must be a brain state Yeah What's wrong with that? Well your hand for example, uh, I'm sorry. What do you mean? Is there a reaction well any behave behaviors are typically caused by the brain that's right And if the words for mental states are names for the causes Of behaviors, then they must be names for particular types of brain state Yep, that's okay. That's straightforward enough Okay, that's central state materialism. Yeah um The idea is It often happens you can have two different ways of identifying one and the same thing And for example, you say there's heat There's what you feel the thing the thing about the about the object you feel When you put your hand in a radiator or um into ice There's heat and then there's a scientific identification of heat as a motion of molecules People knew what gold was um in ancient times But you can say that stuff that everybody knew about that is um, uh atomic number 79 Or water that people knew about for a millennia. That just is h2o Right, so you can identify the same thing two different ways So you can take lightning and say there you go. What what what in the world is that? Well lightning is what is lightning lightning is Discharge of electricity caused by ionization of the atmosphere Am I remembering that right is it discharge of ions caused by electrification? No Okay discharge of electricity caused by ion is ionization of the Atmosphere and you look at the lightning and you think gee whiz. Look at that. Look at that stuff. Look at that How could that be something as prosaic as a discharge of electricity caused by ionization of the atmosphere? But it just is right. It's just the same thing Um, so similarly you say pain. How could pain be c-fiber firing? How could this thing I feel right now? How could that be c-fiber firing? Well, it just is it just it seems kind of unlikely that the lightning is electrical discharge due to ionization Of the atmosphere it seems kind of unlikely that pain is c-fiber firing, but they're both just true That's what this interstate materialism says it just is a kind of state of your brain Yeah, you diagnose that there must be such a state in the same way you diagnose that there must be a virus underlying hiv And you use zone in it by the behavior, but then science can take over and say and here's what that stuff is So pain is the underlying cause of your wincing hopping crying out sucking your thumb and so on We found out scientifically it's in your c-fibers fire that you do that stuff Therefore pain is just c-fiber firing Okay, we can pack we can actually pack up the class there, right? I mean what board do you want? Yes Yes, that's right. Yeah, like like lightning and um Discharge of electricity due to ionization of the atmosphere. Yeah Those are the two different ways. Yeah Yeah, we you usually think that one of them is is telling you what it really is um So you'd think this is telling you what the thing intrinsically is when you say c-fiber firing whereas just describing it as um Whatever is typically causing this stuff. That's like just your way of yeah Exactly right right just as you could say what legionnaires disease was by saying the kind of context in which you get it And what the symptoms are or you could do it by specifying what the virus is Yep, okay very good. Yep. Yeah, this is materialism. Yeah. Yeah, it says pain just is the c-fiber firing So all there is to the mental state is things going on with this bit of matter. There's more to no more to it than that Um, did I write that out? Yeah pain is c-fiber firing, right? There's no more to pain than c-fiber firing Forget all that stuff about ectoplasm and forget the idea that behavior is the key thing It's your brain. There is the key thing for the reason that someone just gave your brain is The cause or practically any complex behavior that you go through. Yeah Yeah, I'm uh, this is a little bit more explicit than Putnam is I think but yeah I think this is the natural reading of what Putnam is doing in that article. Yeah. Yep This throws the ectoplasm out of the window. That's right So I said there were three big views that we're going to look at dualism behaviorism and central state materialism This is central state materialism and this is throwing the other two out Yeah, it can't be right It seems to me And there are two reasons why some of you look quite concerned This is Putnam. Yes, okay this I'm saying, okay, this model No, it's fine. I'm going Over lots of different views without always Highlighting who's who's saying what but I say Putnam is saying you use the behaviors to identify The underlying brain state, but there is no more to the pain than the underlying brain state Yeah, and similarly for any mental state jealousy anger love whatever. Yeah I I think it's not that explicit Actually in that article The reason I'm pausing a bit in this is that Putnam went on in the article We're going to look at next to develop a quite different view that is really what he's famous for Yeah But it's not but my read of this article is that it is central state materialism Yeah, Putnam would not have used that term himself. I think is that what do you think you guys Yes, yes, I think in this article the natural read of this article is that it's central state materialism. Yeah, but as we'll see As we'll see there are reasons for to hedge a bit in that. Yeah Okay But certainly there are plenty of people Who comfortably say pain is C fiber firing Yeah, if you look at the articles by smart and Armstrong in the Jackson collect in the chamors collection, for example You'll see these guys are very blunt flat-footedly saying pain to C fiber firing They're real gung-ho central state materialists. Yeah Okay But and it's a very natural view, right? I mean everybody agrees that your brain's important So this is a way of saying how come your brain's important But look think about this suppose You see a flash of lightning in the sky or you see a flash of what you think is lightning in the sky There is not actually an electrical discharge Due to ionization of the atmosphere. Suppose you see that And you say wow look at that lightning But actually is not a discharge of electricity due to ionization of the atmosphere It is let us suppose the first Blast from the death rays of their approach approaching Martian battle fleet Then is that lightning? It looks like lightning But is it lightning? Of course, it's not lightning. I mean Of course, if it really is the Martian death fleet then You have other things to worry about whether that's lightning or not, but For present purposes, that's the important question and that is not lightning, right? It can look like lightning. It can seem like lightning, but it is not A discharge of electricity due to ionization of the atmosphere that is not really lightning. Yeah Symptoms can be misleading. Yeah It can feel like heat, but it is not motion of molecules and it's not heat Yeah, it could look like water And this is really the same thing as the having the symptoms of polio without having the polio. Yeah Um, but suppose you have the feeling of pain Suppose that it's 20 years from now and you are at the dentist's and you are you have um They have a scanner on you while they do the dentistry And you think my god, you feel these jolts these molten jolts I don't know why I'm using just negative examples. I should be using joy, right But somehow it's always seems more definite when you're using pen But anyway, so suppose you're at the dentist and you're feeling these jolts and the dentist is looking at the scanner And the dentist is saying I know it feels like pain, but actually it's not c-fiber firing So not to worry Don't make such a fuss I know it feels just like pain But the scanner is showing decisively that you do not have c-fiber firing Therefore it's not pain Oh, that's all right then It's not going to make you feel any better and it's not going to make it not be pain And how could it not be pain if it feels like pain? There's no more to it being pain than that Something can look just like lightning, but not be lightning. Something can't feel just like pain, but not be pain I mean Putnam puts it like this um One can have a pink elephant hallucination, right? That makes sense. You know, you're sitting in the bar Um, you look over in the corner. You see a pink elephant. You think No We've all been there, right Right So that makes sense You could have the hallucination of the elephant there, but no elephant, right, but with hallucination Could you have a sensory experience of pain without really there being any pain? That's what the dentist is trying to tell you. It's not really pain Feels like pain, but that makes no sense pain just is the sensation If you've got this in session, then you've got the pain and nobody by going into the biology of the situation Can show that you're not feeling pain And put putnam puts it like that any situation that a person cannot discriminate from a situation in which they themselves Is pain that's a situation in which you have a pain If you're in a situation that you can't tell apart from one in which you have pain That's being in pain. Yep Uh It goes two ways. Actually, let me flip forward here. Oh plastic. Yeah, um Uh, I'm saying if you think you've got the pen, then you have got the pen The thing that you're saying about the headache is if you've got the pen, then you know you've got the pen You see what I mean? You're taking the arrow this way. I'm talking about the arrow going this way Does that make sense? Oh, I see. Yes, that's right. That's right. They're the other they're the opposite. They're complementary sides. Yeah I'm I am putting our saying you can't have a pain hallucination. You're saying you can't have An absence of pain hallucination. Yeah, that's fair enough. Yeah that I I I agree that that does seem to uh, uh You could be hypnotized We're just on the half. Oh, we're gonna have to stop that. Okay, wonderful questions you guys. Thank you Okay