Reflective Task
The Topic:
This week's topic was the ‘Mind-Body Problem’ acknowledging the nature of mental
substances. In the lecture, we looked at the burning question of “what is meant by
‘mental’ and ‘physical’?”, which we developed into the argument of dualism and
physicalism. Dualism explores that the mind and body are two separate substances
and that our minds cannot be fully explained in physical terms. In contrast,
physicalism states that minds and bodies are fully explainable in physical terms.
In our table groups, we discussed which theory of mind was more or least plausible,
and why. We all had different opinions; some had concluded that neither was more
or less plausible due to the argument of interaction whereas, in Descartes’s
Cartesian dualism, mental events cannot cause/are not connected to physical
events. This became a large influence on my decision as I originally sided with
dualism in the lecture when the concepts were first introduced to us. Others in my
group sided with functionalism as it considers how the body's conscious mind and
behaviour interact and how cognitive processes imply that mental states, as opposed
to bodily functions, govern an individual's behaviour.
However, something we all agreed on was that physicalism was the least plausible
theory of the mind, simply because we all believed that not all characteristics and
aspects of the conscious mind can be fully explained in physical terms, which is
highlighted in the thought experiment of ‘Philosophical Zombies’.
The discussion:
In the lecture, the thought experiments ‘Philosophical Zombies’ (Chalmers, 2017)
and ‘Mary’s Room’ (Jackson, 1986) were introduced to us. My group took a
particular interest in Mary’s Room (Jackson, 1986) as we simply could not
comprehend how Mary could specialise in the neurophysiology of vision and all the
physical information on how the body reacts to colour and more, when she herself
hasn’t experienced it. We discussed how the process of learning requires an
individual to have experienced the concept themselves to truly understand and
become an expert on the topic. We strongly agreed with the question, “If Mary was
given a coloured television or ripe tomato, would she learn anything?” as it allows
her to have her own practical experiences of her theoretical studies.
On the contrary, the class had some initial disagreements in terms of Philosophical
Zombies (Chalmers, 2017). Some believed that a clone of every inch and atom of
themselves would create a human being despite its lack of experience or Qualia
(Chalmers, 2017). Others disagreed and expressed that experience and Qualia are
actually what creates a human, because without experience how does a human
learn and become an individual? This topic piqued my interest the most as the
possibility of pretending to have Qualia while acting out physical experiences and
processes (Chalmers, 2017) made me sit and think to myself about my
consciousness and individualism. Without separate experiences, in theory, we would
all just… be the same. Our experiences allow us as individuals to be individual and
differ from each other. In conclusion, it was decided that, as humans, we simply
cannot comprehend these Zombies for the reason that we cannot comprehend not
being conscious.
Reflection and extension:
I would have liked to explore the concept of Qualia further as Qualia raised the
question of consciousness itself to me as I do not truly understand the theory. This
question is interesting to me and allows me to get a greater understanding of the
concept of Qualia itself and general questions of subjective experiences and reality.
“What implications does Qualia have for our understanding of experience and
reality?”. This question explores the ideas philosophers have been consistently
interested in, for instance, consciousness. I think this question could also be really
interesting if it was brought up when we discussed Philosophical Zombies
(Chalmers, 2017) as we could compare Chalmers's idea and the concept of Qualia,
piquing interest about the role of our experiences and reality in our answers. Both
Qualia and Philosophical Zombies (Chalmers, 2017) challenge a physicist's
interpretation of consciousness, examining these concepts together confronts the
limited physical explanations of consciousness, allowing us to also question the
importance Qualia has on our experience and reality, no matter which theory of mind
we side with.
Word count: 704
Chalmers, D. (2017). Zombies On the Web [Link]
Jackson. F. (1986). The Journal of Philosophy: What Mary Didn’t Know Journal of
Philosophy [Link]