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Chayenne Powers

HNR 203-7—The Scientist Seminar:  Minds, Brains, and Machines

Dr. Daryl Close

29 September 2020

Critical Paper #1

The mind-body problem brings up several interesting ideas, such as logical behaviorism.

Logical behaviorism is, at its core, a belief that the mind is a physical thing. Behaviorists place

their roots in the idea that we cannot see the mind. The conscious is unobservable, in its present

self. The only way humans can really attribute any actions to the mind is through external

actions. In theory, a person could be placed outside, in a blizzard, and shiver and turn white and

blue. They would be in a mental state feeling “cold”. A logical behaviorist would argue that the

observed person is cold only by viewing the external, or public, behaviors. They are in the

mental state of unpleasant, cold pain because their body was put into that external stimuli. If we

take the person out of the cold the individual will warm and cease to think that they are cold.

Those external behaviors associated with the cold fleet from their consciousness and be replaced

with new behaviors and feelings. The internal process will make sure we have these external

behaviors have change and the external environment change will change our mental state. One

could not feel the cold with a non-physical mind because that means the mind would not be

attached to the body.

Gilbert Ryle criticized Cartesian Dualism. He spells out, what he considers to be, the

Official Doctrine. Cartesian dualism is that of the mind and body being two separate entities: the

mind a nonphysical thing that is private and the body a physical thing that everyone else can see
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and observe. He famously coined the phrase “The Ghost in the Machine”, which has a

self-evident meaning; the ghost is the nonphysical mind, and the machine is the physical body.

Ryle explains that this is a categorical mistake. If the mind and body are separate, then what is

the transaction between the mind and the body that allows functionality? The mind cannot move

the body because the mind is a mental process, and the body cannot move the mind because the

physical cannot touch what is not physical. The most prevalent example of his argument,

however, is that where one visits a university, tours the entire place—the “libraries, playing

fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices” (Cooney 35), but then asks,

after the tour, where the University is. His analogy is compelling. The University is not an

additional thing, but it is the overall category of everything that the visitor saw. Ryle’s intention

is to make it abundantly clear that it is a mistake to assume that a University is just another

building, equally alongside those libraries, playing fields, etc. The University is rather comprised

of these buildings mentioned. Descartes is making the same mistake regarding the mind and

body. The mind’s stuff, such as emotions and logic, are different from those of the body’s stuff,

such as movements and exertions, and this is a mistake. Ryle thinks that the mental stuff is just a

certain way of thinking about the physical stuff—the mind is an arrangement of the body’s

functions.

I find myself agreeing with this Ryle’s position. If I were to put myself in Descartes’s

position, to subtract all sensory modes that could deceive myself, then I would have no thoughts

at all. If my mind existed before I had a body, then I would have no perceptions of anything and

anyone. I would not feel warmth or experience pain or pleasure or taste. I would not have ideas

or any concept of anything real. My entire mind would be an abstract nothingness. I cannot

fathom what a table is because I have no concept of a table. My eyes have never witnessed
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anything, my ears have never heard anything, I have no tongue to taste, no nose to smell, no flesh

to touch. Thus, I need a mind attached to a body to use these tools to latch onto even the first,

novice concepts of things.

In U.T. Place’s paper, “Is Consciousness a Brain-Process?”, we’re introduced to the

“identity theory”. Place introduces three types of mental events: cognition, volition, and “some

sort of inner process story” (Cooney 78). Cognition oversees knowledge, thinking, etc., and

volition is the will, or wants and intents. The third category is sensation from the body to the

brain. Take, for instance, you smell baked bread in a summer morning. You would be able to

indicate, from the smell, that bread has been freshly baked, and you may derive pleasure from

the smell based on your physical sensory modes. You imagine the bread’s appearance, you can

feel its warmth and fluffy, light interior, you can taste its delicacy Your mind is processing all of

this information, and Place argues that you’re never going to be able to explain this mental event

by way of cognition and volition. Is consciousness a brain process?

Place begins to expand by saying that “is” is ambiguous. There are different types of

usages for the word “is”. There is an “is” of identity and the “is” of predication. In the “is” of

identity, there are two nouns on each statement—these two nouns are equivalent. The “is” is to

an equal sign in that regards. It is equation of language. In the “is” of predication is a noun and a

characteristic of that noun. Place goes onto explain that there are two different subcategories of

the “is” of identity. There is an “is” of definition and an “is” of composition. The “is” of

definition is just that—both sides are nouns and are, by definition, the same. '“A square is an

equilateral rectangle”’ (Cooney 79) is a true statement. These two objects, a square and an

equilateral rectangle, are the equivalent. The “is” of composition is also a true statement, but not

by definition. Using Place’s example, ‘“His table is an old packing case”’ (Cooney 79) to
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demonstrate, it can be said that his table is characteristically as an old packing case. A table,

however, is not the same thing as a packing case. Place is not saying that the table and the

packing case are two different things that are identical, but describing the table as having the

characteristic of a packing case. The specific table is compositionally a packing case in this

scenario. The “is” of definition is necessary—it must be true. The “is” of composition is

contingent—it must be the case but did not need to be.

The point Place argues is that one cannot prove and “is” of composition false. In order to

disprove an “is” of composition, one would need to go look at the circumstantial event. Meaning,

one would have to go look at the table in the above example and then try to deny that the table is

not an old packing case, when that is just what it is. The table, in this example, cannot be a couch

or basket or lamp shade, it is an old packing case and nothing else. The “is” of definition, on the

other hand, can be claimed as false logically, because one can logically disprove claims about the

meanings of words. It is abstract; it is not observable.

The claim, about these “is” statements, is that consciousness is a brain process. This is,

in this statement, not an “is” of predication, as a brain process is not used to describe

consciousness (the brain process is a noun). This narrows down to an “is” of identity. To

disprove the thesis that consciousness is a brain process, one must know the definition of both

words—the statement can be logically disproven if it is an “is” of definition. The argument then,

is that the thesis is an “is” of composition. The only way to disprove this thesis is through

observation—or otherwise science. It is, in essence, a scientific hypothesis. One cannot disprove

a scientific hypothesis that uses the “is” of composition, because it only seems coherent,

logically, that a table and a packing case are not the same thing.
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The “phenomenological fallacy” is a fallacy of assuming that a description of an

experience is the full properties of what that experience was in totality. Place explains that our

descriptions are primarily what our conscious makes of that experience, and secondly what that

experience actually is in our brains. We must learn to describe our environment in order to

describe how our consciousness reacts to it. Our descriptions of words are not mythological

when they are not based upon myths. These descriptions should be based upon reality, not some

vacuum of space that is not able to be recorded in our brains. When we identify an object’s

property before we have a perception of that object, then it is myth. For example, in the case of

the packing case, if a man had no conception of a table, then he cannot call his packing case a

table. It is just a packing case. The table and properties of a table are a myth to the man. If we are

already aware of both “table” and “packing case” and the properties attributed to them, then the

packing case can be a table. Once the argumentation of the phenomenological fallacy is

disrupted, there is nothing from an introspective standpoint that contradicts anything a

physiologist might notion about an external examination of a brain process.

U.T. Place, generally, seems to have a well-thought out and articulate argument. As I

stated above in reference to Ryle, a physical stimulant is needed in order to even produce a

concept. Without my senses, at the very least a singular sense, I would have absolutely no notion

of anything at all. In the Official Doctrine, the transaction of mind to body is missing, and thus

begs the question as to how one can have a conscious without any tools to allow physical

sensations or even abstractions? If the heat of anger can be felt without knowledge of another

person existing, or an object of some sort, or even an idea to make one angry, than how can one

ever be angry? If you have no eyes to gaze upon the color green, then how do you even know

what green is? And so on. U.T. Place allows additional support for this idea by calling to
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attention the fallaciousness of assuming our phenomenal properties are the complete, literal

definition of the object at hand.

Bibliography

Cooney, Brian. The Place of Mind. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Thomson Learning, 2000.