video
Topic Series
Ned Block
Sara Imari Walker on Physics, Emergence, and Life on Other Planets
Greg Epstein on Technology, Morality, and Non-Religion
David Papineau on Consciousness, Physics, & the Mind-Body Problem
Or Graur on the Big Bang and the Physics of Galaxies
Ned Block on Perception, Cognition, and Consciousness
Brian Swimme on Consciousness, Cultural Evolution, and the Noosphere
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Ned, in wanting to understand what we’re all about the so-called mind/body problem is the perennial one that philosophers ask through history and indeed still today. Tell me please what is the mind/body problem?
- Ned Block
- The mind/body problem is the problem of what is the fundamental nature of the mind. Maybe the best way to see it is by way of an analogy, we can ask about other things what their fundamental nature is. So, for example, we can ask what the fundamental nature of water is. It turns out it’s a certain structure of hydrogen and oxygen molecules, which is colloquially known as H20. So it has a chemical nature. Water has a chemical nature. Some other things have different natures. So, for example, what makes an adding machine an adding machine? It turns out it’s a kind of function. It doesn’t just turn out it’s part of our concept that that’s the way it is. So if we ask about the mind, what makes the mind a mind, it turns out there are different aspects of the mind, some of them are like water, some of them are like adding. Consciousness is like water. It has a biological essence. So the mind/body problem for consciousness is one where the question is what is the biological nature of the mind? The mind/body problem for thought and other aspects of cognition turns out probably to be mainly functional; it’s a matter of how thought, how representations in the mind function so as to produce thinking.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- So you see the mind/body problem in essence bifurcated into two kinds of problems, one is a biological problem relating the mind to the body or the brain as we would say today, the other is the function, the cognitive psychology, how it works from a cognitive science computational point of view.
- Ned Block
- That’s right.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- So how then can we make progress in each way. They obviously have to relate to each other, but do we…
- Ned Block
- Sure.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Do we work each one independently?
- Ned Block
- Yes, I think … well, we don’t work them independently, we work them together, each endeavor keeping an eye on the other one, because as we say you know you’d be wrong if you got answers in those two enterprises that didn’t fit.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Let’s just talk historically for a moment, because we say mind/body problem, and again if we said it today it would be mind/brain, but what’s the history of the mind/body problem, just quickly?
- Ned Block
- Well, in its contemporary form I think it goes back at least as far as Descartes who thought that the interface between mind and body was in the pineal gland. But he posed, he put the question in the way that appeals to contemporary thinkers in terms of how do the mind and body interact?
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- And what has been the progress in terms of the different ways of thinking about it from Descartes to the current day?
- Ned Block
- Well, I think a key event was the idea in the late 1950s by an Australian philosopher named J.J.C. Smart (ph.) who was proceeded by a psychologist named U.T. Place (ph.), of thinking of the relation between mind and brain in terms of the notion of identity, the idea that consciousness, for example, just is a process in the brain. And Smart and Place were very influenced by the scientific discoveries of the nature of heat, in terms of molecular kinetic nature, the scientific discovery of the nature of fire in terms of oxidation.
So those discoveries in which science discovers that some phenomena described at an upper level like heat, water or fire or lightening just is some phenomenon describable at a lower more molecular level. - Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- And when you say just is, this is the identity means it’s exactly the same.
- Ned Block
- It’s the same is as the is in two plus two is four. So the idea is this is, and the modern or the contemporary version of the mind/body problem, is what is the fundamental nature of mind is what you’re really asking is what is it in this same sense as you can ask what is water. And it turns out it’s H20.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- And so if you would say the mind is the brain in the same sense that water is H20 you have arguably a complete answer to the question, it’s a full stop.
- Ned Block
- Yeah.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- That’s identity.
- Ned Block
- Yeah. The thing about identity is sometimes you need further explanation [sic] to tell you how an identity could be true. So just to say that a phenomenal property like the property of what it is like to see something red is a certain brain property; even if it’s true we’re not going to be satisfied with that because we want to know how a mental property could be a brain property.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Well, yeah, but that is what happened to the identity, that’s not commonly accepted today, because of the impossibility or some one say the difficulties, some impossibility of making the identity stick.
- Ned Block
- Yes.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- You try to make it stick but things squiggled out from it.
- Ned Block
- Yeah, right. (LAUGHTER)
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- So what happened to the postulation of identity that the mind is equal to the brain?
- Ned Block
- Well, I think people are having trouble understanding how that could be true, even if it is true. The problem is the problem of the explanatory gap, the problem of how it could be that the neuro basis of a given phenomenal state is the neuro basis of that state as opposed to some other state or some other phenomenal state or none at all. We don’t understand that, and furthermore we don’t even see how we could understand it. And that is what causes the difficulty.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- What you’re saying is that not only don’t we understand it, but we don’t even see what could count as an explanation of that.
- Ned Block
- That’s right.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Because what is the that? The that is a very large sequence of neuronal spikes of electricity in hundreds of billions of nerve cells and maybe trillions of different connections and chemicals passing back and forth. That’s what it is. And so we don’t see what could count as explanation, how any of that could be this phenomenal feeling of seeing red.
- Ned Block
- Right. A good way to think about this is a way that was first proposed by my colleague at NYU, Tom Nagle (ph.) where he said we’re like a pre-Socratic (ph.) philosopher who’s told that matter is energy. He can’t understand it because he doesn’t have an adequate concept of matter and an adequate concept of energy that would allow him to see how those two concepts could pick out the same phenomenon in the world. Similarly we don’t have an adequate phenomenal concept; that is a mentalistic concept, an adequate scientific concept to see how those concepts could pick out the same thing. You know as Nagle said even if we were told what consciousness is in the brain we wouldn’t really understand it. So I think the key things that need to be done are we need to work on the concepts of consciousness, and I think at least we have to separate phenomenal consciousness from certain other kinds of consciousness. And, of course, we have to work on the neuroscience of it so that we can find concepts such that we can understand how they pick up the same thing.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Some would say that the vast majority of the work really should be done on the neuroscience side because there isn’t a whole lot of stuff on the phenomenal side in reality, but once we understand the neuro side the phenomenal side will fall out of it, it will be a natural consequence of it. So you don’t have to worry really about this side, we do have to worry terribly about the neuroscience side because that will be a natural consequence. We don’t need to know that up front or a priory.
- Ned Block
- I have some sympathy with that, but I also think that we need to make some distinctions on the mental side. And then we need to pay careful attention to the science to see what further distinctions need to be made. I think if the study of consciousness goes in the direction that the study of almost every other phenomenon has gone in, we will need to do some revision of our ordinary concepts so that we can produce mentalistic concepts that match up with the scientific concepts in the right way.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Some philosophers would say that consciousness though is fundamentally different than virtually anything else in science and that we will make lots of progress on the so-called easy problem but in the fundamental phenomenology problem of the hard problem that it’s almost impossible to ultimately solve that.
- Ned Block
- Look I think we shouldn’t conflate our current lack of understanding with a principled problem. 100 years ago people could not understand how life could be something biological but they did come to understand that and I’m optimistic. I think that in the end we will understand what conscience is from a biological point of view.