Michelle’s Notes for 1/27/02:
Theories of Reality MWF 1pm

Mind-Body Problem: What kinds of things make up the world? Are mind and body the same thing? If so, why do they seem different? If different, how do they interact?

1. IDEALISM- everything is mental or spiritual consciousness (example: Hinduism later Buddhism, eastern philosophy), material world is an illusion (example: Christian Science Church, Gnostism, Plato?), material world is dependant on the spiritual world, material world creates material, material world changes all the time, so it can’t be fundamental.
2. MATERIALISM- idea that everything is physical and souls are energy in the form of matter (example: minds are really a product of physical brain). Reductive materialism- “Greek gods do not exist.” Regular materialism- “Gods were a way of explaining phenomenon that they couldn’t have explained otherwise.”
3. DUALISM- there are both mental or spiritual and physical things.
4. PLURALISM- there are many different kinds of things. How many and how we break them down is arbitrary (example: humans invent categories to break thi9ngs down into and think that it is arbitrary to decide if Greek gods existed or not).

Descarte’s CARTESIAN INTERACTIONISM- mind and body causally effect one another in the pineal gland located in the brain. Analogy with gravity- Asked how gravity works to help people understand that just because you can’t explain something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
1. Mental intention in soul or mind goes through pineal gland which then tells the body what to do or say.
2. Body gets hurt and this tells mind to react in order to stay out of danger.

MENTAL things: thoughts, decisions, feelings, doubts.
PHYSICAL things: weigh something, have shape, size, color.

CRITISISMS of CARTESIAN INTERACTIONISM:
1. Gilbert Ryles thinks Descarte’s thinking is like saying we’re all ghosts in a machine.
2. Descarte believed animals weren’t conscious and didn’t feel pain.
3. Ryle thinks Descarte made a category mistake by confusing one fundamental category of things with another (example: the university example- buildings make up a university, a university is not a single building, but the collection of everything on campus). Category mistake is that mental things (thoughts) exist in the same sense as physical things do. Ryle thinks that mental language describes behavior of physical bodies and that simply because things can be categorized doesn’t mean that there is more than one fundamental (physical) category( team spirit example- out of towner gets shown short stop, pitcher, catcher and then asks where the team spirit is). Another example: Bill is sad. Descarte would say Bill’s soul is in a sad state. Ryle would say Bill is behaving in a sad way.