The Process of Inference

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Mole
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Belief Revision ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Philosophical Theory ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Belief States ◽  
Mental Events

The set of entities that serves as the domain for our discourse about the mind is metaphysically heterogenous. It includes processes, events, properties, modes, and states. In the latter part of the twentieth century, philosophers started to suppose that a philosophical theory of the mind should be primarily concerned with the explanation of mental states. Those states could be mentioned in the explanations that would need to be given for mental entities of other sorts. If, for example, we had a prior explanation of belief states, then those states could figure in our subsequent explanation of inferences: inferences, on this approach, are to be identified with certain processes of belief revision. This states-first approach was not favoured by earlier theorists of the mind, who tended to suppose that mental events and processes are explanatorily more basic than mental states. The current states-first approach faces insuperable difficulties, which the earlier approach avoids.

Dualism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Property Dualism ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Mental Properties ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Events

Dualism is the view that mental phenomena are, in some respect, nonphysical. The best-known version is due to Descartes (1641), and holds that the mind is a nonphysical substance. Descartes argued that, because minds have no spatial properties and physical reality is essentially extended in space, minds are wholly nonphysical. Every human being is accordingly a composite of two objects: a physical body, and a nonphysical object that is that human being’s mind. On a weaker version of dualism, which contemporary thinkers find more acceptable, human beings are physical substances but have mental properties, and those properties are not physical. This view is known as property dualism, or the dual-aspect theory. Several considerations appear to support dualism. Mental phenomena are strikingly different from all others, and the idea that they are nonphysical may explain just how they are distinctive. Moreover, physical reality conforms to laws formulated in strictly mathematical terms. But, because mental phenomena such as thinking, desiring and sensing seem intractable to being described in mathematical terms, it is tempting to conclude that these phenomena are not physical. In addition, many mental states are conscious states – states that we are aware of in a way that seems to be wholly unmediated. And many would argue that, whatever the nature of mental phenomena that are not conscious, consciousness cannot be physical. There are also, however, reasons to resist dualism. People, and other creatures with mental endowments, presumably exist wholly within the natural order, and it is generally held that all natural phenomena are built up from basic physical constituents. Dualism, however, represents the mind as uniquely standing outside this unified physical picture. There is also a difficulty about causal relations between mind and body. Mental events often cause bodily events, as when a desire causes an action, and bodily events often cause mental events, for example in perceiving. But the causal interactions into which physical events enter are governed by laws that connect physical events. So if the mental is not physical, it would be hard to understand how mental events can interact causally with bodily events. For these reasons and others, dualism is, despite various reasons advanced in its support, a theoretically uncomfortable position.

Mental Substances

2003 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 229-250
Author(s):  
Tim Crane
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Semantic Externalism ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Independent Entity ◽  
Mental Properties ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Events

Philosophers of mind typically conduct their discussions in terms of mental events, mental processes, mental properties, mental states—but rarely in terms of minds themselves. Sometimes this neglect is explicity acknowledged. Donald Davidson, for example, writes that ‘there are no such things as minds, but people have mental properties, which is to say that certain psychological predicates are true of them. These properties are constantly changing, and such changes are mental events’. Hilary Putnam agrees, though for somewhat different reasons:The view I have long defended is that the mind is not a thing, talk of our minds is talk of World-involving capabilities that we have and activities that we engage in. As Dewey succinctly put it, ‘Mind is primarily a verb. It denotes all the ways in which we deal consciously and expressly with the situation in which we find ourseleves. Unfortunately, an influential manner of thinking has changed modes of action into an underlying substance that performs the activities in question. It has treated mind as an independent entity which attends, purposes, cares and remembers’. But the traditional view, by treating mental states as states of the ‘underlying substance’, makes them properties of something ‘inside’, and, if one is a materialist philosopher, that means properties of our brains. So the next problem naturally seems to be: ‘Which neurological properties of our brains do these mental properties “reduce” to?’ For how could our brains have properties that aren't neurological? And this is how materialist philosphers saw the problem until the advent of such new alternatives in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language as Functionalism and Semantic Externalism.

scholarly journals A Neuroscience Levels of Explanation Approach to the Mind and the Brain

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edmund T. Rolls
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Levels Of Explanation ◽  
Processing Level ◽  
Reductive Physicalism ◽  
Brain States ◽  
High Level ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Different Levels

The relation between mental states and brain states is important in computational neuroscience, and in psychiatry in which interventions with medication are made on brain states to alter mental states. The relation between the brain and the mind has puzzled philosophers for centuries. Here a neuroscience approach is proposed in which events at the sub-neuronal, neuronal, and neuronal network levels take place simultaneously to perform a computation that can be described at a high level as a mental state, with content about the world. It is argued that as the processes at the different levels of explanation take place at the same time, they are linked by a non-causal supervenient relationship: causality can best be described in brains as operating within but not between levels. This allows the supervenient (e.g., mental) properties to be emergent, though once understood at the mechanistic levels they may seem less emergent, and expected. This mind-brain theory allows mental events to be different in kind from the mechanistic events that underlie them; but does not lead one to argue that mental events cause brain events, or vice versa: they are different levels of explanation of the operation of the computational system. This approach may provide a way of thinking about brains and minds that is different from dualism and from reductive physicalism, and which is rooted in the computational processes that are fundamental to understanding brain and mental events, and that mean that the mental and mechanistic levels are linked by the computational process being performed. Explanations at the different levels of operation may be useful in different ways. For example, if we wish to understand how arithmetic is performed in the brain, description at the mental level of the algorithm being computed will be useful. But if the brain operates to result in mental disorders, then understanding the mechanism at the neural processing level may be more useful, in for example, the treatment of psychiatric disorders.

Revaluations through Dance: Friedrich Nietzsche's Thought in Isadora Duncan's Speech The Dance of the Future

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-219
Author(s):  
Meindert E. Peters
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Mind

Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on Isadora Duncan's work, in particular his idea of the Dionysian, has been widely discussed, especially in regard to her later work. What has been left underdeveloped in critical examinations of her work, however, is his influence on her earlier choreographic work, which she defended in a famous speech held in 1903 called The Dance of the Future. While commentators often describe this speech as ‘Nietzschean’, Duncan's autobiography suggests that she only studied Nietzsche's work after this speech. I take this incongruity as a starting point to explore the connections between her speech and Nietzsche's work, in particular his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I argue that in subject and language Duncan's speech resembles Nietzsche's in important ways. This article will draw attention to the ways in which Duncan takes her cues from Nietzsche in bringing together seemingly conflicting ideas of religion and an overturning of morality; Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence and the teleology present in his idea of the Übermensch; and a renegotiation of the body's relation to the mind. In doing so, this article contributes not only to scholarship on Duncan's early work but also to discussions of Nietzsche's reception in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the importance Duncan ascribes to the body in dance and expression also asks for a new understanding of Nietzsche's own way of expressing his philosophy.

scholarly journals Confusions about ‘Inner’ and ‘Outer’ Voices: Conceptual Problems in the Study of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franz Knappik ◽  
Josef J. Bless ◽  
Frank Larøi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Clinical Assessment ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Diagnostic Value ◽  
Assessment Tools ◽  
Auditory Verbal Hallucinations ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Conceptual Problems ◽  
The Mind

AbstractBoth in research on Auditory Verbal Hallucinations (AVHs) and in their clinical assessment, it is common to distinguish between voices that are experienced as ‘inner’ (or ‘internal’, ‘inside the head’, ‘inside the mind’, ...) and voices that are experienced as ‘outer’ (‘external’, ‘outside the head’, ‘outside the mind’, ...). This inner/outer-contrast is treated not only as an important phenomenological variable of AVHs, it is also often seen as having diagnostic value. In this article, we argue that the distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ voices is ambiguous between different readings, and that lack of disambiguation in this regard has led to flaws in assessment tools, diagnostic debates and empirical studies. Such flaws, we argue furthermore, are often linked to misreadings of inner/outer-terminology in relevant 19th and early twentieth century work on AVHs, in particular, in connection with Kandinsky’s and Jaspers’s distinction between hallucinations and pseudo-hallucinations.

scholarly journals Activity in the brain’s valuation and mentalizing networks is associated with propagation of online recommendations

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa C. Baek ◽  
Matthew Brook O’Donnell ◽  
Christin Scholz ◽  
Rui Pei ◽  
Javier O. Garcia ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Word Of Mouth ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Prior Work ◽  
Opinion Change ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mentalizing System

AbstractWord of mouth recommendations influence a wide range of choices and behaviors. What takes place in the mind of recommendation receivers that determines whether they will be successfully influenced? Prior work suggests that brain systems implicated in assessing the value of stimuli (i.e., subjective valuation) and understanding others’ mental states (i.e., mentalizing) play key roles. The current study used neuroimaging and natural language classifiers to extend these findings in a naturalistic context and tested the extent to which the two systems work together or independently in responding to social influence. First, we show that in response to text-based social media recommendations, activity in both the brain’s valuation system and mentalizing system was associated with greater likelihood of opinion change. Second, participants were more likely to update their opinions in response to negative, compared to positive, recommendations, with activity in the mentalizing system scaling with the negativity of the recommendations. Third, decreased functional connectivity between valuation and mentalizing systems was associated with opinion change. Results highlight the role of brain regions involved in mentalizing and positive valuation in recommendation propagation, and further show that mentalizing may be particularly key in processing negative recommendations, whereas the valuation system is relevant in evaluating both positive and negative recommendations.

A unitary hypothesis of mind-brain interaction in the cerebral cortex

1990 ◽  
Vol 240 (1299) ◽  
pp. 433-451 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cerebral Cortex ◽  
Pyramidal Cells ◽  
Neuronal Structure ◽  
Mental Experience ◽  
Effective Selection ◽  
Global Nature ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
Apical Dendrites ◽  
The Brain

A brief introduction to the brain-mind problem leads on to a survey of the neuronal structure of the cerebral cortex. It is proposed that the basic receptive units are the bundles or clusters of apical dendrites of the pyramidal cells of laminae V and III-II as described by Fleischhauer and Peters and their associates. There are up to 100 apical dendrites in these receptive units, named dendrons. Each dendron would have an input of up to 100000 spine synapses. There are about 40 million dendrons in the human cerebral cortex. A study of the influence of mental events on the brain leads to the hypothesis that all mental events, the whole of the World 2 of Popper, are composed of mental units, each carrying its own characteristic mental experience. It is further proposed that each mental unit, named psychon, is uniquely linked to a dendron. So the mind-brain problem reduces to the interaction between a dendron and its psychon for all the 40 million linked units. In my 1986 paper ( Proc. R. Soc. Lond . B 227, 411-428) on the mind-brain problem, there was developed the concept that the operation of the synaptic microsites involved displacement of particles so small that they were within range of the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg. The psychon-dendron interaction provides a much improved basis for effective selection by a process analogous to a quantal probability field. In the fully developed hypothesis psychons act on dendrons in the whole world of conscious experiences and dendrons act on psychons in all perceptions and memories. It is shown how these interactions involve no violation of the conservation laws. There are great potentialities of these unitary concepts, for example as an explanation of the global nature of a visual experience from moment to moment. It would seem that there can be psychons not linked to dendrons, but only to other psychons, creating what we may call a psychon world.

SENTIMENT AND MATERIALITY IN LATE VICTORIAN BOOK COLLECTING

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 785-820
Author(s):  
David C. Hanson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Systematic Study ◽  
Book Collecting ◽  
The Mind ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Bibliographic Study

In the first half of the twentieth century, analytic bibliographers in Britain turned their attention to the systematic study of the nineteenth-century book. Developing their subject, they felt compelled to distance themselves from the Victorian book collector, who touched off a “suspicion . . . deeply ingrained in the mind of scholars and librarians” (Sadleir, “Development” 147). A new generation of bibliographers – Michael Sadleir, John Carter, and Graham Pollard – acknowledged that Victorian collecting had laid the foundations for the bibliographic study of books by “modern” (i.e., nineteenth-century) writers, as opposed to incunabula, the traditional focus of British book collecting. The contribution was regarded as fundamentally flawed, however, owing to a “sentimental element” in Victorian collecting (Carter and Pollard 101).

Introduction: Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Sarah Pinto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Young Woman ◽  
Social World ◽  
New Method ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
World War ◽  
Dream Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Mind

In the middle of World War II and at the end of colonial rule, a young woman in Punjab met with family friend Dev Satya Nand as a willing participant in his new method of dream analysis. This chapter introduces Mrs. A., Satya Nand, and the outlines of the case, which began with a discussion of bringing “Hindu Socialism” to Indian peasants and turned into an exploration of love, sexuality, ambition, and life after marriage. The case appeared early in the career of Satya Nand, a prolific but little remembered figure in twentieth-century Indian psychiatry, who theorized complex connections between the mind and the social world, casting the psyche as an organic vehicle for ethical imagination. This introduction also introduces Draupadi, Shakuntala, and Ahalya, central mythic figures who entered Mrs. A.’s musings and Satya Nand’s science. It asks what it means to begin a conversation about ethics from elsewhere than the usual sources in European myth and philosophy, and wonders at how we might consider this narrative in and beyond its place and time, Punjab on the eve of Partition, considering what it demands of us as readers of and alongside Mrs. A., an anonymous yet intimate voice.

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