Is the mind-body relationship mysterious?
William Charlton
Philosophy October 1, 2019 DOI: 10.1017/s0031819119000305 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that the philosophers' sense that consciousness is an insoluble mind-body problem stems from specific commitments—seeking the privacy of Locke's closet, adopting Hume's conception of causation, and mathematicising physical explanation in line with Newton's First Law—whereas non-philosophers' vaguer concepts of life, sentience, and intelligence allow them to treat these as genuinely emergent. Contends that machines performing intelligent tasks are no more conscious of their reasons than actors on a stage. |
Abstract
Abstract: Why do some philosophers (Nagel, McGinn, Chomsky), despite all we know about evolution and embryology, think that consciousness makes the mind-body relation a problem still unsolved and perhaps insoluble by those with human brains? They ask how consciousness arises in matter, not in living organisms, whereas non-philosophers ask how far down the ladder of life it extends and when it arises in individuals of sentient and intelligent species. They desire the privacy of Locke's closet, furnished with phenomenological properties; and besides replacing Aristotle's ‘folk’ conception of causation by Hume's, they mathematicise physical explanation in line with Newton's First Law of Motion. Non-philosophers operate with ‘vague’ concepts of life, sentience and intelligence which allow them to treat these things as truly and naturally emergent. Machines that perform intelligent tasks are no more conscious of the reasons for their movements than actors performing them on the stage.