Abstract
In both past and contemporary philosophy and science, the question as to where mind takes place has received an amazingly large variety of answers. In this chapter, I will first introduce some important distinctions concerning the variables that are logically involved in this question (1.), then sketch a brief and necessarily rough systematic overview of the basic kinds of answers that have been given to this question (2.), and finally attempt to give a phenomenological account of these basic kinds of answers (3.).
The mind is its own place
John Milton: Paradise Lost, Book 1, 254
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Notes
- 1.
Much of modern reference to a “seat” of (the) mind has been influenced by Descartes who notably referred to a “seat of the soul” (siège de l’âme), locating it in the “pineal gland” of the human brain (cf., e.g., Descartes (1649), The Passions of the Soul, Art. 32ff). Ancient authors such as Aristotle preferred referring to the “place” (tópos) wherein particular kinds of mental states and processes (e.g., “sensations”) have their “origin” or governing “principle” (arché) (cf., e.g., Aristotle (1961), Parts of Animals, II, 656a). Cf. also Lind (2007) and Onions (1951) for reviews of ancient views on the “seat” of mind.
- 2.
- 3.
Cf. the discussion on the relationship between place and world in the Introduction to this book.
- 4.
In ordinary language, the noun “mind” is often accompanied by an article (e.g., a mind, the mind, etc.), by a possessive adjective (e.g., my mind, your mind, her mind, etc.), or by a demonstrative (e.g., this mind, that mind, etc.), and it can thus be used either in singular or in plural (e.g., one mind, two minds, etc.).
- 5.
Cf. Robinson’s (2014) entry on “substance” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- 6.
Cf. Schaffer’s (2016) entry on “monism” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- 7.
As opposed to “existence monism” and “priority monism”, “substance monism” may be defined as “the doctrine that all concrete objects fall under one highest type (perhaps material, or mental, or some neutral underlying type […])” (Cf. Schaffer 2016).
- 8.
- 9.
Panpsychism is not always conceived thus broadly. According to Hartshorne (1950), for example, panpsychism “is the doctrine that everything is psychic or, at least, has a psychic aspect”. It thus not only “contrasts with the monistic tendency of much idealism”, but is also, “in its more significant form”, not a “two-aspect theory”, but “the view that all things, in all their aspects, consist exclusively of ‘souls’”. Similarly, Sprigge (1998) defines panpsychism as “the thesis that physical nature is composed of individuals each of which is to some degree sentient”. In yet another sense, even Seager and Allen-Hermanson (2015), who provided the definition that we supposed above, give a somewhat narrower definition when, at the beginning of the same entry, they define panpsychism as “the doctrine that mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe”. In fact, the broader (and more literal) definition that we supposed above is not committed to the thesis that mind is “a fundamental feature” of reality, but admits the possibility that mind has a derived character, as long as the ubiquity of mind is granted.
- 10.
Cf. Sprigge’s (1998) account of panpsychism.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
Cf. Ramsey’s (2016) definition of “eliminative materialism” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- 14.
Cf. Ramsey (2016).
- 15.
The most famous examples of philosophers associated with this view are of course Descartes and “Cartesian” philosophers such as Malbranche, though at least in Descartes himself the issue is less clear than it is often taken to be (cf. Harrison 1992).
- 16.
- 17.
In recent times, this view has been suggested in particular by the Santiago School of cognition (Maturana and Varela 1980), on the one hand, and by the Adelaide school of cognitive biology (Lyon 2006; Lyon and Opie 2007) as well as by the Bratislava Center for Cognitive Biology (Kováč 2000), on the other. According to the Santiago theory of cognition, “[l]iving systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition” and “this statement is valid for all organisms, with or without a nervous system” (Maturana and Varela 1980, 13). Similarly, according to the cognitive biology approach, every organism – whether mono- or multicellular – that can sense stimuli in its environment and respond accordingly is cognitive.
- 18.
Cf. Turing (1950). While the “Turing test”, as originally conceived, was concerned with the question whether “machines [can] think” (Turing 1950, 433), an analogous test had been earlier conceived by Ayer (1936) in order to determine “the presence or absence of consciousness”: “The only ground I can have for asserting that an object which appears to be conscious is not really a conscious being, but only a dummy or a machine, is that it fails to satisfy one of the empirical tests by which the presence or absence of consciousness is determined” (Ayer 1936, 140).
- 19.
The eminent neuroscientists Tononi and Koch (2015), for example, would go so far as to ascribe some minimal consciousness even to a “photodiode”: “A corollary of ITT that violates common intuitions is that even circuits as simple as a ‘photodiode’ made up of a sensor and a memory element can have a modicum of experience”, though “[i]t is nearly impossible to imagine what it would ‘feel like’ to be such a circuit” (p. 11). See Oizumi et al. (2014) for a detailed defense of this thesis.
- 20.
- 21.
Notably, Descartes localized the mind in the “pineal gland” (cf. Descartes 1649, The Passions of the Soul, Art. 32ff), whereas contemporary philosophers and scientists generally localize mental states and processes, in general, and consciousness, in particular, in functional “brain networks” (e.g., Laureys et al. 2016).
- 22.
- 23.
- 24.
- 25.
- 26.
- 27.
- 28.
The distinction between “atomistic”, or “monadological”, and “synechological” (from Greek συνεχής continuous, conjoined) versions of panpsychism has been introduced by Fechner (1855) and taken up by Hartshorne (1950): “The synechological view differs from the monadological view in that it does not associate the psychic unity with the single atoms, and thus does not suppose as many (conscious or unconscious) souls as there are metaphysically or physically discrete simple body-atoms in the world; it rather associates the psychic unity ultimately with the lawful connection of the whole system of the atoms of the world (God), thereby associating subordinate psychic unities (souls of human being and animals) with subsystems of this whole system” (Fechner 1855, 248f).
- 29.
- 30.
The distinction between “anthropogenic” and “biogenic” approaches to cognition and mind has been introduced by Lyon (2006).
- 31.
Notably, the relationship between mind conceived in “anthropogenic” terms and mind conceived in “biogenic” terms is somewhat analogue to the relationship between respiration conceived as ventilation (which requires lungs and is behaviorally manifest as inhalation and exhalation) and respiration in general, including both physiological respiration (which may be realized by very different kinds of respiratory systems and may be behaviorally manifest in very different ways) and cellular respiration (which may be realized by respiratory mechanisms involving very different kinds of chemical substances). Thus, as already argued by Fechner (1861), showing behavioral evidence of mental representations and/or having a more or less centralized nervous system might be no more necessary for mind than inhalation and exhalation and/or having lungs are necessary for respiration.
- 32.
For good reason, the title of this chapter, “The place of mind”, is equivocal: it may refer either to mind as place or to mind as something that takes place in some place.
- 33.
Of course, the “similarity” in these respects also involves a “similarity” concerning the spatial and temporal scale of these respects. Cf. Morewedge et al. (2007) for empirical evidence of a “timescale bias in the attribution of mind”.
- 34.
Even today we would probably find it rather hard to attribute mental states to a brain in a vat, even if we were assured that the neuroelectric in- and output patterns are the same as in an embodied brain: to make such an attribution minimally plausible, we would probably need some concrete representation of the body-related stimuli and behaviors corresponding to those neuroelectric in- and output patterns. Vice versa, we would probably find it rather easy to attribute mental states to aliens if their behaviors were sufficiently similar to ours, even if their internal organization were completely unknown to us or radically different from that of known organisms on earth: to make us doubt in such an attribution, we would probably need to discover that their internal organization or their origin is rather similar to that of artefacts.
- 35.
More precisely, it is their supposed autonomous and intrinsic unity what makes atoms and celestial bodies more likely candidates for the attribution of mind than mere aggregates such as heaps of sand. For as the example of celestial bodies illustrates, inner-world entities may become less likely candidates for the attribution of mind, if it is discovered that their unity is less autonomous and intrinsic than it seemed.
- 36.
In fact, the phenomenological view of mind does not exclude that some (though not all) objectively manifest mental states and processes may take place without being subjectively lived, but it excludes that subjectively lived mental states and processes take place without being somehow objectively manifest.
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Hünefeldt, T. (2018). The Place of Mind. In: Hünefeldt, T., Schlitte, A. (eds) Situatedness and Place. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 95. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92937-8_7
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