Philosophy & What Matters. Ep. 33: Philosophy of Mind with Tim Crane (CEU)

Hello, I'm JJ Rockin. Welcome to philosophy and what matters where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view. In today's episode, we will focus on the philosophy of mind. We all have minds. We can think, feel, be conscious, and have beliefs and desires. But what exactly does it mean to have a mind? Does having a mind mean having a brain, or is it something else? Here to discuss these questions with us is Tim Crane, professor of philosophy at the Central European University and a worldleading philosopher of mine. Hello, Professor Kane. Welcome to philosophy and what matters. Hello JJ, nice to meet you. Okay, before getting into our topic, let's first discuss your philosophical background. How did you get into philosophy? Well, I think like uh many people, I got into philosophy through um religion, religious questions. Um I was brought up a Roman Catholic and um my religion was quite important in my family. Um and um I started reflecting on the meanings of these questions and how how we know um whether there is a god or whether there's life after death. Uh and I started reading about things like this when I was a teenager. Um and that's what led me towards philosophy and in the end I dropped the religion but kept with kept up with the philosophy. So who influence you to pursue a career in academic philosophy? Uh well I think my my most inspiring teacher when I was an undergraduate was um EJ Lo Jonathan Low who was uh a wonderful lecturer and seemed to have this absolute mastery of the subject that he could discuss things from all over the all areas of philosophy. He had opinions on and um and uh so he was a very inspiring teacher and he was very encouraging to me. Um sadly he died much younger. He died in his 60s. um um some years ago. Um but he was a big influence on me. I I then um went and I studied in Cambridge for my PhD. My my advisers there were Jeremy Butterfield and Huella. They also were very they were tough both very very tough teachers but uh inspiring too. So I think they kind of inspired me. Um I think what I got from Jonathan Low and also from from Humela was this the importance of pursuing your own questions and not following else someone else's agenda and how important that is for philosophy. So you're talking about Jonathan Leo who's famous for the possibility of metaphysics book sketch of metaphysics and of course you Miller who's into a lot of things especially probability theory and metaphysics as well. So what led you to specialize in the philosophy of mind if these influences are into metaphysics? Yes, I think I see I was interested in this question of um the soul and uh and whether we have a soul uh and what that means and because I was taught when I was growing up that that each of us has an immortal soul. Um, and the more I thought about that, the more strange it seemed and I couldn't and I wanted to understand what people meant by that. Um, so I then was very interested in philosophy of mind as an undergraduate. Um, and then then as a graduate student I came across this book by edited by Andrew Woodfield and it was called Thought and Object. Mhm. It was an collection of essays from some conference or workshop or something and it had a a famous essay by Dennit, Dan Dennett in there called um Beyond Belief and various other various other um classic essays. This this book was described itself as being about the content of thought. And I thought what a and I had no idea what that meant, the content of thought. And I thought but it seemed something incredibly exciting, the content of thought, right? Well, thoughts have content, you know, what what does that mean? And so I got distracted onto that whole question of the content of thought and that's what I wrote my PhD on actually. Okay. So we're we're starting to do philosophy of mind. Now onto our topic. Most of your work focuses on different issues in this area in philosophy but could you define the field for us in the first place? Yeah, I think the philosophy of mind um is the most general investigation into the nature of the mind or into the nature of minds or creatures with minds. Uh so the most general in the sense that we don't presuppose as you mentioned at the beginning you know we all know each of us knows that we have a brain. We know that we have a mind but we don't presuppose that what's essential to having a mind is having a brain. Uh so for example we can ask questions about whether whether you know robots might have minds or artificially created intelligences might have minds and um those questions aren't answered by saying that these these beings don't have brains. So although the brain is obviously the mechanism of our mind, well I say obviously some people might disagree but the brain is the mechanism of our mind. Um the question of the philosophical question about the nature of the mind is not the same question about as the nature of the brain. So it's about what is so to speak what what counts as having a mind. What what is the the essence or nature of anything that we count as having a mind? How is it different from cognitive psychology though? Because cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists are also concerned about the cognitive or the consciousness and all those other things related to the mind. So how is philosophy of mind different from those other fields? Yeah, that's a very good question. I mean I I think cognitive psychology only deals with actual minds, the nature of the how minds actually are. So animal minds and human minds uh the the the mechanisms of our mental processes. Um whereas philosophy of mind asks a more general question which is um what what must any possible mind be like and not just the actual minds but um what is so to speak the very concept of mind to use this the title of um Gilbert Riyle's famous book the concept the concept of mind and in order to investigate mental phenomena empirically um you have to be able to um clarify what it is that you're trying to investigate. Um now this I'm not saying that cognitive psychologists will should start their inquiries with a course in the philosophy of mind. I don't think it really works like that. But uh cognitive psychology is a discipline that's already up and running and it comes with certain preconceptions about what it is that it's studying. Um, so broadly speaking, you know, cognitive psychology doesn't study the circulation of the blood or digestion of food, right? It studies processes that are cognitive. Well, what makes a process cognitive? Um, and then you're off. Then you have to say then you have to say what what makes a process cognitive or not. Um so and how does how do how does something like the idea of a cognitive process relate to the idea of consciousness for example are some cognitive processes conscious and some not conscious and so you have to then clarify what you mean by consciousness and um um and there's a lot of dispute about this in in psychology itself and in cognitive science um and some of that dispute is actually philosophical Um so it doesn't matter whether they call it philosophical or not. They might call it theoretical but it's there are these questions about you know what is the nature of their subject matter. Yeah. So there's there's a recent issue in um philosophy of science or particularly in this whole consciousness field and some say that philosophical questions are not really scientific questions. So what what could philosophers contribute in this bordering field of of the study of the mind? It's yeah it's hard to answer that in the abstract unless you have a very clear and or rigid distinction between what's a philosophical question and what's a scientific question. I think these things blend into each other. Um but um let me give you an example from the history of psychology. I mean in the in the early 20th century um the beginnings of the 20th century um psychology was a uh a field based on introspection int reports of introspection. So subjects were asked to how how certain experiences felt and asked to report how how they were. And then this the psychologists tried to classify these experiences or mental events or something on the basis of this and this was felt to be by some um psychologists and philosophers felt to be insufficiently rigorous or scientific. Um so there was this move in psychology but to to say that all you could really study were publicly observable events like behavior and that became that was called behaviorism and that was spread across across the world from the United States and Britain and also in um in Europe and in Russia there were behaviorist psychologists. So that move away from introspection to behavior was based on certain assumptions about what the subject matter of psychology is and how you can study it. Uh then behaviorism uh for various interesting reasons was then replaced by what's now known as cognitivism in the n from moving on from the late 1950s to the 60s where the ambition was then no we're not just studying behavior we're also studying the processes that underly behavior. We're looking at what's going on inside the mind or the brain not just the the the external manifestations of it. Now, those disputes about what what it is that you're studying are, I think, philosophical. They may they may say they're theoretical, but they're philosophical disputes. Um, why can't why can you only study things that are publicly observable? Why is that why is that a criterion? Why can't you use those things as evidence for internal mechanisms and study the internal mechanisms? [Music] Um so um these these questions I think are are very are philosophical and a lot of the attacks on behaviorism were philosophical attacks attacks by Chsky and by GE and Chisum and others. you know um so I don't have a general answer to the question of what the philosophy give gives it what philosophy gives to the study of the mind uh except that when you start looking at the details you get a sense for it you get a nose for it what are these what are the big methodological questions so at the moment consciousness is um is is the subject matter and you can see that there's a huge philosophical element here because no one really knows how to go. There's no agreement. There's no consensus on how to answer the question. You have these big supposedly empirical theories of consciousness like the integrated information theory. Um, and you also have global workspace theory. These big big claims about consciousness. Um, and they all involve some heavy duty philosophical assumptions about what it is that you're trying to identify. Yeah. So, um I'm I think I think the bound at the boundaries philosophy, psychology and cognitive science are wrapped up with philosophy. Um I think what phil what independent philosophers can do is that they can come at this without um a particular empirical horse in the race so to speak and just look at the claims that are being made and see you know that we're not applying for any any research grants to study study integrated information. We can just look at the claims being made and ask what they mean whether they hang together whether there are problems about you know the implementation of this. So this is so for example the work of Ned Block is a very good example here. Um when Ned Block has talked about how different concepts of consciousness are used by by psychologists and cognitive scientists and neuroscientists and that seems to me blocks work although I disagree with what a lot of what Blox says but I think Blox's work is a good example of how philosophy engages with neuroscience and psychology. Okay. So you have outlined a brief history of the subject but what are the key issues discussed in the philosophy of mind in this area of philosophy. So you have you talked about consciousness. How about intentionality? Is is that also a leading issue right now in the philosophy of mind? Well I think I think so. Yeah. Intentionality in this sense is um a philosophical technical term for representation, mental representation. Um so um um it was it was comes it comes actually from the work of a an Austrian philosopher France Brentano in the in the 1870s. He he wrote a book called psychology from an empirical standpoint where he tried to define what this what psychology was in terms of its subject matter. And he said that the subject matter of of psychology was mental phenomena. He called them and me and mental phenomena were distinguished from other phenomena by the fact that they exhibited this um intentionality which was intentionality here means that they are mental phenomena mental acts and states are directed on something other than themselves. So when you have a belief your belief must always be about something else. And if you have a thought you're always thinking about something. If you have a desire, it's a desire for something. If you imagine, you imagine something. Um, and Brentana claimed that this was the defining mark of the mental. That all mental phenomena exhibit this this representation or intentionality. Um now that idea is I think intentionality and consciousness are generally reckoned to be the two main um problem areas of philosophy of mind. Uh and they also have obviously they have very close connections to work going on in cognitive psychology. A lot of cognitive psychologists assume the idea of representation. um most of them I would say um some want to reject the idea of representation and that's where you see another theoretical or philosophical issue coming in uh in the foundations of psychology. Um some philosophers think that consciousness is actually the only real mark of the mental and and not and intentionality is only a mark of the mental in so far as it's um in in so far as the thought and other intentional phenomena are conscious. Wow. Others think that there is unconscious intentionality um and that um thought that beliefs and desires and drives and intentions can also be unconscious. Um so that requires that you have some understanding of the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious. Mhm. But what what exactly is your view here? Because you're a leading expert in philosophy of mind and one of your key ideas is that the unique feature of the mind as you have said following Banano is that it's intentional. Is still is this still your view regarding this? That is that is my view. Yeah, I've defended that view for some decades now. So I defend that much Brenano's view. I don't defend other views of of his. But for example, Brentano thought that all all mental phenomena are conscious. He didn't there was any unconscious mental mentality. So I think there is an unconscious mentality. Um and I think all mental phenomena are connected in some way to their intentionality. I think it's a complex connection but it's um all the intentionality is the heart of the mental. That's one of my views. My another my one of my views is that um this is not that this that although we we are embodied creatures which is not controversial right um this doesn't require that we take a stand on um the question of materialism or physicalism which is a view about whether everything in the world is physical or material but physical or material in this sense means the subject matter of physics physics. So physics is being the basic science and and everything else is um dependent or derivative of um on on the subject matter of that science. Um so I'm skeptical about that doctrine of physicalism. Uh and I and I think that we in order to accept the idea that intentionality is the mark of the mental all mental phenomena are intentional and that this this intentionality is embodied in our in our bodies and brains. uh we don't have to accept physicalism. That's that that's another one of my views. So I'm an anti-hysicalist in a sense, but I also that doesn't mean I think we have immortal souls. So I'm trying to I'm trying to tread this middle path between between physicalism that says everything is just purely physical and uh um and um the dualism of Decart or others, you know, that says that we have a soul as well as a body. Okay. In your opinion, where is philosophy of mind heading? What is its future given all the technological advancements that we have? You have generative AI, you have a lot of large language models and of course the biology of it, the physiology of the mind as well has been uh extensively discussed nowadays. So where is philosophy of mind heading given all these advancements in the sciences? Well, um I'd like to say it was heading in my direction. I'm not sure if it is, but uh I I think we lack um we lack an overview of all these phenomena. uh and you can see that we lack an overview because in the case of generative AI um there's a lot of confusion and there's a lot of big claims that are made um and there's a lot of people talking about their intuitions or their feelings you know about whether um a large language model is conscious or something like this or whether whether AI could take could become more intelligent than us or something. Um these sort of questions there's a lot of bold claims going on and very little consensus. Um so AI is a very good example I think where um we're at the limits of what we're what what what we're understanding about the mind. So we have to start theorizing. Um so this is where I think philosophy of mind properly if it's properly addressed and uh if people try and communicate well could have a role in trying to explain to people uh what's going on here. Um if I could give an example I mean take take this example of large language models. Um so people say that that um these large language models will um become even more powerful and they will become even more intelligent and that we will arrive at a point where they're more intelligent than us. Um and that point which um Ray Kursfile calls the the singularity. The singularity is the moment when machines become more intelligent than us. Now why believe that this is going to happen? or I believe that this even could happen. To believe this is this is going to happen, you have to understand what it means to say that something is more intelligent than something else. Um, now we already have machines that are more intelligent than us in certain ways. Any chess playing program can play chess better than me. So that's they they've already won in that or go or um or in answering questions very quickly on any on any subject matter. a large language model can do that better than me and um create grammatical sentences quicker than I can on any subject matter without having to look it up. Um why think that generalizes to intelligence as such? Well, in order to answer that question, you have to say what you mean by intelligence as such. And people in AI, they realize this and they've developed this concept of artificial general intelligence. Artificial general intelligence is the I is the kind of in an artificial version of the kind of intelligence that we have. Not just specific problem-solving capacities like the capacity to to to win at chess or the capacity to um um you know produce grammatical sentences very quickly. not just these specific um tasks but any task that that we think requires intelligence. Unfortunately, that that doesn't seem to be a computationally tractable uh project in the sense that you have to if you think think of what a um a large language model does. Um it produces text which is whose content is relevant to the content of the prompt that you put in. Um so it it and and what the fact that it can do this so quickly uh so successfully and so grammatically is quite remarkable. But that's the task we can specify the task. So if we want to implement artificial general intelligence in a in an AI machine then we have to give it the task. What is the task? What is the task of general intelligence? What what is what is a goal? What is the goal of general intelligence? what's it trying to achieve? If we can't answer that question, then we can't ever train a machine to say when it has or has not achieved it. Mhm. Can't train the machine, then there's no such thing as you know this machine learning anything. [Music] Um now my my view uh which I this is kind of controversial but I think it's worth pushing is that actually there isn't such a thing as general intelligence. Uh there's we have there are things we call common sense. Use your common sense general, you know, you got general intelligence, but there are so many mental capacities and abilities and skills that we have that fall under this notion of intelligence that there's no way that you would ever be able to specify what the task of general intelligence is. And if there's no way to specify that, then there's no way to make a computer do it. Um because these computers are still, you know, people seem to think that these large language models have a kind of life of their own, but in fact they're computers with algorithms. you know there's they have you know they're processing information they're just doing it in a different way than than other computers do. So I think here's an example of like where if people thought clearly about what the task actually was then they would limit they would they would step back from making these ambitious claims unless of course they make claims for other purposes. I mean, I think, you know, Elon Musk makes claims about AI and AGI, not he thinks that they're true, but because he wants to wind people up or cause a storm or present his another aspect of his worldview. But if you want to really understand what's going on, then you just have to think more carefully about it all. Um, so I think philosophy of mind could play a important role there. I think it's um I would also like to understand uh which I think something we don't understand which is embodiment what it means for a mind to be embodied. Um Decart of course said that Decart was a dualist and he thought we had souls as well as bodies. But he he also said that I'm not lodged in my body like a pilot in a ship. Meaning it's not like there's my soul is here controlling my body like a like an ocean liner. Uh it's not like that. I feel myself to be everywhere connected with my body and where I feel my body to be is where I feel I am. Um and I think these ideas are not are not well understood uh in philosophy or psychology. Um so I would like to pursue that that way of understanding things. Okay. So, you've been doing philosophy for a while now. And so, what's your advice for those who want to get into professional philosophy? Um, yeah, this uh it's tough. I mean, first thing you have to really decide whether you're really committed to doing this because you'll be spending a lot of time with not very much money um struggling with something that's very difficult. Um I mean well all academic pursuits are difficult in a way. Philosophy has a particular kind of difficulty. You can feel you can feel very alone and confused and it can make you feel very stupid when you try and read some of these books and you try and understand what they're saying. Um you really can feel that you have to struggle and it's hard to to understand this stuff. So you have to have staying power if you want to stay in this. You have to want to be a be in it for the long game. um on one hand, but on the other hand, you have to be willing to take a risk because it may be that um particularly with the way that universities are going now and the way the world economy is going, may well be that there'll be fewer jobs in philosophy than there have been. So, it's actually hard to get a job teaching philosophy. Those of us who are lucky enough to have a job teaching philosophy should not think that we necessarily got it through our own merits because we there was a lot of luck involved being in the right place at the right time being in I I was fortunate to come on the scene with my PhD but just when in Britain they were expanding the universities so there were more positions in philosophy departments anyway so that's so there's an large element of risk and you have to be realistic about that um and you have to be prepared to struggle. Um, and struggling means being bored a lot of the time because a lot of these philosophers don't write in a way that's very interesting, but when you struggle through it, you can get to something interesting. [Music] um then but if you get that far and you get you're in a PhD program and um and if you're in a PhD program that is likely to lead to some sort of employment um then you have to find your own voice and this is the difficult thing another difficult step right you've got your PhD then you have to find your own voice you have to make your own contribution um now the way contributions work at the moment in academic philosophy is that you publish an article in a you have to publish an article in a peer-reviewed journal where you go through pretty extreme criticism from your from the reviewers. Um, and the tendency is to publish articles that make points within an established conversation. So people are already already saying things and you make a move in that conversation. you saying oh they've missed this point or so and so makes an error here and I can correct this error by saying this so often these points seem quite small that's the style of analytic philosophy anyway I'm talking about I mean other forms of philosophy it's work work in a different way but the style of analytic philos philosophy is to work in this peace meal as you know you know peace meal small point publish in a peer-reviewed journal and if you have a few articles in a in good peer-reviewed journals then this will be the best way to get onto the next stage of the job ladder. Yeah. So my advice there would be to to don't don't waste your ideas in publishing in places that your that which won't be visible in the job market. So if you if you think you've got a good idea, try and publish it in one of the good journals, a peerreview journal. don't publish in a conference proceeding or or a collection of essays something because uh it won't have the same impact on the people who are reading your CV. Um so that that's a piece of sort of professional advice for that. Um and then once you've got that then maybe you'll get a posttock or if in Europe there are a lot of posttocks um or maybe you'll get a tenure track job in the United States if if the United States is still continues to exist the continue to exist then you'll get a tenure track job um and then I think you have to start developing your own voice that's don't and I would I would recommend people to think for themselves And don't the the the danger in philosophy one of the dangers is um there are well actually there are two related dangers. Um one is a sort of hero worship uh where you follow the ideas of certain very powerful or strong thinkers um and you follow them just because they are those ideas and so you and you don't challenge those ideas. Um so that leads to a certain kind of orthodoxy. The second danger then is that the orthodoxy can manifest itself in in what Thomas called normal science where normal science is just working through little problems which are set by the established paradigm of the age. Um and although in some ways that's how analytic philosophy works, we need to be aware that there may be more to it than that. that it's also possible to challenge the paradigms. Um so that's that's the second danger. The first danger is hero worship. The second danger is um just doing boring normal science. But could would you say that a career in philosophy is worth it? Is your career worth it? Uh I I feel very fortunate. I mean I've I've got a very I've had a very enjoyable career. Um I was very lucky to teach in very good universities in UCL in um Cambridge and and here in in the CU in Vienna and in Budapest. Um so for me yes I think you know if you want to if if if you can take the risks um and you don't mind the uncertainty for some years um or at least you can live with it the uncertainty then this is a very pleasant way to spend your time. Um um I think it's very important that there are things like the universities and philosophy departments in in civilized countries uh and with those of us who can teach in them are very fortunate. Um I'm not saying there aren't problems with universities or with philosophy but but I I think um it's a good it's a good way to live your life and the there so many nice things about I mean you you do meet lots of interesting people. Uh students I mean this is true in any academic or teaching profession. The students are always young. They're always coming in. So you're always hanging around with younger people and um you get older but the students say the same age. Uh and that's very stimulating. Thanks again for your time for sharing your time professor Kane. For you guys out there, join me again for another episode of Philosophy Matters, where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view.