Voices of Wisdom: Definition of Philosophy,

Plato’s Idealism, and Mind-Body Problem.

Voices of Wisdom: A Multicultural Philosophy Reader

(Ninth Edition)

Gary E. Kessler

California State University, Bakersfield

CENGAGE Learning, United States, 2020

CHAPTER  ONE

What Is Philosophy?

1.1 A DEFINITION OF PHILOSOPHY

Have you ever wondered about the purpose of life? Have you ever been curious about what you can reasonably believe? Have you ever marveled at the beauty of nature or been upset by suffering? Have you ever thought that life is unfair? Have you ever been puzzled about what you ought to do?

Perhaps you associate these kinds of questions with philosophy. If you do, why do you? What do you think is philosophical about these questions? When you hear the word philosophy, what do you think it means? Think about it awhile and write your answer.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE), who asserted that philosophy begins in wonder, was impressed by the ability of human beings to think. In fact, he defined humans as “rational animals.” Aristotle maintained that philosophy arisesfrom the human ability to reflect on experience, to wonder and be curious about what happens to us and to others.

Of course, wonder is not the sole cause of philosophizing. Sufficient leisure must be available to engage in reflection, and hence economic and cultural factors play an important role in promoting and influencing human curiosity. However, without the human capacity to wonder and be curious, it is doubtful that philosophical thinking would occur.

I hope this book will stimulate your natural ability to wonder, teach you something of the art of wondering, and help you learn how to live in wonder. Cultivating the art of wondering is important, Aristotle believed, because such an art leads us along the path toward wisdom.

The word philosophy comes from a combination of two Greek words-philos. meaning “loving,” and sophia, meaning “wisdom.” Etymologically, philosophy means the “love of wisdom.” To love something is to desire it. So for many Greeks, the philosopher was the one who desired wisdom. The word philos also refers, for the Greeks, to the special kind of love found in close friendship. Hence the philosopher could also be characterized as the “friend of wisdom."

The historical origin of a word, however, often does not help us very much when we are searching for an adequate definition today. The meanings of words change. Also, meanings derived etymologically are sometimes unclear. If the philosopher is the lover or friend of wisdom, then what is wisdom? About that, philosophers--even Greek philosophers--disagree.

Philosophy in Western culture was born in the sixth century BCE among a group of thinkers called the Pre-Socratics. According to tradition one of these thinkers, Pythagoras (about 570 BCE), coined the word philosophy. Along with other Pre-Socratics, he was intensely interested in nature in knowing how the universe or cosmic order developed, and in figuring out what things were made of. These thinkers disagreed about the stuff out of which things are made (some said earth, some air, others fire, still others water or some combination of these elements) but many of them did think that wisdom consisted of knowledge about nature. To love wisdom, as far as they were concerned, was to search for knowledge about the universe.

A century later, another group of thinkers in Athens offered their services as teachers to those who could afford them. They claimed to teach virtue. The Greek word for virtue (arete) means “excellence or power.” So to possess virtue is to possess power. Wisdom, they taught, is the possession of virtue. It is to have certain powers or abilities, especially in the social and political realm, to influence people and be successful. Since these teachers claimed to possess this wisdom, they came to be called “Sophists” or “The Wise Ones.” For them, philosophy is not a search for knowledge about the universe, nor a search for wisdom. Rather philosophy is the possession of wisdom and hence the possession of virtue or excellence especially in the social and political dimensions of life.

Socrates (470-399 BCE) lived in Athens at the same time as the Sophists. He spent his days wandering around the marketplace asking people questions about all kinds of things. He found himself perplexed by things other people claimed to know. For example, people claimed to know what knowledge, justice, virtue, and the right way to live are. The Sophists claimed to teach these things. However, under Socrates’ relentless critical questioning, the definitions and grand theories that people held about these sorts of things collapsed.

The oracle at Delphi, a well-respected source of divine truth in the ancient world, said that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens. When word of this got to Socrates, he was greatly puzzled. How could he, who knew next to nothing and spent his days asking others, be the wisest? What about the Sophists the teachers of wisdom? Were not they the wisest? Socrates did believe he knew what virtue is; it is knowledge. But what is knowledge? He had to confess he did not know, so how could he be wise? And yet he reasoned, the oracle of Delphi could not be lying. It was, after all, the voice of the god Apollo. But the oracle was tricky. You had to figure out what it meant.

Finally, Socrates understood. Wisdom, the oracle was telling him, is knowing that he did not know! Wisdom is the awareness of our ignorance, an awareness of the limitations of knowledge. Let the Sophists claim to be wise the best Socrates could do was to claim he was a lover of wisdom. He lived his life in the pursuit of wisdom, as lovers live their lives in pursuit of the beloved. For him, philosophy was a critical examination of our pretensions to knowledge and the constant search for that final truth that always seems to be just beyond our grasp.

The Greeks were not the only ones to philosophize, for the pursuit of wisdom is common to all cultures. The Greeks were also not the only ones to disagree about the nature of wisdom. For example, in India some philosophers claimed that wisdom is coming to know one’s true self as immortal. Yajnavalkya, a wise man described in early Indian literature called the Upanishads, tells his wife Maitreyi that wealth will not gain one immortality; only the true self or atman, as he called it is immortal. However other Indian philosophers disagreed. Wisdom, they said did not consist in the knowledge of a true immortal self or atman. Quite the opposite is the case. Genuine wisdom consists in knowing that there is no such thing as an eternal self or atman.

Clearly there are different understandings of what wisdom is and hence there are different understandings of what philosophy is about. No single definition can possibly capture all the nuances of the art of wondering in every place and time in which it appears. This does not mean, however, that we can define philosophy any way we wish, and it does not mean that some definitions are not better than others. Let me offer my definition, which, I think, states something important about philosophizing and helps us distinguish it from other types of thinking: Philosophy is the rational attempt to formulate, understand, and answer fundamental questions.

Many people think that philosophy is a body of doctrines and that philosophers are people who have answers to difficult questions about the meaning of life. My definition stresses that (1) philosophy is an activity rather than a body of set teachings and (2) philosophers are as concerned with formulating and understanding questions as they are with finding answers.

Formulating questions is very important. What we ask and how we ask it determine, in large part, where we look for answers and the kinds of answers we get.

For a pronunciation guide for Sanskrit, Chinese, and Arabic words see Appendix II. To facilitate reading, I have left out diacritical marks that indicate sounds in other languages that are not normally part of English.

Progress in many fields consists, in part of an ever-greater refinement of our questions and more precision and sophistication in our methods of interrogation. You will not get good answers if you do not ask the right questions.

For example, the title of this chapter is “What Is Philosophy?” and at the beginning of the chapter, I asked you to think about the meaning of the word philosophy and to write your answer. Review your answer. Now think about the question “What is it to philosophize?” If I had formulated the question about your understanding of philosophy as a question about what it is to philosophize and asked you to answer it, would your answer have been any different? If so how would it have been different?

Understanding what we are after when we ask questions is as important as formulating questions. Words are often ambiguous and vague; we must be as clear as possible about what they mean. If I ask, “What is the meaning of life?” what do l mean? What am I looking for? Is this the best way to put it? What might count as a helpful answer? Where should I look for an answer? Am I asking about the purpose of life? Is life the sort of thing that has a purpose? Or am I interested in what makes life worthwhile? Is the purpose of life (if there is one) the same as what makes life valuable or worthwhile?

The purpose of formulating and understanding questions as precisely as we can is to find answers, but often our answers lead to further questions. Why assume some answer is final? Or why assume all questions we can ask have answers? Also what counts as an answer? How do I know when I have a good one? Consider this conversation:

Yolanda: What is the meaning of life?

José: What do you mean by that question?

Yolanda: I mean, what is the purpose of life?

José: Oh, that’s easy; its purpose is survival and reproduction. That’s what my biology textbook says.

Is José’s answer a good one? Is it the sort of answer Yolanda is after? Can this question be answered with factual information, or is it about values? When Yolanda asks， “What is the meaning of life?” is she asking, “What makes life ultimately valuable?” And if she is asking that, then the answer José gives may well miss the mark (unless, of course, Yolanda thinks survival and reproduction are more valuable than anything else).

I said in my definition that philosophers are concerned with fundamental questions. The word fundamental means “basic” and has to do with what is primary. Fundamental questions are radical questions in the sense of pertaining to roots. They are the most basic questions we can ask. Therefore they are often abstract questions that have to do with a wide area of human experience.

However, even though the sorts of questions that concern philosophers are abstract, they are about concepts we employ every day. We are constantly making judgments about good and bad, right and wrong, true and false, reality and fiction, beautiful and ugly, just and unjust. But what is good? By what norms can we distinguish right behavior from wrong? What is truth? How can I distinguish appearance from reality? Is beauty only in the eye of the beholder? What is justice, and is it ever possible to achieve it? 

Some of the main branches of Western philosophy are distinguished by the kinds of fundamental questions they ask. Many philosophers have regarded “What is truly real?” as a fundamental question. Note the word truly. I did not ask, “What is real?” but “What is truly real?” In other words, I am assuming that not everything that appears to be real is real. Or, to put that another way, by asking, “What is truly real?” I am asking how we might distinguish appearance from reality. The branch of philosophy called metaphysics deals with this and related issues. One of its purposes, some philosophers have claimed, is to develop a theory of reality or a theory of what is genuinely real. It is also concerned with what might be the most fundamental question we can think of: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

What is knowledge and what is truth? These seem to be good candidates for fundamental questions because the concepts of knowledge and truth are basic to so much of our thinking, including all that we call science. The branch of Western philosophy known as epistemology, concerns itself with the issues of knowledge and truth. Epistemologists search for a theory of what knowledge is and how it might be distinguished from opinion. They look for a definition of truth and wonder how we might correctly distinguish truth from error.

Axiology, the third main branch of Western philosophy, has to do with the study of value and the distinction between value and fact. Traditionally it is divided into two main subdivisions: aesthetics and ethics. Aesthetics deals with such questions as the following: Is beauty a matter of taste, or is it something objective? What standards should be used to judge artistic work? Can we define art? Ethics attempts to decide what values and principles we should use to judge human action as morally right or wrong. What is the greatest good? How should one live? Applied ethics applies these values and principles to such social concerns as human rights, racial justice, globalization, environmental ethics, and animal rights to determine what would be the morally right things to do.

Fundamental questions are not only basic and abstract; they are also universal questions. They are the sorts of questions any thinking person might ask anywhere and at any time. They arise out of our capacity to wonder about ourselves and the world in which we live. They arise naturally, as it were, as we search for wisdom.

Although fundamental questions are universal, or nearly so, it should be noted that the way I have described the organization of the field of philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology) is decidedly Western. Different societies organize knowledge in different ways. Also, what may seem fundamental in one society may seem far less important in another. For example, some Buddhist philosophers have been suspicious of intellectual speculation about metaphysical matters, especially questions like “Does God exist?” This question, so important to many people, excites little interest among these Buddhist thinkers.

It should also be noted that each of the three main branches of Western philosophy deals with important distinctions that all of us learn to make based on the standards our society teaches us. Hence, metaphysics is concerned with the distinction between appearance and reality, epistemology with the distinction between knowledge and opinion, and axiology with the distinction between fact and value. One important question is whether we can discover criteria that are universal and not merely relative to our own particular time in history and our own particular cultural view for making these distinctions. Fundamental and abstract questions about reality, knowledge, and value--and the distinctions these questions imply-may be universal in the sense that most cultures have developed intellectual traditions concerned with these issues. However, the concrete way the questions are asked，understood, and answered varies a great deal from one tradition to another.

For example, Plato (428-348 BCE) made the distinction between knowledge and opinion, at least in part, by claiming that opinion has to do with beliefs about the world, which are based on our sensations, but knowledge has to do with the reality we discover through our reason. For him, logic and mathematics constituted examples of knowledge, but information about physical objects based on sensation did not. Under the influence of physical science, many people today would be inclined to say almost the opposite of what Plato said. For instance, many of my students have maintained that knowledge is what empirical science provides, and opinion is a product of abstract speculation like philosophy.

As twenty-first century students are living in a highly technological and pluralistic society, we live in a very different world from the ancient Greeks or Indians. Yet we, like them, wonder about life and ask basic questions about what is real, what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful. This is not to say that there are not vast differences among philosophies and ways of doing philosophy. There are. You are about to experience something of this variety firsthand as you read different philosophers from different cultures and different eras.

In sum I think philosophy is the activity of rationally attempting to formulate, understand, and answer fundamental questions. I have discussed most of the parts of that definition except the word rational. Why must it be a rational attempt? And what is it to be rational, anyway? If we cannot agree on what rationality is, how can we know what constitutes a rational attempt to formulate and answer basic questions.

CHAPTER 9· What Is Really Real?

9.1 INTRODUCTION

Have you ever wondered if what you think is real is actually real? Someone has undoubtedly asked you, with a smile, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there, does it make a sound?” What do you think? Have you ever thought about the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Have you ever thought, “Is the world we experience real or an illusion?” Have you ever been puzzled by the question, “What are time and space?” Do you think something can come from nothing? What are ideas made of? Is nature all there is, or is there some sort of supernatural reality?

If you have wondered about these sorts of questions you have been concerned with what philosophers call metaphysics. Metaphysics has to do with the construction and criticism of theories about what is truly real. Although it deals with abstract issues, its concerns arise out of everyday experiences. For example you may have been traveling down a road and seen, ahead on the highway, what looked like an animal; but when you got closer, you discovered that it was really a bush. It appeared to be one thing and turned out to be another. The question about what is genuinely or really real presupposes a distinction between appearance and reality. Metaphysics generalizes that distinction and asks, “If some things in the world appear to be real but turn out not to be, what about the world itself? Is the universe appearance or reality?”

Some philosophers maintain that the chief part of metaphysics is what they call ontology (literally, “the study of being”). One ontological concern has to do with the kinds of things that exist. For example, try to categorize the items in the following list into two general groups, material and immaterial:

chairs       trees       cats       ideas

seeing      anger     stones    atoms

God        space       time        you

Did you have a hard time sorting these? One problem is that some things seem to be a mixture of the material and the immaterial. For example, you have a body, which is material, but you also have a mind, which some would claim to be immaterial. Another problem has to do with definitions. What do we mean by material and imam- terial? How can we classify things until we know how to distinguish among them?

This last question leads us directly into a second concern of ontology, namely the definition of different kinds of being. For example, some philosophers have argued that material beings can be distinguished from immaterial beings according to the following characteristics:

Material         Immaterial

   spatial              non-spatial

                        public              private

mechanical        teleological

According to this list, material things like chairs take up space (hence are spatial), but immaterial things like ideas do not take up space (hence are non-spatial). It makes good sense to ask how wide a chair is, but does it make any sense to ask how wide my idea of a chair is? Material things are also public in the sense that they can be viewed by different people I can see a chair or a tree, and so can you. However, I cannot see your idea of a chair or a tree. Your idea is private; it is not open to public inspection. Finally, material objects are causally determined in purely mechanistic way. They are non-intentional--that is, they behave not according to purposes but according to the laws of physics. That chair is in the corner of the room not because it wants to be there, but because it was placed there by external forces. But what about you? Is your behavior purely mechanistic (machinelike)? Or is your behavior teleological, that is, governed by goals and purposes? Are you in the corner of the room because of external forces, or are you there because you want to leave and the door is located there?

A third concern of ontology has to do with what is ultimately real. Once we have discovered all the kinds of beings that seem to exist and have adequate defined each of the kinds, which if any of these kinds are really real? Is matter the really real? If you answer yes, you would be an advocate of materialism. Materialism is the metaphysical theory that matter is truly real and immaterial things are not. Note that we should not confuse materialism with physical science. Physical science is clearly concerned with matter and the study of physical things. The claim, however, that only physical things are real is not a scientific claim, it is a metaphysical claim. It is a claim about the whole of reality.

Some of you might be inclined to argue that being, or reality, is fundamentally immaterial. One widespread philosophical version of this theory is called idealism. The metaphysical theory of idealism asserts that ideas (in the broad sense of thoughts, concepts, and minds) are ultimately real. Do not confuse idealism as a meta-physical doctrine with idealism as a moral theory about ideals. Idealism, as I am using that term here has to do with ideas not ideals.

One major problem for idealism, as you might expect is to explain our experience of things that seem both material and real. The chair I am sitting on seems physical solid, and real to me, and I certainly hope it is. Could it be that this chair is nothing more than a bundle of sensations or ideas? If materialism needs to explain the mental in terms of the physical, idealism must explain the physical in terms of the mental.

Maybe you want to suggest that both these sorts of things (the material and the immaterial) are genuinely real. This dualistic approach seems reasonable. It certain escapes the problems of explaining away chairs, bodies, minds, and ideas. Dualism is the theory that reality is both material and immaterial. My body is real, and the material chair it is sitting on is real (what a relief, but my mind and its ideas are also real (that’s good to know, too). However, if reality is both material and immaterial, how are the two related? How, for example, are our minds related to our brains? The major problem of dualism is to relate the material and the immaterial.

Those who argue that being, or reality, is fundamentally of one nature avoid this problem. They are called monists, and their theory (in contrast to dualism) is called monism. Monism holds that there is a single reality. Notice that a monist can be either a materialist or an idealist. The contrast here is between monism and dualism, not between materialism and idealism.

Discussions of dualism versus monism soon lead to the problem of the one and the many. Is there one reality, or are there many different real things that cannot be reduced to a single thing? Pluralism is the position that there are many different real things. This question of one or many, along with the question about what is really real, constitute two fundamental metaphysical problems.

Metaphysics may seem abstract and totally unrelated to real-world problems. What difference does it make whether reality is one undivided whole or is made up of many parts? Although it may not seem like it, metaphysical assumptions (largely unexamined and often unconscious) influence our lives on a daily basis. They also play a vital role in moral debates. For example, arguments about stem cell research and abortion often depend on a variety of metaphysical ideas about the existence or non-existence of souls and the nature of human beings. Debates about environmental policies rely on meta-physical assumptions about individuals, communities, ecosystems, and so forth. How we treat the others with whom we share this planet depends, in part on metaphysical assumptions about how all things are related (or not related). Although some philosophers have argued that metaphysical speculation is a meaningless activity because we cannot discover any solid, verifiable answers to metaphysical questions about the nature of reality, most philosophers realize that we cannot escape thinking about what is really real.

9.3 PLATONIC DUALISM

We have encountered Plato and Socrates before (see Chapter 3). Plato (428-347 BCE) was Socrates’s star pupil and one of the most creative and influential minds in the whole history of Western philosophy. He lived in Athens, founded the first “univer- sity” (called the Academy) in the West, and wrote a number of dialogues in which Socrates frequently appeared.

Alfred North Whitehead, a twentieth-century British-American philosopher remarked that “all Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato.” This might be overstating the case for Plato’s importance, but there can be little doubt that his ideas have influenced and still influence the thoughts and values of people who do not even know his name.

Do you believe in the immortality of the soul? Do you think that there is a mate- rial reality and an immaterial or spiritual reality and that the latter is more important than the former? Do you think logical and mathematical methods of reasoning are ideal models for arriving at truth? Do you believe that things have an essential nature? Do you believe you ought to control your passions by the use of reason? Do you think politicians ought to have the good of the people in mind? Do you think virtue is its own reward? If you answered some of these questions in the affirmative, you are reflecting ideas that Plato articulated almost twenty-four centuries ago.

Plato wrote on almost every aspect of philosophy. Here we are concerned pri- marily with his metaphysical ideas. Plato’s metaphysics has been classified as dualistic because he argued that reality could be divided into two radically different parts. There is the reality of matter characterized by change (becoming) and the reality of what he called the Forms, or Ideas characterized by permanence (being). Being is immaterial and of greater value than the material.

Along with this general ontological dualism between being and becoming, Plato taught a soul-body dualism. Human beings are composed of bodies and souls. One power that our souls have is the power of thought (the mind), and this is by far our most valuable thing. Our minds and souls are immaterial in contrast to our material bodies.

Plato’s metaphysics is also classified as an idealism，because it centers on the theory of Forms (Ideas) and because, although the reality of matter is not denied, matter is regarded as less real than the immaterial Forms. What is the theory of Forms？ The English word form is often used to translate the Greek word for idea or concept. So, in the first instance, a Form is the mental concept or idea we have of something. For example, how do you recognize a table as a table when you see one? After all, each table is different. How are you able to classify a whole group of different-looking objccts into the class “table”? Well, you can do this, we might say because you have the concept or idea of a table. If someone asked you what a table is you could give a definition. This definition would constitute the expression of your concept.

Your definition (if it were the “correct” definition in Socrates’s sense) would also express the essential nature of table. That is, it would not tell us what this or that particular table is, but it would tell us what all tables are insofar as they are tables. So, in the second place a Form is an essence.

Now most of us think that the concepts of things exist only in human minds and the essences of things (if there are such) either exist in our minds or somehow exist in the things themselves. If we might use the word tableness to designate the Form of tables, then most of us would be inclined to say that if there were no tables, there would be no tableness. Not so Plato. Or at least, not so Plato as interpreted by his star pupil, Aristotle. For Plato, according to Aristotle, essences (Forms) exist objectively apart from the minds that think them and the objects that instantiate them. They constitute ideals, perfect models if you will, that are even more real than the material things that reflect them.

Think of a square. Any particular material square you can draw will be imperfect. Its angles and lines will not be exact. But the square as such (squareness or the pure abstract geometric shape that we can define with mathematical precision) is another matter. It is perfect and its definition will never change. Is not that which is perfect and permanent more real than that which is imperfect and ever-changing? Plato answers yes.

The selection that follows is from Plato’s most famous dialogue, The Republic. This is one of the masterpieces of Western literature, and someday you should read all of it. It is filled with stories, myths, striking analogies, and political ideas that are still debated. For now, we will have to be content with just a little bit. However, to appreciate this little bit, some idea of what the whole is about will help.

Socrates, along with others, has been invited to the home of Cephalus. The question “What is justice?” arises and after examining and finding fault with several definitions, Thrasymachus (pronounced Thra-sim-a-kus) has argued that justice is whatever is in the interest of the stronger party. Socrates disagreed and argued that power and knowledge must be combined because the art of government, like other arts, requires skill and knowledge. In particular, it requires knowledge of what is good for people, because government ought to serve the needs of those who are governed, not merely the interests of the strongest.

In Book 2, Glaucon and Adeimantus pressed Socrates to prove that the just life is worth living. Socrates argued that virtue is its own reward and began an analysis of political justice. The ideal state needs philosopher-kings (wisdom loving rulers), guardians (soldiers and police) and producers (artisans, tradesmen, farmers). When each class does its proper business without interfering with the others political justice is achieved. By analogy with the state, Socrates argued that the just person is one in whom the three basic elements of human nature the rational, the spirited, and the appetitive are properly ordered. Proper order consists of the rule of rationality or reason over the spirited and appetitive parts of the soul.

Books 3-5 describe in some detail Socrates’s vision of the ideal state. In the idea republic, the classes are carefully controlled by breeding, education, and selection. Just as reason should rule in the individual if personal justice is to be realized, so the “lovers of wisdom” (philosophers) should rule the state. This means that the rulers (philosopher-kings) need to know what is good and so must be properly educated. These ideas lead to a discussion of what the good is and what the proper education of the guardians should be. This discussion takes place in Books 6 and 7, from which the following selection comes.

Socrates admitted that the good itself is the proper object of the philosopher’s quest, but he could not say directly what the good is. He offered three analogies. The first compares the good to the Sun. The second called the simile of the divided line, compares opinion (which derives from sensations of material objects) with knowledge (which derives from knowing the Forms via reason and understanding). The third, called the allegory of the cave, compares the philosopher to a prisoner who has escaped from a cave and seen the light of the real world.

The last three books of The Republic deal with political change, the decline of the state, and various forms of government. The Republic closes with an argument for the immortality of the soul. By loving justice (i.e., by harmonizing reason, spirit, and appetite under the rule of rationality), we can keep our souls healthy and thereby prosper forever.

CHAPTER ELEVEN  What Am I? Who Am I?

11.1 INTRODUCTION

To what does the word I refer? You might want to say that the word I refer to your body. This would mean that you are your body, and I am my body. That seems simple enough. Notice, however, the words your body or my body. Why do we say my body as if the body were something the I possessed? This way of talking seems to imply that we make a distinction between ourselves and our bodies. And of course, we can lose parts of our bodies or even have parts of them replaced without losing or replacing ourselves.

Maybe “I” doesn’t refer to the body but to something that goes on inside the body, like thoughts or sensations. So you are what you think, perceive, and feel.

However, we run into the same problem, don’t we? We speak of my thoughts, my perceptions, and my feelings. Also, these things are constantly changing, but is the “I” constantly changing? Are you a different person every time you have a different thought, feeling, or sensation?

If “I” does not refer to my body or my thoughts, perceptions, and feelings, maybe it refers to my mind. My mind is what has thoughts, perceptions, and feelings, so you might say it possesses them. And since my mind tells my body what to do, you might even say that my body is possessed by my mind. Or, at least, my mind inhabits my body.

As the above bit of thinking about the question “What am I?” indicates, the discussion sooner or later leads one to talk about the mind and the body. This seems natural enough since we normally think of ourselves as human beings, and we commonly think of humans as having minds and bodies. However, what precisely are the mind and the body, and how are they related to each other? These questions constitute what philosophers call the mind-body problem.

Generally speaking, the proposed solutions to the mind-body problem fall into two groups: dualistic and monistic. Dualistic theories hold that the mind and the body are two different substances. The mind is conscious, non-spatial, and private (only you have direct access to your own mind). The body is unconscious, spatial, and public (it can be viewed by others). How do these two substances, so defined, relate?

One theory, usually associated with René Descartes, is called interactionism. According to this theory, mind and body causally interact in the sense that mental events (e.g., thoughts) can cause physical events (e.g., walking) and physical events (e.g., taking a sleeping pill) can cause mental events (e.g., feeling sleepy). This seems plausible enough at first, but the problem of how two substances so radically different can causally affect each other has led to considerable controversy as well as to the development of other theories.

Some dualists who reject the idea of causal interactionism subscribe to parallelism. The German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), for example, argued that a pre-established harmony exists between mental and physical events so that they run in parallel, like two clocks set to tick together. Mind and body appear to interact, but in fact they do not. A physical event occurs (e.g., a blow to the arm), and parallel to that event, but uncaused by it, a mental event (e.g., pain) occurs.

This seems somewhat fantastic, so other dualists have been led to yet a third theory called epiphenomenalism. According to this theory, mental events are by products of physical events, as smoke is a by-product of fire. This means that physical events cause mental events, but mental events cannot cause physical events. Mental events are just things that happen when certain brain activities take place. The brain activity is what is primary; the mental activity is secondary.

Monistic solutions to the mind-body problem deny that the mind and the bod are two different substances. For example, materialism, or physicalism as it is some- times called, holds that so-called mental events are not different from physical events. There is no such thing as a mental substance above and beyond the physical. There are several varieties of materialism, but a popular version, called the identity theory, proposes that mental events are identical with brain processes in much the same way as lightning flashes are identical with electrical discharges.

Whereas some versions of materialism attempt to reduce mind to matter, idealism attempts to reduce matter to mind. If you read George Berkeley in Chapter 9, you may recall how such an argument progresses. Berkeley argued that because all we ever experience are sensations and because sensations are mental, matter is an unwarranted and unneeded inference. Only minds and mental events exist.

A third kind of monism is called the double-aspect theory. This view, maintained by the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), proposes that we rethink what we mean by mind and body (matter). Instead of thinking of these as things or substances, we should think of them as qualities, characteristics, or aspects.

There is one substance, Spinoza argued, that in itself is neither mental nor physical but has at least two different aspects or qualities called mind and body. A modern version of this theory was suggested by the famous British philosopher Bertrand Russell (see Section 1.4). Russell called his theory neutral monism and characterized it as the view that what exists is neither mental nor physical but neutral with respect to these distinctions.

Perhaps the mind-body problem arises only because we begin with faulty assumptions. If we focus on our normal experiences, we notice that we experience ourselves as embodied. Our bodies are relevant to what we think and feel. We raise our arms without thinking about how to do it, and when someone kicks us, we yell. Our bodies seem to be more than mere shells or irrelevant dwelling places where our true selves just happen to be, as if by accident.

Our brains are part of our bodies and they are an important part. I might accidentally cut off my finger, and although that unfortunate event would change me， it would not change me nearly as much as accidentally losing my brain. The relationship between brains and conscious minds is particularly close and it is important to know how the brain works.

After the advent of the computer age it did not take long for people to start suggesting that brains work like computers. Computers process all sorts of information very rapidly. Perhaps the brain does the same thing. Maybe our minds are simply products of a very complex computing system we happen to call the brain. Then again, maybe not, Read further and see.

The question about what I am leads to further questions about the nature of human beings and about what they are made of. It also leads to other questions in particular, questions about what a person is. It is here that the question of what begins to shade off into the question of who. Who are we? We are persons. Simple enough, right?

We must be careful to distinguish the concept of “person” from the concept of “human being.” Human being refers to a biological species one to which we happen to belong. Person, on the other hand, is not a biological concept. We can bring out the distinction by pointing to the example of the space alien E. T. It would appear that E.T. is a person, but certainly not a human being in the biological sense. This distinction is central to much of the debate about abortion because many claim that whereas a fetus belongs to the biological species human being, it is not a person, but only potentially a person.

To say that something is potentially a person indicates that personhood is something that may not always be present. Of course, we all know that persons can and do change. The fact that being a person is dynamic (a changing and developing process) leads to the issue of the identity of persons through time. Consider this puzzle: Are you the same person today as you were when you were five years old? If we mean by “same” a kind of strict identity such that if A is identical with B, then A and B have the same characteristics, the answer is obviously no. You have a different set of qualities today (such as size and age) than you did when you were five years old. If we mean by “same” similar but not absolutely identical characteristics then the answer is yes.

But is similarity good enough? If I am only similar to my former self, then I have changed. And if I have changed, how much have I changed? For example, does it make sense to hold the person I am today responsible for the act of stealing cookies at age five? If my mother suddenly discovered that I, not my sister, stole the cookies and I lied about it, should she call me up and scold me many years later?

If we accept Descartes’s views (see above), then we might say that my identity consists in my soul substance, and because my soul has remained the same even though my body has changed, my mother should indeed scold me now no matter how different my body is now.

Many people believe in the soul. It is a very popular idea. It not only takes care of the problem of identity through time but also gives the assurance of life beyond the death of the body. This belief does all that and makes us feel very special, important, and different from all those other living things with which we happen to share the planet. My identity is a soul. My person is a spiritual being. I am special.

But what if there were no souls? What if human identities (persons, if you will) were not everlasting, special, and unique souls but bundles of sensations, thoughts memories, and experiences? What if the word “I” was merely a convenient way talking about that bundle?

Puzzles about personal identity are closely related to other concerns about identity, such as how our sense of who we are is constructed in a social setting. Whether we are souls or not we are social animals. We are born, we live, and we die in a social/cultural setting that is vitally important to who we are. If you were born in another country to a different family, you would be a very different person than you are now. Your religion might be different, along with many of your beliefs and values. Talk to people from other countries or other cultures and so what I mean.

Social identity is closely tied to gender identity because how society treats us depends, in part, on our gender. Suppose you were born a different sex. Can you imagine yourself, if you are female, as a male? How might you be different? Can those of you who are male imagine yourselves as female? Would you like to be female? Would a sex change operation make any real difference to who you are? Could you be a female in a male body? Could you be a male in a female body? Who are you? Think about it.

11.2 YOU ARE YOUR MIND

We return once again to Descartes (see Section 7.3), in particular to the last chapter of his Meditations. Let me remind you of his argument. Descartes was concerned with proving representational realism true. That is, he wanted to show for certain that physical objects really do exist outside our minds. He began by using his method of doubt to show that all our beliefs about an external world based on our sensations can be doubted. Hence, the most direct way to know the external world----namely, by sensation----is blocked by doubt. He then discovered that he could not doubt that he existed as a thinking thing as long as he was thinking because every time he doubted (which is a thought) that he existed he proved that he existed as a thinking thing. So he found a certain foundation from which to begin, but he was trapped in his own mind.

Our selection in Section 7.3 ended with the second meditation and with Descartes knowing for certain that he existed as a thinking thing, but knowing nothing else. In the subsequent meditations he sought a way out of his own mind by showing that God exists. If he could prove that God exists, he could be certain that at least one thing outside his own mind exists. He attempted this proof in Meditation V with his famous argument from perfection. Descartes argued that by God we mean a perfect being. A perfect being has all perfections. Existing is a perfection and, because a perfect being has all perfections, God must exist. Furthermore, God cannot be a deceiver because a perfect being must also have the perfection of goodness and a perfectly good being would not deceive.

Along the way Descartes also tried to establish a rule for distinguishing true ideas from false. Ideas that are clear and distinct are true. He also thought he discovered the cause of error. We can use our will to choose to believe things that our understanding does not completely grasp. Hence, we can be confident that God is good and not the source of error. He also tried to show that material things are essentially different from mental things. Matter is extended in space and mind is not. So Descartes believed he had established with absolute certainty the existence of his own mind as a mental substance and the existence of a perfectly good God. How did he get from there to a world made up of physical objects external to our minds? In the Meditation that follows, Descartes made that move.

The standard interpretation of Descartes is that he not only establishes a mind-body dualism but also supports a theory of interactionism. According to this theory, the mind and body can causally interact even though one is a mental substance and the other is a physical substance. Recently, some philosophers have questioned whether Descartes did in fact support interactionism. Descartes corresponded about this very issue with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia in May and June 1643. Elisabeth was puzzled about how interactive causation might happen because causation is a mechanical process requiring contact between bodies extended in space. But the mind is not extended in space and hence can have no contact with a physical body. So how do you raise your arm if your mind can have no contact with the muscles in your arm? Descartes never did provide a satisfactory answer to this difficulty as the perceptive princess pointed out. As you read the following selection, see if you can make your own assessment of where Descartes’s arguments succeed and where they may be unsatisfactory.

Have you ever wondered whether computers can think? Of course, they can think in the sense that they can process information. But I mean really think----that is can they be conscious? If they can, perhaps our brains are like complex computers, vastly intricate machines that can process information in such a way that consciousness is the result.

As I pointed out in the introduction to this chapter one set of answers to the mind-body problem is called monism because it denies that humans are made up of two radically different things, minds and bodies. One version of monism, usually called materialism or physicalism, claims that only bodies (matter) exist. The problem this answer must explain is why we have a conscious mental life (thoughts, feelings sensations) that appears to be nonphysical in nature. Various kinds of physicalistic theories have been proposed in an attempt to solve this problem. I briefly mentioned the identity theory in the introduction According to this theory, mental states are identical with brain states. When we think or dream, certain sorts of physical events are happening in various parts of our brains, which can be observed and studied by science. One problem with this theory is that mental states seem to have characteristics different from those of physical states. For one thing, mental states are private whereas physical states are publicly observable. For another, it appears unlikely that the same kind of brain state accompanies the same kind of thought or sensation For example, I feel pain, you feel pain, and the other day Peanut, my fat blind cat, also felt pain when I accidentally stepped on his tail. Now my brain and your brain may be sufficiently alike so that our brain states may also be sufficiently alike. But the brain of my cat, and indeed the brains of many other animals, is quite different, and it seems unlikely that----even though we might have similar mental states (e.g., feeling pain)----we would have identical brain states. Also, for two things to be identical, they must have identical properties. A brain state, being physical, is located in space. But where in space is my feeling of being sorry that I stepped on my cat tail? Is it 3 inches to the right of my left ear? Is it possible for a brain scientist to observe some kind of electrical event in my brain (a brain state) and read my thoughts? When I see Arthur the dog chasing Peanut the cat, can some scientist looking at my brain activity see the same thing? Hardly!

Materialists have their answers to these sorts of questions, but these kinds of problems with the identity theory have led some materialists to develop a different sort of theory, a theory called functionalism. There are different varieties of functionalism, but in general this theory holds that mental states are defined completely by their functions or causal relations. A mind is what a brain creates. Theoretically, something other than a brain could function as a mind----for example, a computer.

The slogan of functionalism is not the cry of the identity theorist that “the mind is nothing but the brain.” Rather, drawing an analogy with computers, the slogan is “the mind is to the brain as a computer’s software is to its hardware.” The behavior of a computer is not explained, or at least not explained completely, by its physics and chemistry (hardware). It is explained by its program or “software” that manages the tasks the computer performs. The software of a computer is not identical with its hard ware, and hence our minds are not identical with our brains. Nevertheless, the brain is a kind of computing machine, and the mind is the brain’s program.

John Searle (b.1932) is the Slusser professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. In the following selection, taken from the 1984 Reith Lectures, Searle argues that machines cannot think (be conscious) and thus, by implication, that functionalistic theories of the mind fail. He offers what has become a classic example of a thought experiment in the field, the Chinese room argument. Its goal is to show that no matter how complex and sophisticated digital computers may become, they will never be able to produce consciousness and hence the human brain must be significantly unlike a computer----because the brain can cause consciousness.

Searle is responding in part to what has become known as the Turing Test. Alan M. Turing (1912-1954) was a central figure in the development of computer theory and the field of artificial intelligence or AI as it has come to be called. The analogy between brains and computers would be far more convincing if we could duplicate something very like human intelligence in a machine. This requires us to figure out how to recognize when a computer is exhibiting intelligence that approximates human intelligence. Turing is famous for proposing a test, the Turin Test. He reasoned that since we recognize whether others are intelligent by talking to them, why not do the same with machines? If we can devise a method for asking questions of a computer and getting responses that we cannot distinguish from the responses we would get from a human mind, we will have strong evidence for the existence of AI. The analogy between the brain and computers would also become more plausible.

Central to Searle’s argument is a distinction between syntax (the grammatical rules that govern the arrangement of words in a sentence) and semantics  (the meaning of a word or a sentence).Computers manipulate symbols according to syntax (a set of rules for their arrangement)but it does not follow that computers are aware of the meaning (semantics) of those symbols. If I knew only the syntax of Chinese, but not the semantics, could I be said to know Chinese? If a computer can manipulate symbols according to a set of rules does that show it “understands” what those symbols mean?

11.4 YOU ARE MEAT

Many people don’t like the idea that computers or computerized robots could ever be conscious in the way humans are conscious. They are made of metal, plastic, wires, and computer chips. Sure, George Lucas’s robot characters in Star Wars (R2-D2 and C-3PO) made us laugh and feel sorry for them when they were damaged. We even feared for them when they were in danger. They seemed human, but we know they were only the products of Lucas’s fertile imagination and the filmmaker’s art.

Let's change the scene. Let’s imagine that intelligent, conscious, and feeling robots like R2-D2 and C-3PO visit earth. Would they be amazed that we flesh and-blood humans can think, feel, and communicate? Would thinking flesh and bone wow them? Perhaps they would deny, as many of us now do with regard to computerized robots, that these mobile meat containers were capable of conscious thought.

Terry Bisson (b.1942), author of the next selection, is a member of the Authors Guild as well as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He is an award-winning author of many different kinds of stories, including both adult fiction and children’s books. In the following science fiction fantasy, he imagines robots visiting a planet to study creatures that have been sending radio messages into outer space. What to their amazement, if not amusement, do they find? Read and see.

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