 Before I introduce our speaker today, Professor Bridges, I'd like to make an announcement regarding next week. We learned earlier this week that Professor Vogler will not be able to make the talk next week. And so we will resume not on February 3rd, but on February 10 when Peggy Mason, raise your hand, Peggy, will be speaking on the topic racism, is it biological? I'm all looking forward to that talk. This afternoon, on behalf of the McLean Center and the Grossman Institute for Neurosciences, Quantitative Biology and Human Behavior, I'm delighted to welcome you to the ninth lecture in this lecture series on ethical issues in neuroethics. The lecture series was organized by John Moncel and Peggy Mason and Dan Sulmasey. And it's a pleasure to introduce our speaker today, Jason Bridges. Professor Bridges is an associate professor of philosophy here at the university, received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and his primary research areas and teaching areas are philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and philosophy of language. Professor Bridges also works in metaphysics, epistemology, and political philosophy. His latest book, published in 2011, was on the possibility of philosophical understanding, reflections on the thought of Barry Stroud, and currently he's working on several other books, including one on Ludwig Wittgenstein and another entitled The Ecology of Reasons. Today, Professor Jason Bridges will give us a talk entitled Mind, Brain, and Mechanism. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Professor Bridges. Thank you. Thank you, Mark, for the invitation. Thank you all for coming. I have to begin with a correction. This is my fault. This talk is actually called Mind, Brain, and Naturalism. So those of you who really wanted to hear about mechanism, feel free to leave now. False advertising. So first I'd like to say a little bit about how what I'm going to talk about fits into this lecture series theme. So the theme of the lecture series is neuroethics. That neologism has two parts, neuro and ethics. So there's various ways you could understand how they might come together to determine a subject matter. The most familiar, I think, understanding of that term has it categorizing the study of special ethical and perhaps legal questions that arise as a result of neuroscientific advances. So for example, those advances might make possible new medical treatments that raise thorny ethical or legal questions. Or they might make possible, or at least the prospect, of getting kinds of information about people that seems to violate norms of privacy that we have. Or they may enable certain kinds of consumer electronics that raise questions about regulation and use. My talk is not on any of those issues. My talk will count as falling under the label neuroethics on a different understanding of what that is. On this understanding, neuroethics studies the philosophical, sorry, no, I would say more generally just the implications of neuroscience for questions about ethics, any kind of question about ethics. I'm a philosopher, so I'm interested in philosophical questions. So I'm interested in particular questions about what implications, if any, neuroscience and more generally cognitive science, more generally natural science, have for philosophical questions about the understanding of our fundamental ethical concepts, in fact, more generally concepts of thought and agency. And I'm going to focus in particular on one such philosophical question today, though it's a doozy. The question is, how are we to understand thought as part of reality? That question, in some form or another, has been with philosophy essentially since the beginning, and it's motivated almost always by a worry, often in co-et, not fully articulated, that there's some problem in seeing how thought could fit into reality, into our picture of reality. In our picture of reality, just to get the initial intuitions going, whether it might be a worry, we are thinkers, we are human beings, and so we're material objects, and so we occupy the spatio-temporal material world and interact with other kinds of material things. And then the question can arise, where does this thinking aspect of us fit in that picture? Does it take place in some weird, immaterial realm that's very hard to understand, or if that picture is wholly incoherent, as I think it is and as many people think it is, then how do we get thought into the material mix? Now, I'm going to speak today on the question of what implications, if any, neuroscience and cognitive science have for that question. And I'm going to suggest not much. That's not to say that neuroscience doesn't have implications for a whole bunch of questions about ethics or the mind. Of course it does, and even philosophical questions. But I want to suggest that at least one way in which philosophers have tried to bring that scientific material to bear on the question of the reality of thought has been misguided. Now, I'm going to begin by saying a bit about the shape of the worry as it has manifested itself to 20th century philosophers and contemporary philosophers. And for them, it comes to fruition under a conception they have of the world, which is known as naturalism. So I need to say a little bit about naturalism first. So that's what I will do. So what is naturalism? It's a very widespread view or orientation in contemporary philosophy in many traditions and has been since the middle of the 20th century or so. Or more cautiously, that word naturalism has been used a lot. It's been a really popular word in philosophy since at least that time. A lot of philosophers say that what they're saying about the mind or about ethics is naturalistic or in some way or another is allegiant to some thesis of naturalism. It's not always entirely clear what people mean by that term, but I think we can get some sense of what lies in the base of essentially all such work. At the base is a very simple idea, which I have in the handout. I call it the basic thesis of naturalism. And it's just this, everything that happens or is so. All of reality is natural. The real world is the natural world. The force of this claim is supposed to be negative. What it says is nothing happens or is so except what is natural. So if there's some candidate thing to be so or to happen and we can see that it's not natural, we cross it off the list. It ain't real. That's the basic thought. Of course, so far it stated it's not clear exactly what it's saying and there's various ways to understand it of different strength. I want to talk about, for the sake of contrast, two different ways and I have them on the handout. Both in one way or another tie the notion of nature to the idea of natural science, which I'll say a word about in a minute, but for now we'll leave unexplained. So the first interpretation of the basic idea of naturalism is this. Is that everything that happens or is so is consistent with the laws and mechanisms discovered in natural science. The second claim, which is stronger, is that everything that happens and is so can be fully characterized and explained in terms of natural science. These claims come apart. The first denies that anything happens which is in direct violation of the laws or principles that govern the unfolding of events in the universe as we seem to understand them. For example, there can't be, according to this thesis, a ghost that somehow knocks over a dresser in a way that violates some conservation laws. That's ruled out. It's a good example because precisely what this thesis is meant to rule out is the supernatural. It's a denial that there are any forces or agents that are supernatural. That is, it's somehow transcend or violate or break the laws that seem to govern everything else. A great majority of the philosophers and the tradition that I'm interested in, 20th century British and American. Yeah, sure. You know, I could kind of stick my head down like this the whole time, but I don't think I want to. How about this? Is it any better? I could try gluing it to my chin. All right, I'll just, I'll talk louder. Okay, let me know if you can hear me. So most philosophers in this tradition are anti-supernaturalists. Almost everybody is. For better or for worse, they don't believe in supernatural entities. At any rate, they don't appeal to such entities to explain anything that happens that they want to explain. And that includes God. So that's a difference between the contemporary tradition going back to the 20th century and earlier philosophical traditions. You may agree or disagree, but almost all philosophers, American and British philosophers who work on issues in the philosophy of mind, see no role for the supernatural. Can you hear me back there? Okay. Interesting. All right. Work on that. I'll start quieter and get louder. Maybe I'll come forward. So, not only are the philosophers in the tradition anti-supernaturalists, the ones who say they are naturalists adopt the stronger view that I have on the handout as number two, which I call scientistic naturalism. And that's a much stronger claim. They mean not just that everything that happens or is so is consistent with the laws of science. They mean that everything that happens or is so can be fully characterized, fully accounted for and explained within natural science. And that's a much stronger claim. So to see that, think of this claim, this fact, that there was a subprime mortgage crisis fueled recession around 2007. That's a fact. There are two different ways in which you might think about that fact in relationship to these theses. One thought you might have, which I think is very plausible, is you don't need to appeal to any supernatural forces to account for the recession. You don't need to think that there was some demon using black magic that somehow got the recession going. A stronger claim is that that recession, that event, that social phenomenon and all its enormous complexity can in principle be identified and understood in the terms of some natural science, physics, chemistry, molecular biology, whatever else you want to count as natural science. You can think that there are no supernatural forces involved in bringing about or constituting a recession without thinking that a recession, that kind of event, can be fully understood and characterized in the terms of a natural science. And if you do, if you think the one and deny the other, then you're an anti-supernaturalist without being a scientific naturalist. The philosophers I'm interested in are scientific naturalists. They do think everything can be characterized and explained in terms of the natural sciences. Now, a full specification of either of these theses is going to require that we say something about what natural science is. And actually naturalists aren't usually very clear about what they mean. It always means physics, physics counts, chemistry counts, usually evolutionary biology counts, molecular biology. It starts to get fuzzy. But what is more clear is that that scientific naturalists deny that our ordinary ways of thinking about the mind when, for example, we ascribe a belief or a desire to somebody or a conscious state that that counts as a natural science. Our ordinary psychology, what's sometimes called our folk psychology, that is not a natural science. Moreover, any science that uses those concepts without explaining them, maybe sociology, is not going to be a natural science. So the criterion that rules something out of the natural science is that it makes explanatorily primitive use of our ordinary mental concepts, like belief and desire. So we now have enough on hand to state the basic puzzle of scientific naturalism. And so what scientific naturalistic philosophers spend their time doing, what they're paid to do. And it's this. We think all that's real is natural. And we think that means, because we're scientific naturalists, that all that is real can be fully captured in the terms of the natural sciences. That does not include the vocabulary of talk of beliefs and desires. They don't, on their face, count as natural. They don't display the events they talk about or the states that they ascribe as natural. But we think that we have beliefs and desires. So the problem for the scientific naturalist is to explain how those two things can both be true. How everything can be explicable in terms of the natural sciences, and yet we still believe things and desire things. That's a part of the furniture of reality. Now, there are various tax you can take in resolving this puzzle. The one that I would favor, I'll maybe say a word about the end of this time, is to reject scientific naturalism. To have a more expansive notion of nature, which includes things that aren't characterizable, though still consistent with the laws of natural science. But then you're not a scientific naturalist and I want to talk today about the issues that face them. And so I'm going to talk about two other options. The first tack is just to give up our presumption that we believe or desire things. To give up unconsciousness, to hold that those are illusions, but then we're talking about that kind of stuff. We're just wrong. It isn't there. In the contemporary context, that view manifests as a view known as eliminative materialism, and I have a specification of it on the handout. Eliminative materialism is the view that many, maybe all of our basic concepts of mental life are misbegotten. They don't capture anything real. That includes, and this is the concept a limit of materialists like to focus on, the concept of a belief, a thinking that something is so. That concept has no actual application. And so we should give it up. You might think you believe something. You might think that you think it's chilly outside. You might think you believe it's chilly outside. You're wrong, according to a limit of materialists. Nobody believes anything. You have no beliefs. How do you get to such an extraordinary view? The line of argument proceeds as follows. First, a limit of materialists observe that we use the concepts of belief and related concepts like desire to explain human action, human behavior. So for example, I might say, Mark moved his car because he believed that there was going to be street cleaning on the side where his car currently is and he didn't want to get a ticket. So ascribing a belief and a desire, I make sense of something that Mark does. So a limit of materialists notice correctly we use those concepts to explain things that people do. This suggests to a limit of materialists that our ordinary way of explaining what people do, our ordinary uses of those concepts are a theory. They're part of folk psychology. Folk psychology is our folk theory of human behavior. And the hypothesis it uses, the hypotheses it uses, being a theory it uses hypotheses, are ascriptions of beliefs and desires. And then a limit of materialists will say there must also be some presumption of laws at work. So they might think folk psychology implicitly has a set of laws of the form say everybody who wants W and believes that by doing A they will get W can be counted upon to do A. That law would underwrite the explanation I just gave of Mark's behavior, it's of that form. So it's a theory. That means in principle there could be a better theory. And what do you do when you get a better theory? You throw out the old theory. And a limit of materialists see neuroscience as in the process of coming up with a competing, better theory of human behavior. It's not there yet, but it's on its way. And when it gets there we should give up folk psychology. This idea was first articulated by the philosopher Richard Rorty in the 60s. But it became most associated in the 80s with Paul Churchland and Patricia Churchland out in California. So I have a characteristic and famous statement of the view from Paul Churchland on the handout, which I'll read. So Churchland says, folk psychology is not just an incomplete representation of our inner states and activities. It's an outright misrepresentation of those inner states and activities. Consequently, we cannot expect a truly adequate neuroscientific account of our inner lives and activities to provide theoretical categories that match up nicely with the existing categories of our common sense framework. Accordingly, we must expect that the older framework will simply be eliminated rather than reduced by matured neuroscience. We'll thus end up using the theoretical vocabulary of a matured neuroscience to conduct our interpersonal affairs and even our private introspection. There is an obvious and I think completely decisive objection to eliminative materialism. And it emerges from the simple thought that anyone who accepts it cannot consistently acknowledge that she accepts it. For as soon as she admits to herself or anyone else that she believes eliminative materialism, she contradicts eliminative materialism in its implication that there are no beliefs. Now, eliminative materialists are aware that there's a worry somewhere in this vicinity but they tend to misconstru it. They tend to think that the worry is that eliminative materialism, the view, is self-refuting. And they say it isn't and I think they're right, it's not self-refuting. The view itself, just focus on the claim there are no beliefs. That is a logically consistent claim. It's not itself a contradiction. You can imagine there being no beliefs. At one point in the history of the universe, there were no beliefs. And if things had gone a certain other way, there never would have been any. That's logically possible. Eliminative materialism would be a contradiction if the very claim that there are no beliefs implied that there is at least one belief, say in it. But it doesn't imply that. Some people have said it does, but it doesn't. Maybe it implies that the claim that there are no beliefs is worthy of belief or ought to be believed, but that doesn't imply that there's anyone around to actually believe it. That's what eliminative materialists tend to say in charge and the right. The theory is not self-refuting. It's not a limitative materialism that refutes itself. It's the eliminative materialist who refutes herself. What makes her an eliminative materialist is that she accepts, endorses, a limitative materialism. That she accepts that view implies that it's incorrect. Moreover, she knows or at least believes that she accepts it. There are books trying to get other people to share her view. Churchland, in a later edition of that book, has a preface where he says something totally banal, which I put on the handout. He says, The philosophical significance of the scientific results I discuss as I see it lies in the support they tend to give to the reductive and the limitative versions of materialism. But my opinion is only one of many alternatives. I invite you to make your own judgment. Here, Churchland admits that he has an opinion and that we make judgments, and that contradicts the eliminative version of materialism. Is this unfair? Is there a way out of this bind for the eliminative materialist? One might think there's got to be. One might think the eliminative materialist isn't really denying that in any sense at all people accept or endorse or think or even believe things. She's just rejecting some special notion of acceptance that's weighed down by its participation in this misbegotten folk psychological theory. Now, if that's what a eliminative materialist thought, they would owe us an account of what belief or endorsement is that isn't folk psychological. That's cleansed of the supposed accretions of this bad theory. And none of them have tried to do that The reason why is that what a eliminative materialist don't like about the concept of belief is so fundamental to it if you give it up you have no conceivable possibility of understanding belief or anything like it at all. And that's because what a eliminative materialist don't like about the description of beliefs to people is the fact that beliefs have propositional content meaning they are attitudes towards propositions. Propositions are things that are true or false, right? They're expressed by a whole sentence not by a part of a sentence. If I just say my cat, I haven't expressed a proposition. I've said nothing that's yet true or false. If I just say brown, I haven't expressed a proposition. You have to bring those kinds of concepts together into a unity in order to get something that's truth-evaluable, a proposition. My cat is brown. That feature of belief that has propositional content is shown in the fact that to specify a belief you need a VAT clause, grammatically. I believe VAT, and then what goes into the slot of that operator is a sentence. It's raining. It's chilly. My cat is brown. It's just that feature of beliefs that a eliminative materialist think corresponds to nothing but an actual, neural, cum-cognitive economy. And they think that. Yeah, sure. Go ahead. No. They don't think our beliefs can be explained by cognitive processes or connectionist networks or whatever, because they don't think we have any beliefs. That's what it is to be a eliminative materialist. There's another kind of naturalist you can be which tries to explain belief, and I'll talk about that in a minute. It precisely says it's a problem for neuroscience if it seizes its task to find in the brain states that have propositional contents. That's just the bad thing about folk psychology that should be given up completely. Okay. So that's why an eliminative materialist can't somehow rejuvenate the concept of belief in some way that isn't folk psychological. The very idea of belief, the very idea of a state that could be true or false that is in question for them. Okay. I think I'm going to skip this thing I have in the handout about illusions. Okay. So what are we to make of a eliminative materialism's failure? Does that failure have more implications than just that a eliminative materialism fails, which we might not care about? I think it does. One implication is an example of the extent to which philosophers can feel attracted or even compelled to sweeping claims about our ordinary concepts that are so negative they strain in this case break through the bounds of intelligibility into the world of making no sense. Okay. Eliminative materialism is far from alone in the history of philosophy in being such a view. It's an important feature of the subject of philosophy. It's important to know that you can be so tempted toward saying things that are at the outer limits of intelligibility or beyond. A further and more specific point revealed by reflection on a limit of materialism's failure is that it's a mistake to think the very idea that we have beliefs is part of a theory. That's wrong. That people think things to be so that they accept certain views but it's not a theory. It's the precondition for theory as such. It's if you want to be fancy in Kantian it's the form of theory or another metaphor it's the medium in which any theorizing can take place. So I have a quote from Patricia Churchland on the handout which I'll read. She says, Now within the confines of that very theoretical framework the unlimited vist as believing that there are no beliefs. However, this is not because folk psychology is bound to be true but only because we are confined within the framework that the unlimited vist wishes to criticize and no alternative framework is available. If the unlimited vist is correct in its criticisms and if the old framework is revised and replaced then by using the new vocabulary the unlimited vist criticisms could be restated with greater sophistication and with no danger of pragmatic contradiction. For example, the new unlimited vist might declare I is a neuro-psychological state defined within the mature new theory. But the problem here is that the unlimited vist is limited to speaking of what she believes not because there is as yet no new alternative. She must speak that way because her project just is. Her project is a human activity that we all can recognize and it just is to assess the merits of a particular view about the mind and to defend it. Any reformulation of her criticisms insofar as they remain formulations of criticisms will show her to be committed to a view about how things are and thus to believe her accept her to endure such a view and thus to leave her irretrievably moored in the supposedly bad theoretical realm of believing. We can ask, will the churchland in the future think that she Gronkifies beliefs? If she does think that, then whether she Gronkifies them, she has them and so, Eliminative Materialism is wrong. I'll stop wrapped up eating that dead horse. There's another alternative that is more popular in philosophy that I want to talk about now. The moral of the failure of Eliminative Materialism is this If we want to support our conviction that reality is fully characterizable in terms of the natural sciences we'll need to do so in a way that does not deny that we believe things because we cannot deny that and still engage in this project or any intellectual project. So some naturalistically minded philosophers are led to the project of what I'll call constructive naturalism. Constructive naturalists try not to eliminate mental phenomena but as they put it to naturalize them. What does that mean? Well, what it means in a nutshell is that they aim to show that the phenomena we talk about with our ordinary mentalistic vocabulary those phenomena are indeed natural even though the ordinary mentalistic vocabulary does not display them as natural. By the likes of scientific naturalism words like belief and desire don't represent what they characterize as natural they don't reveal those happenings as part of the natural world but the thought is perhaps we could describe the very same phenomena in a different way using different concepts concepts drawn from the natural sciences this would reveal that what we talk about when we ascribe beliefs, desires and the rest are after all natural. Now in the time that's left I'll just say a few general things about this project. The main point I want to get across is if it's going to do the philosophical work that philosophers wanted to do there's a particular idea about what it is to explain something that they need to rely upon and I think they can't under scrutiny the project falls apart the idea is of a constitutive explanation of a phenomena that's a grand word for something that we are all familiar with to a degree a constitutive claim makes a claim about the nature of something it says what it really is what it's so what it boils down to and to formulate such a claim philosophers and non-philosophers alike start with phrases like being F consists in being G or what it is to be F is to be G or for something to be F is for it to be G those kinds of ways of talking the ideas that they express have been around philosophy since the beginning so I have in the handout two competing claims that are discussed in Plato's early dialogue the euthyphro when Socrates and euthyphro are debating about the nature of piety one of the claims is what it is to be pious is to be loved by the gods that's a constitutive claim and the other claim is that being pious causes one to be loved by the gods now the crucial thing to understand here is that these claims are different it's actually Socrates' point in the dialogue that you can't think both of them at the same time the first reports to tell us what piety is it just is being God beloved there's nothing more to being pious than being loved by the gods so if you're loved by the gods it's guaranteed to be pious because that's just what it is to be pious the second claim also says that piety and God belovedness go together but not because one constitutes the other rather because one causes the other so the thought is something like the gods recognize your piety and they dig it and so they love you so your piety causes the gods to love you that claim implies that what it is to be pious is not to be loved by the gods it's incompatible with that claim the causal claim only makes sense if piety has an independence in its nature from being loved by the gods such that it can be deployed as a cause of that effect what constitutive naturalists try to do what constructive naturalists try to do is give a council of mental states and attitudes and processes consistent not what they are caused by what people within cognitive science and neuroscience often do are to give accounts of if not they don't necessarily use the language of causation but mechanisms that implement the philosopher wants to look to neuroscience cognitive science and make claims about what constitutes phenomena why? because of the philosophical thesis that everything that's real is characterizable in terms of the natural sciences the idea is if we can specify the nature of the stuff we talk about in our ordinary mentalistic vocabulary in natural scientific terms and say what the nature is, say what it consists in who have succeeded in doing that in a way that preserves the truth of our ordinary mentalistic vocabulary we don't eliminate it, we naturalize it how much time do I have? okay good so I think I'll just talk about the next section section 5 I think constructive naturalism faces fundamental difficulty that is not sufficiently appreciated by philosophers and the problem proceeds from a simple thought it's this in order to be in a position to accept these constitutive claims we have to understand them of course they report to explain the natures of something we better understand them talk of consisting in, of constituting of what something is, it's suggestive it can mean something it doesn't wear its meaning on its face we need to know what in any given case its use comes to and that's going to depend upon the subject this subject is philosophical it's very abstract it purports to be substantive nonetheless we need the naturalist to do work to explain what these claims mean and I think it can be seen in detail when you look at any given case that in trying to explain what they mean they lose the capacity to actually state the essence of something they turn out to be a different kind of claim not what the naturalist means or needs so very abstractly here's why let's get that so insofar as we understand a constitutive claim our understanding is going to depend in part upon obviously our grasp of the concepts used to make the claim and in a case of a naturalistic claim about what constitutes mental phenomena one of the concepts used to state the claim is going to be our non-natural mental concept say belief or whatever it is or pain or what have you we will need to be able to see from the perspective of the concept of pain or belief or what have you claims that we already concept we already have that these claims might plausibly hold we have to be able to understand them as a constitutive materialist the constructive naturalist can never give up or even purport to give up our ordinary concepts of the mental they must always remain in her repertoire and in the repertoire of her audiences because otherwise her project has no meaning and her claims have no sense so I claim I have in the handout if someone were to say being in pain consists in C fibers firing for that claim to do something for us intellectually to depend and grasp on what pain is that is not just through the idea of C fibers firing that is not just a redundant disguised platitude C fibers firing is C fibers firing that tells us nothing this purports to tell us what pain is we need our ordinary concept of pain in order for it to do that and the problem is when you try to think through how these naturalistic claims unfold we always lose our handle on how it's able to correspond to what we really have so that we can understand the claim now I'm actually going to read I hope this is not ill-advised a fairly long passage from Wittgenstein because I think he makes this point clearly and then I'll say a word about what it means and then I'll say another couple of things and it'll stop so Wittgenstein says this he's writing in the 30s he's thinking about someone who says thought takes place in our head what that means he says if we say thought takes place in our heads what is the sense of this phrase soberly understood I suppose it is that certain physiological processes correspond to our thoughts in such a way that if we know the correspondence we can by observing these processes find the thoughts but in what sense can the physiological processes be said to correspond to thoughts and in what sense can we be said to get the thoughts from the observation of the brain I suppose we imagine the correspondence to be verified experimentally let us imagine such an experiment crudely it consists in looking at the brain while the subject thinks we may simplify the case by assuming that the subject is at the same time the experimenter who is looking at his own brain say by means of a mirror the crudity of this description is no way reduces the force of the argument then I ask you, is the subject experimenter observing one thing or two things the subject experimenter is observing the correlation of two phenomena one of them he perhaps calls the thought this may consist of a train of images, organic sensations or on the other hand of a train of the various visual, tactual and muscular experiences which he has in writing or speaking a sentence the other experience is one of seeing his brain work both these phenomena could correctly be called expressions of thought and the question where is the thought itself had better in order to prevent confusion be rejected as nonsensical when we use the expression that thought takes place in the head we have given this expression its meaning by describing the experience which would justify the hypothesis that the thought takes place in our heads by describing the experience which we wish to call observing thought in our brain ok, what the hell does that mean well, apply to our current topic it's this suppose somebody says my believing that it's chilly outside not is caused by consist in such and such neurophysiological state in my brain and you say and so then the person is therefore thoughts are in the head because those states are and you say why do you think this what does this mean and the person can say only well using my mirror I've observed a correlation between my thinking that thought and those that state firing I can just see it that's my basis and so Vickensheim says look, if that's your basis that's all that your claim means we don't understand what you're saying when you say my thought consists in this neurophysiological state except you've observed a correlation between those two phenomena now if you want to say that by using talk of correlation and get fancy, sorry, using talk of consisting interconstitution you can but the only meaning that you succeeded in giving to that is just that there's an observed correlation that isn't enough for the purposes of the scientific naturalist it doesn't get you to constitution now I don't mean to say that here I'll just kind of state directly things if I had more time I'd argue for I don't mean to say that you can never justify through science or anything else a constitutive claim about the mind maybe you can the point is if you're going to do it you got to do it and obviously Vickensheim's benighted budding neuroscientist doesn't do enough now later philosophers did do more so if you on the handout I have the famous thesis of the identity theory of pain popular in the 50s that being in pain is your C fibers firing that's what philosophers like to say then where did they get that claim from not from like Vickensheim's imagined neuroscientist just a correlation no they had the following very clever thought they thought what is our ordinary concept of pain our ordinary concept of pain is of something that plays a certain role in our lives it causes certain behavior it has certain characteristic causes it causes avoidance behavior it causes expressions so why not say that our ordinary concept of pain tells us what pain is is whatever plays that role then science might from the other direction come and identify the item that plays that role so now we can see from the perspectives of the two concepts why this claim might be the case the crucial thought is what it is to be pain is to play a certain role not empirically that it's C fibers firing or in the case of Martian something else as philosophers like to talk about Martians at the time that plays that role now as it turns out functionalism failed and it failed for two related reasons one is it proved on reflection impossible to specify the role that Plain pays in our lives according to our ordinary concept without using the word pain that is you couldn't even describe satisfactorily the behavior that pain gives rise to insofar as that's a matter of our concept of pain except by using the word pain pain gives rise to expressions of pain it leads to the avoidance of pain with respect to other people this is another crucial component if you see pain or recognize pain in someone you acknowledge or endeavor to ameliorate the pain there proved to be no way of spelling the role without using the concept of pain and thus no way of independently having a structure that we could fit C fiber firings into for the constitutive claim to go you would have to have a completely a characterization of the role that's completely cleansed of the concept of pain in order for this particular thesis functionalism to work now the second related problem is functionalists themselves knew that they were never going to be able to capture what's called the qualitative aspect of pain what it feels like to be in pain and that's because even if you think we can make sense of and we can of C fibers playing a certain role in a causal physical mechanism that instantiates some structure we can specify it's very hard to see how it could constitute what it feels like to be in pain what it's like to be in pain from the inside as philosophers like to put it and so they wanted to separate these two projects out just succeed in doing the causal role part and hope that in the future somehow philosophy or science could figure out how to deal with qualitative consciousness but in fact many philosophers have convincingly argued starting with Wittgenstein you can't separate out those two roles there's no way to do so from the perspective of our ordinary concept so the functionalist project failed okay final point my own work is on more recent naturalistic approaches and the problem I see with them is that they that includes actually the work of Tyler Burge who's going to be giving a talk in this series later brilliant philosopher I disagree with him on this issue it's the idea that we need to justify and make sense of these claims as been lost I argue and so the problem with contemporary naturalism is they just make these constitutive claims without giving us any way of seeing how they could be true but then Wittgenstein's point that we don't even know what they're supposed to mean beyond positing a correlation which is not enough applies the upshot is I think we need to see our way toward giving up scientific naturalism not denying that neuroscience cognitive science and other sciences play an enormous explanatory role but denying that they provide the material to show that the concepts of the mental and the phenomena they describe are characterizable in terms of those sciences they're still natural but that's because we expand our notion of the natural to include them there are reasons why we don't want to do that but we have to face it and get past those reasons okay thank you questions and comments so there's a little above my head but let me start with a question that I know I don't understand which is that you drew a line of what's the natural science and what is not and that line fell somewhere between molecular biology and folk psychology mm-hmm to me that's the universe so I don't get where that line is in real terms and I don't get what would constitute the requirements mm-hmm I agree with that 100% so as I see it it's a problem for the naturalist to say what that line is for the sake of argument I'm granting that there's some line but if there isn't that's more grist for my mill the history of philosophy is one of kind of realizing you have to expand the notion of the natural sciences thought of as delimiting reality someone like the american philosopher quine in the late 20th century thought physics characterized all the facts just microphysics very hard to see how to make sense of anything from that perspective so more contemporary naturalists have expanded it to include various aspects of biology I have a quote from this guy Alex Rosenberg who's a recent philosopher who's a hardline physicist he says there's nothing but fermions and bosons and anything else has to be understood in those terms and of course we can't understand them in those terms so I agree that it's very fuzzy now one thing to say on behalf of the people I'm criticizing is they are able to understand natural science in such a way that it includes cognitive science even though cognitive science makes use of descriptions of contentful states and intentional content things like that and the reason is they think of cognitive science as not taking our ordinary concepts of belief and desire as explanatory primitive rather they think they can use another apparatus to explain those concepts and so since they're starting below they count as a natural science on that picture social psychology wouldn't be a natural science it would be a social science but then the real heart of your question is who cares where you put the term anyway and the reason that these philosophers and I think it's not just philosophers but it's a lot of popular science and a lot of us we just reflect on these things idly we just have this sense that there's gotta be some line with the stuff that's more fundamental that's all reality is a lot of people feel that way um it's hard to spell it out exactly I mean I was sitting here listening to your talk for an hour and having thoughts new ideas were going through my head and is it your if someone had been monitoring at the time using the latest neurophysiological techniques pet scanning and other chemical probes could it not be eventually demonstrated that the thoughts that you were stimulating in my brain were reducible to these biochemical physical properties um I maybe it could be said but what I suggest is a lot needs to be said to make sense of what that could mean and it's not enough to say these things are going on when I think of thought it's not even enough to say a whole bunch of things that we say in cognitive science about those states which I don't deny are themselves real and useful what we need to be able to see is how we can bridge the gap between beliefs and desires as we already understand them in all their complex glory and the concepts that we use to describe the lower level stuff where we can say more than just the one enables the other or helps account for the other but it fundamentally constitutes the other I think the onus is on the people who want to say that to delimit reality to tell us what that comes to and I think it's hard and that they don't succeed I just was wondering if you have any answer for this question about what is the psychodynamic aspect that once we formed a belief it is so hard to get rid of it and and what is it that so many of us in world are not interested in truth because if we are interested in truth just like mathematician or physicist we never argue we just politely talk we don't have war or all these big other below we have in this world what happens as if somehow our belief we develop ownership and it sticks with us and it's so hard to change it I think that's absolutely right as a matter of if the question is why do people stick with irrational or crazy things I don't know I mean we do I mean I have some ideas about that that are probably no more probably less interesting than many of your own but one point I think can be made from the perspective of the kind of work I'm talking about which is I think the tenacity of belief that they don't go away shows that there aren't states that is the idea that beliefs and desires might be reduced to states of the brain is so fundamentally misconceived it's not even true that beliefs are states of us they are something else of their own logical category that's shown by the fact that they just stick around and it's also shown by the fact that it makes not a lot of sense to say all day long it's only a very rarefied concept you could say all day long I've been in pain I've been in a state of pain but you know all day long I've been believing that Obama's president he says were you believing that while you were asleep you weren't in pain when you were asleep were you believed there's no real sense to that question we don't really get it because it doesn't have the character of something that persists in that way such as you can speak of it in the progressive tense having that character that raises the question of how to think about beliefs I think it's hard to understand is there a sense of mental or physical security in our belief that makes us comfortable in life that once we give it up of that belief we have lost sort of our sense of security in that situation say physically I believe the O'Hare is toward north and physically I go toward it I am comfortable all the way through but if I physically mentally believe in some of the supernatural that you were talking about that also gives me a comfort and if I leave it all of a sudden I feel naked as if I've lost my sense of security could that anything along that line help us yeah I think one way to put that is it may be true that part of the role of belief in our lives I mean we might have hoped that the role was to track the truth so as to enable us to act effectively to achieve our ends but no part of its role may be various expressive purposes for example belonging to a community or so forth and believe the things you do because that has an expressive social value I mean it seems like that's got to be true to explain why people believe so many of the things that they do that kind of role though it's a very sophisticated social role and it's very hard to see how it could be understood in terms of the kinds of things that scientists and naturalists want to but I think that's a fair point yeah probably just a sort of subset of the same critiques you've raised but I thought it might be useful for the audience here to hear your thoughts and critiques about a kind of ethical scientific naturalism that I don't think we're going to have any speakers talking about here the kinds of problems or experiments in which green yeah, not Savalescu so much I was thinking of more people like Joshua Green who's not going to be here the ones who put people into PET scans and then give them the trolley problem and say that the PET scan lights up in a certain area and it happens actually fractions of a second before the person either pushes the lever or claims to have the thought that they have reached a moral judgment and the conclusion that many of these folks draw from that is that ethics is just the brain state and it may be helpful as I said it's probably just another subset of the kinds of critiques you've already raised but it might be helpful if you were to raise through your critique of that kind of an experiment which sounds amazingly like the Wittgenstein quote actually yeah, that's a very good point modern quote 81 years ago um it is that's a really good question it is related, I think you have to say somewhat different things so one thing I would press against an ethical naturalist is, I mean one way that ethical naturalism manifests is with the claim that it looks like we're trying to say true stuff about the world when we say it's wrong to murder people or so and so displayed the virtue of kindness on this occasion or whatever those look like propositions that we're putting forward as true and so ethical naturalists these days are inclined to say that's an illusion what those claims really do is express certain non truth-evaluable attitudes that we have like disapproval they just kind of look like claims now one way that that work tries to be supported is by seeing how those claims tie into or correspond to various structures in the brain that look effective and so forth but the philosophical problem with that view I think is just again if you're going to seriously make that claim then you owe us a full account and part of that account has to be tell us what those responses are and I think it turns out to be very hard to say what the responses are that we're expressing when we say that somebody is doing something wrong without just using the idea that the person believes that something is wrong I mean one thing that you might think that that sentence expresses is the belief the belief that that that thing is wrong that's the naturalist can't say that there's no such fact in the world there has to be some other kind of attitude but the details of it get very difficult it's analogous to a view about some metaphysicians have about color so they say there's no color in the world in itself for something to be red or brown is just for it to look a certain way to us but then the challenge is to say look what way and it's very hard to see how the answer is anything other than brown but then we're just presupposing the idea that the object is brown so it's a related where I press on ethical naturalism so I think I'd like to follow on from the previous question so what's missing from the examples at least the ones that I appreciated were you described correlations of people have a mirror up to their thoughts but we manipulate since almost as long ago Wilder Penfield showed that if you stimulate a part of the brain you will create thoughts elementary thoughts maybe but it's that kind of experiment that makes us it's the manipulation it's blocking C-fiber activity and eliminating pain that makes us think that we can build up a sense of movement from building blocks of neural activity so how do you incorporate that into what you're saying well I think in the following way for most scientific uses of that thought it's sufficient to say what that shows is that stimulating such and such fibers causes pain I mean we already knew that punching someone causes pain stimulating that nerve causes pain and we can give a very sophisticated story involving the brain and nervous system about that what the philosopher needs and if you're not a philosopher maybe you don't care about this what the philosopher needs is some basis for saying that pain is the C-fiber firing or the C-fiber firing constitutes it as the fancy way people like to say it now is it's the metaphysical ground of the pain and that I think those experiments can't establish they only get us to a causal claim to an enabling claim they don't get us all the way to the thing that the philosopher needs for his or her pared down conception of reality can I answer your question I think it's as far as we could go it seems like you philosophers are hard to satisfy I'm thinking about the brown and doesn't it come down to when enough people agree that it's brown then we accept that it's brown I mean my wife might still say it's red but if enough people think it's brown it's brown yeah maybe so but I don't know what I think about that kind of possibility that is if we all saw is this a possible world everybody sees red things as brown but they're really brown I'm sorry everybody sees red things as brown but in fact they're really red I don't know but whatever you say about that you still owe an account of what you just said means it looks brown now a natural way to take that is it seems to you that it is brown then that's a natural basis for you to believe that it's brown a metaphysician who wishes to deny the reality of color would have to say all of those beliefs are wrong because there really isn't any brown in the thing they don't like to do that usually so instead they say look when you say it looks brown you're not really saying it seems to you that it is brown you're reporting on something that you have visually but then the challenge is to say what it is without using the very idea that an object has a color which we're trying to get away from and I should say not a lot of philosophers do feel the force of that worry I'm not sure that philosophers are hard to satisfy I think we should be more than other people perhaps just because philosophy is so abstract it's very easy to just end up saying BS just doesn't come to anything because it's so removed and so we owe it to the subject to think really hard about what we mean that for me is one of the fundamental morals of Wittgenstein a philosopher that I was mentioning before but not everybody feels the force of that concern at least in this particular way I think they should so I'm thinking maybe I see it as brown because I've been taught that that's brown and so I recognize that so I say it's brown so the challenge is to understand what you were taught while holding on to the idea that nothing is brown actually that's what anti-realists about color want to do and I think it's hard to do and there are basically two ways to go they could say you were taught to believe that things are brown even though nothing is any colors at all so we're all just under this big illusion that's called the error theory or you could go another way and say look when you say that it's brown you're not really expressing any belief at all you're expressing as in the moral case some other kind of attitude it's hard to say what that attitude is that's what I was pressing on I think there's a worry for the error theory the worry is it's not even so much as for things to have color that's just not part of how reality is or metaphysically possible how did we ever come to form these beliefs that they are I mean that would be like you know it doesn't make sense that through our training we were all mistakenly taught that squares are triangles I don't know what it could ever be for people to be I mean we might use words differently those uses of cinemas but those words meaning what they do we can't be taught that there's no making sense of that if there's really no color in the world how were we all taught that things have color where did we even get that apparently metaphysically baseless idea I think that's the problem I mean again not everybody is convinced by this problem but it's a problem let's see I very much want to thank the professor Bridges for coming and speaking with us today thank you