In contemporary philosophy, dualism is rare, in recent times, there are hardly any substance duelists, as a matter of fact, I only know of one John Eccles. But some philosophers adhered to property dualism, holding that mental states have both physical and nonphysical properties. More widespread in contemporary philosophy is monism, and more specifically materialism or physicalism. In the rest of this week, we consider the pros and cons of four materialist theories. With respect to the other kind of monism, idealism, the view that only minds and their contents exist, I kindly refer you to my colleagues in continental philosophy and your nearest coffee shop. Let's consider Ryan first, in his 1949 classic, the concept of mind and more specifically in the chapter the cat meet, Gilbert real argues that the cats concept of the mind as an entity separate from the body, which rile calls the dogma of the ghost in the machine is profoundly mistaken because it's a category mistake. Take the idea of mental causation, it's not a relation between two separate things on the one hand, mental events causing, on the other hand, material or physical events more specifically bodily behavior, rather, the mental and behavior are one and the same thing. Ryan's own proposal is called philosophical or logical behaviorism, because behaviorism in psychology, it avoids talk about an observable, unverifiable mental states by translating them or reducing them to observable, verifiable behavior. According to logical behaviorism then, mental states just are these junctions of behavior dispositions that are tendencies to respond to certain stimuli in certain ways. So for instance, Tim's so-called mental state of wanting to travel to Finland is when watching Netflix, Tim only looks at finished series, or when there is news about the Finnish Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, Tim starts to smile and so on. There are a number of objections to logical or philosophical behaviorism, technically speaking, specifying the disjunctions of behavior dispositions is like trying to squeeze apple juice from an orange. The disjunction will be endlessly long, it will be extremely hard to avoid also any non-behavior language in the specification of the disjunct. More fundamentally, there will not be a tie of this junction, that's because the relation between the mental states and behavior is supposed to be conceptual instead of causal. So we may not understand the these junks as different potential effects of one and the same mental state. A recurring objection to the materialist theories that we are and will be considering in this week, our objections from the qualitative aspects of our experiences. Suppose that you have a headache, one aspect of your experience is representational, you believe the proposition that you have a headache. Another aspect of your experience is purely qualitative. The feeling of pain itself, philosophers call such qualitative aspects qualia. Now, logical behaviorism has to face the problem that someone with completely different or even absent Qualia might exhibit the very behavior that would be exhibited in normal circumstances by someone in pain. A second reductive approach identifies mental states with brain states, the mind is the brain, this view has been called reductive materialism or brain state theory, but the name that is most often used is identity theory. The proposal is not merely that a specific mental state is identical to specific brain state. Such token token identity is fairly uncontroversial. However, according to the identity theory, mental types, for instance, pain can be identified with physical types or brain types like C fibers firing such type type identity, make the theory vulnerable to objections and counterexamples. The identity theory also has to face the problem of qualia, in his famous paper, what is it like to be a bat? Thomas Nagel argues that from the external perspective, we know a lot about bats, for instance, we know that bats orientate themselves and detect their prey by means of echolocation. However, what it is like to be a bat, how it feels to be a bat, the bats qualia from the bats internal perspective are things we can never know. Since however, all physical properties are knowable to empirical investigations, we can safely conclude that minds cannot be physical. Another objection to the identity theory that we need to consider is the argument from multiple realizations. Since the identity theory is identifying mental types like pain with physical types or brain types like C fibers firing, it precludes the possibility that other animals with quite different brains can be in pain as well. To drive this point home, David Lewis even asks us to imagine a margin with a completely different hydraulic brain being in pain, and Hillary Putnam makes a similar point with respect to computers. The identity theory, however, doesn't allow for mental types being multiply realizable. In this clip, we've considered too modest, and more specifically materialist views, logical behaviorism, and identity theory. Both are reductive approaches, but the reductions they propose are conservative. They do not eliminate mental states rather logical behaviorism claims that mental states are just these junctions of behavior dispositions and according to identity theory mental states just our brain states. Interestingly enough, both views also share some problems, most notably worries about a purely qualitative aspects of sensory experiences, the so-called Qualia that constitute amigus terminology what it is like to taste beer, beer bats, and so on.
