Are beliefs brain states?

In 1998 Andy Clark and David Chalmers published their article “The Extended Mind” in which they defended the view that the mind is not only in the brain, but also in the world around. This so-called extended mind thesis was the start of a discussion that lasts until today. A more radical version of this view is the enactivist approach, which I discussed two weeks ago. An important advocate of this theory is Shaun Gallagher. Although the actual discussion started only after Clark and Chalmers had presented their paper, they had forerunners. One of them was Lynne Rudder Baker. She called her account “practical realism” and she gave a comprehensive explanation of her view in her book Explaining Attitudes.

Baker’s practical realism is an attack on the – then – standard view that states that someone’s beliefs are literally somewhere in the brain. How this can be is explained by different theories in different ways, but, so Baker, “[w]hat Standard View theories have in common is the thesis that each instance of each belief is identical with, or is constituted by, an instance of a particular brain state.” In short: “Beliefs are brain states” (p. 12). Although without a doubt, so Baker, it is true that “[h]aving certain neural states is, presumably, necessary for people to have beliefs ... it does not follow that for a person to have a particular belief there is a neural state that constitutes that belief.” “[A] belief is a global state of a whole person, not of any proper part of a person, such as the brain”. (pp. 153-4) So, “[h]orses win races; legs have states. Having certain leg states is, presumably, necessary for horses to win races; but it doesn’t follow that for a horse to win a particular race, there is a leg state that constitutes the winning of the race.” (p. 154)

An attitude such as a belief, so Baker continues, can be compared with a state of financial health or a state of physical fitness. To take the first example, only in marginal cases your financial health has to do with the state of your bank account. It’s a relational concept: If the amount on your bank account is above a certain minimum, your financial state is more a matter of your pattern of spending, your financial wishes and the state of the economy (inflation, national income) than the sum of money you possess. In the same manner, a belief is not to be identified with any particular internal state of the believer. (ibid.) In enactivist terms, having a belief supposes not only a brain, but also a body and a world in which the brain and body exist. Seen this way, Baker has paved the way for undermining the “standard view”.

Nevertheless, one case discussed by her seems not to agree with the extended mind thesis and the enactivist approach. Peter asks Paul for Mary’s telephone number. Paul consults a directory, as always, and produces the correct number: 06-54321. Since Paul always has to consult a directory, “[i]ntuitively”, so Baker, Paul does not have the belief that Mary’s number is [06-54321] but only a belief how to find the number” (p. 161) and she explains that this is in keeping with practical realism. However, does the fact that Paul never remembers Mary’s telephone number makes that he does not have the belief that it is 06-54321 but only the belief how to get it? Let me take the main example from Clark’s and Chalmers’ article. Otto suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Therefore he carries always a notebook with him and every time he learns some new information, he writes it down. When he needs some old information, he looks it up. The notebook contains also Mary’s telephone number, so when Peter asks for it, Otto looks in his notebook and says “06-54321”. However, Fred knows Mary’s number by heart, so when Peter asks Fred for Mary’s telephone number, Fred produces it by heart without any hesitation and faultless. This made Clark and Chalmers conclude, that there is no fundamental difference between what Otto does and what Fred does, but there is only the practical difference that Otto consults the extended part of his brain, and that Fred consults the internal part of his brain: In both cases we can say that the telephone number is in the brain. But if this is true, and if we apply this reasoning to Baker’s example of Peter and Paul, we can say that Paul has not only the belief how to find Mary’s telephone number but also the belief that her number is 06-54321, just as Fred has this belief. This is this fully in line with Baker’s view that a belief is not simply a state of the brain but that it is a global state of a whole person related to the world around and especially to that part of the world that is within his or her reach. So, if we correct Baker’s view this way, it is only one step more to a fully developed theory that the mind is extended if not enactivist and this makes that Baker is a forerunner of these views.

Sources

- Andy Clark and David Chalmers,  “The Extended Mind”, in Analysis, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Jan., 1998), pp. 7-19. Ook op website http://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/clark-chalmers-1998.pdf

- Lynne Rudder Baker, Explaining attitudes. A practical approach to the mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

The Constitution View. A homage to Lynne Rudder Baker

Lynne Rudder Baker

Who am I? Since Descartes asked this in his Meditations, it has been a leading question in philosophy and in these blogs as well. It has also been one of the leading questions in the philosophy of Lynne Rudder Baker. Her answer was that I am the thinking being that I am, so I am a human person. However, you can object that I am also a body, and in a sense we are body and mind at the same time. How is this possible and what then is the relation between my being a person and my being a body? Baker had a clear answer to these questions: the Constitution View. In short, it involves that, in her words, “a human person is constituted by a human body. But a human person is not identical to the body that constitutes her.” (p. 3) For most of my readers – as for me when I read about the constitution view for the first time – it will not be clear what constitution here means, so let me explain.

Actually the constitution view of what a human person is consists of two parts. First, we must know what makes a person as a person different from the body she is as well. Second, what makes a person a human person? To answer these questions, let’s start to look at Michelangelo’s famous statue of David. Actually it is not more than a piece of marble. Following Baker, let me call this Piece. Now you’ll protest. For you this object is not simply a lump of stone but it is a work of art, representing the Jewish King David. However, so Baker, Piece and David are not identical. In a world without art, for instance in a dog world, Piece would exist as a piece of marble but not as David. In such a world Piece would exist but David wouldn’t. On the other hand, David couldn’t exist without Piece. If Michelangelo would have died after he had bought Piece but before he had made David, Piece would have existed but David hadn’t. But once David exists he has properties that Piece has not. David, so Baker, “could not exist without being a statue. So, David has a property ... that Piece lacks” (p. 30), and the other way round as well, I want to add. It’s David (the person we see in the marble) not Piece that represents the Jewish king. And it’s not David that has the property “stony” but Piece has. So David and Piece are not identical, but because David cannot exist without Piece, we say that Piece constitutes David. In the same way we must think the relationship between my body and me as a person. I cannot exist without my body, but my body and I are not identical: My body constitutes the person I am.

So far so good. But if a person is not identical with her body, what then “distinguishes a person from the body that constitutes her”, Baker asks. (p. 59) For answering this question we must return to the beginning of this blog. We saw there that Baker assumed that I am a thinking being. This implies that I have an inner life. But it’s not my body as such that has an inner life, but I have. According to the constitution view, so Baker, something with an inner life is different from something that hasn’t. Having an inner life is characteristic of a person, but it is not just characteristic as such but in a certain way: it involves that a person can reflect on herself. A person can think “oneself as an individual facing a world, as a subject distinct from everything else.” (p. 60). In other words, a person has what philosophers call a first-person perspective. All this brings Baker to her definition of a human person: “[W]hat makes a human person a person is the capacity to have a first-person perspective. What makes a human person a human is being constituted by a human organism.” (p. 91)

I must leave it at this and I think that this abstract of the constitution view of identity will raise more questions than it answers, but be sure that Baker discusses many objections that you might raise against this view.

To my mind, the constitution view looks like the dual aspect theory view on man, which says that man can be considered in different ways: as a biological body or as a conscious and thinking mind, although in the end man is both together. It’s the view I adhere to. I think that LRB would not agree. Anyway, the constitution view is a well-founded and coherent theory. It helps us to fill in the idea of a person and to say what personal identity is. Much work by Baker tried to answer questions in this field and were important contributions to current discussions in the philosophy of mind. Therefore it’s a bit strange that I hardly paid attention to Baker in my writings, although I valued her work very much and although I have read much of it. That’s why by way of homage to her I have written this blog, for a few days ago I heard that Lynne Rudder Baker has died about a year ago, on 24 December 2017, 73 years old. She wrote five books and many articles and book chapters, not only on personal identity, but also in the field of action theory and ethics. Without a doubt her work will keep to rag the brains of other philosophers yet for a long time.

Source

The page numbers in the text refer to Lynne Rudder Baker, Persons and Bodies. A Constitution View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Do we think only with the brain?

Your mind is not only in your brain, but also in your body if not in the world around you or at least in some parts of it. I have sustained this view several times in my blogs. It is the main thesis of the so-called extended mind theory and also of the enactivist approach, which goes even a little bit farther. The first theory – defended for instance by Andy Clark and David Chalmers – leaves yet a rather important place for the brain as the centre where the mind processes come together, albeit so that according to this theory also much you know exists outside your brain, such as in your notebooks and your computer. The enactivist approach states that the brain has a rather decentralized function and that many cognitive processes take place outside the brain. This view is defended for instance by Shaun Gallagher. In short, the enactivist thesis says (p. 6; see “Source”) that “[c]ognition is not simply a brain event. It emerges from processes distributed across brain-body-environment.” What we see in this description of enactivism is that the brain is not the central processing unit that constitutes cognition (say “knowledge”, in order to keep it simple) but that it is only one such a unit, besides the body (and then especially understood as action, or intended behaviour) and the world around us, which comprises material objects but especially the people we interact with (significant groups and society in general). Now I could continue to give an abstract summary of the enactivist view, but instead I want to give a few examples in order to make the idea clear.

The first case that comes to my mind is not from Gallagher (whose view I want to discuss here) but it’s one discussed in an older blog (dated 20 July 2009): Holding a warm cup of coffee makes you have more positive attitudes towards a stranger than when you hold a cup of ice coffee. In other words, how we are going to act towards others – friendly, rejecting – is not only a decision taken by the brain but it is also “taken” by the temperature of the coffee we drink. This is in line with an example used by Gallagher (p. 152): A study by Danziger et al. showed that the favourable rulings by judges generally went down during the morning from about 65% to 0. After the lunch it returned abruptly to 65%. So, the fact that the judges gradually became hungry influenced their decisions! Actually it’s a phenomenon that everybody knows: Hunger affects your decisions and what you perceive. The hungrier you are, the more you see food in everything you see, and finally it forces your behaviour. It’s a phenomenon already noticed by William James, so Gallagher, who “noted that an apple appears larger and more inviting red when one is hungry than when one is satiated.” (pp. 151-2) Even the phase of your heart beat – and who is able to perceive the phase of his or her heart beat? – has an impact on what you feel, for “[w]hen the heart contracts in its systole phase, fearful stimuli are more easily recognized, and they tend to be more fearful than when presented during its diastole phase”, so Gallagher (p. 152, referring to an investigation by Garfinkel et al.). A phenomenon that many people know is the connection between the breathing and feeling excited; and that you can become more quiet by slowing down your breathing.

Yet a few other examples from Gallagher (pp. 152-5; for a part my interpretations). After a day of trekking in the mountains the next slope may look steeper than it really is, because you are hungry and tired. The next morning, when you are fresh again, it’s no problem to go up, not because the slope has become less steep, but because your affective state has changed. Intentionality can influence your perception as well. After a day of climbing and trekking you are very tired and you feel that it had been better to stop an hour ago. Or, same situation, you are sitting with your friends around a campfire at the end of the day and you feel satisfied how much you have done this day. Or – my example – after a day of trekking you may feel that the next slope is too steep, because you are tired and that’s better to pitch a camp. But what if you know that a bear is following you or that your love is waiting for you .... ?

My cases are a bit limited, but they exemplify that cognition is not simply a product of the brain. What we perceive and know is to a large extent also determined by our affects, our intentions, the state of the world, and the like. Despite challenges of the idea by some, which I’ll ignore here, I think what stands anyway is that “judgment and perhaps perceptual experience is informed by one’s present affective state” (p. 155). I would rather delete the word “perhaps”, for I think that the affective state does have an impact on perceptual experience, anyway. In more technical terms, we can speak of the “embodied-affective nature of perception” (p. 156), and I would like to add “and of cognition in general”. Cognition is not only in the brain but in the brain, body and natural and social environment together and in their relations. In order to know how we know it’s not enough to know how the brain functions, but we must understand this whole aggregate and its internal dynamic connections.

Source

The page numbers in the text refer to Shaun Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions. Rethinking the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Happiness as the stream of life

Money makes you happy by having it, not by trying to have it. We have seen this last week. However, what is happiness? Many authors have tried to answer this question, but for a basic understanding one falls back on Aristotle, as so often.

Following others, happiness is the highest good in life, so Aristotle. His reasoning is simple. We choose happiness as a goal only for itself and never for reaching another goal. It’s true that there are also other goals that are often set for itself, like honour, enjoyment or intellect, but even if we don’t choose them in order to become happy, we always assume that attaining these other goals goes together with being happy. Therefore we can say that happiness is the highest goal in life. However, saying so looks like a platitude, if we don’t define what happiness is. For otherwise we run the risk that we say, for instance, that I am not happy because I am depressed and I am depressed, because I don’t feel happy. Therefore we must define happiness that way that it can be taken independently of other feelings. Aristotle gives such a definition. Nonetheless, I’ll not quote it here. Instead I’ll give my interpretation of Aristotle’s approach of the idea of happiness, in order to avoid becoming entangled in a discussion what Aristotle actually means.

If we look at the example just given about the vicious relationship between being depressed and being happy, we see that this relationship is static: the state of being happy is related to another state such as being depressed in my case. It’s not the way Aristotle looks at the idea of happiness. Although he gives the impression that happiness can be seen as a state (especially when he discusses the question, whether or not we can judge whether a person was happy only after his or her death), in fact Aristotle’s approach is dynamic: For him happiness is in the activity of the soul that makes that this soul functions in an optimal way in view of its goals. It’s true that Aristotle adds yet the phrase “in a full human life”, and just this makes Aristotle’s dynamism again static in the end. But I think that I as a living person can ignore this phrase, since I cannot judge my whole life: At the moment that I judge, I have at least yet a while to go, and who knows what will happen yet that might completely reverse my judgment, as Montaigne says somewhere? The final judgment is up to others. I can judge only as I live right now and while I am still alive, giving my judgment from my own first person point of view. Seen that way, a person’s happiness is in his or her doing, in the acting, not in the achievements.

How then about the goals? Aren’t they important? Yes, as everybody knows they are. We set goals and once we have achieved them, we feel happy, even happier than before. But as everybody knows as well, soon this extra happiness will fade away. Happiness lasts three months as psychological investigations show. And then? Then we set new goals and we begin to focus on these new goals. And that’s the function of goals: they structure a person’s life. They make that a person’s life can stream, so to speak, and it’s just this streaming that makes us happy. How then about the money you have? Don’t keep it in your pocket but spend it, on experiences, for example. It will make you even happier than you are.

Source

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, 4-12