PREVIEW-Episode 21: What Is the Mind? (Turing, et al)

0:00 Unknown speaker: This is a Partially Examined Life episode preview. You'll find the full episode available for purchase in the music section of the Itunes store or at partiallyexaminedlife.com store. If you want more than one episode, you can become a PEL citizen at partiallyexaminedlife dot com membership.

0:26 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point said on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. This is episode 21, where we approach the question what is mind? By talking about several articles, including Alan Turing's 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, a chapter from Gilbert Ryle's 1949 book the Concept of Mind called Descartes Myth, and then some responses to the ideas put forward in those that are more or less trying to reduce mind to something physical or something functional or something like that.

Thomas Nagel's 1974 essay what is it like to be a bat? John Searle's Chinese room argument as discussed in a 1980 piece Minds, Brains and Programs. And then a response to those somewhat Daniel C. Dennett's quining Qualia from 1988. So we'll have links to all of those on the web@PartiallyExaminedLife.com as well as our ever exciting blog and other cool things. My name is Mark Linsenmayer Thinking Aloud from Madison, Wisconsin.

1:33 Seth: This is Seth Paskin participating from Austin, Texas.

1:39 Wes: This is Wes Baldwin in Boston, Massachusetts.

1:43 Marco: And my name is Marco Wise, and I'm calling from San Francisco Bay Area.

1:50 Wes: All right, can you please be more specific? No.

1:53 Marco: Just in case I say something that pisses somebody off, I want them to be able to find me.

1:58 Mark: We're gonna post your address.

2:00 Wes: It's not his real name, by the way, listeners.

2:02 Marco: That's right.

2:03 Mark: So Marco was one of the first people I met when checking out UT as a school to potentially go to.

2:08 Marco: That's right. We were wined and dined by the chair, I think, of the department. They took us out to a nice place to eat. And then he took us on the most scenic route to get there, just to get us all excited about where we would be living. And then basically told us, well, there's no way you guys could ever afford to live in this particular part of town. But it's really nice. Yeah. And I think we also spent. I think he dropped us off on 6th street after that. And then we hopped from bar to

2:38 Mark: bar, the famous live music capital of the world, when it was still cool in 1994.

2:44 Seth: It still is cool.

2:46 Mark: Well, even When I was down there, like when we went, it was like a Tuesday night, and every single place on 6th street had music in it and was full of people. And you could go upstairs in some of the places and there'd be different music. It was unreal. And even during the time I was there, by 98 or so, a lot of those places had closed. Just there weren't the kind of crowds, at least on the weekdays like that. So. And I think it's a national trend. It wasn't just Austin. It's just been a national live music venue issue. And then Marco and Wes and I hung out a lot our first few years, especially when Wes and I were living together.

3:19 Marco: That's right. I think I met Wes in front of the student union through you. Yeah, right. Is that ring a bell? Yeah. Then lots of coffee.

3:27 Wes: We hung out a lot there coffees,

3:30 Marco: tried lots of coffee places. It was fun. It's actually one of my favorite memories of graduate school, just hanging out and talking about philosophy with you guys.

3:39 Wes: Yeah, right.

3:41 Mark: So we're very happy that you could rejoin us for this. And we especially thought Marco would be appropriate for this Philosophy of Mind episode because, let's see, he and I both sort of started in the track of cognitive science, which is. I don't know if it's still considered the same way, but it was really this interdisciplinary thing with artificial intelligence and psychology and a little bit of philosophy. Sometimes a philosophy professor would be involved, but sometimes not. So we took a COGSCI course together, and then I kind of got out of that a little bit. But you went whole hog and did the computer thing and learned formal logic and programming and Lisp and stuff like that, right?

4:17 Marco: Yeah, that's right. And actually I sort of worked much more on the programming side and pure AI type of work. And I moved away from cognitive science towards the end and just got much more interested in like the tools involved, the programming tools and Lisp and various languages. So I moved away from cognitive science as well. But instead of moving back towards philosophy, I think I spent my last two years there almost all the time in the computer science department. I think at one point, one of the professors remarked that I should just move my mailbox on that side because they will never see me.

4:51 Seth: Probably said with envy.

4:52 Marco: Why did you.

4:53 Seth: Towards the end of my tenure there, I mean, it seemed that all the philosophy guys who were trying to do formal logic and all that stuff were just envious of the computer science and CogSci because those guys had legitimacy and funding.

5:07 Marco: Yeah, it's definitely true. There are a lot of philosophers working on that when I got there, and I think it was one of the reasons why I chose UT over some of the other schools.

5:17 Mark: And now professionally, Marco, you are a computer guy, but not doing artificial intelligence, right? Doing web work?

5:23 Marco: Yeah, I do web work for central IT at Stanford University and basically work on getting our information online in different ways and also helping other groups get their information online. There's a lot of programming. There's quite a bit of just looking at our infrastructure and trying to figure out ways to make it easier for others to do what we do. It's quite interesting. I really enjoy what I do there. One of the bonuses is that I also get to be in an academic environment. It's one of the things I missed at first when I left ut.

5:53 Mark: And do you regret moving away from philosophy, not pursuing the PhD?

5:57 Marco: Well, I would say I regret not pursuing it. I still think that maybe eventually I'll work on it and get the degree. What I do regret is not touching a philosophy book. For the past 10 years, I started dusting off some of the ones that I had because of this podcast. But really, for the past 10 years, I haven't looked at any of this stuff really.

6:17 Mark: So have you actually read the assignments for a couple of these episodes?

6:23 Marco: No. No.

6:25 Mark: Just this one. No, a few.

6:27 Marco: Just this one.

6:27 Mark: Nobody does that. Right.

6:28 Marco: Okay.

6:30 Mark: We don't even do that.

6:32 Marco: Is that how it's supposed to work?

6:34 Mark: We're supposed to read things? That was our imagination when we started this. That we'll just have a short article and we'll kind of put it on the blog plenty in advance and people will read it and then they'll listen to us. And I don't know, maybe a couple people do that I'd be interested in hearing on the blog or on the Facebook discussion site if anybody is actually doing that. From what I understand, it's more. Oh, you guys said some cool stuff about Hobbes. This made me actually look at Hobbes a little bit. Not. Oh, I wanted to be prepared for your discussion. So I read the Hobbes. No, no, no. That's too much pressure.

7:02 Seth: Not to mention the proliferation that Mark has introduced into the. Because he's a voracious reader.

7:09 Mark: Well, you know, there has been some evolution about that in that when I started, I really thought this was going to be like, we'll read something really short and just kind of bullshit about it and, you know, not take notes or anything. But you guys upped my game. Wes would Come in all prepared with all this Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy stuff. Seth, you've revealed your method on the blog. Make these detailed color coded notes of

7:33 Seth: diagrams, but not of multiple readings, just of the one specific text. You know, what can I say, man? Deep reading. Deep reading.

7:41 Mark: And once I got into this then I was like, this is my opportunity. If we're doing one Nietzsche episode or whatever, like when are we going to do Nietzsche again? Maybe not for another year. So I just wanted to, if we have three weeks to read it, like rather than. In fact, I've been not so much reading the same article multiple times to be able to talk about it intelligently, but just like read more by that person if I have time. Because I just want to get the most refreshment out of it. I just enjoy it, that's all.

8:04 Wes: Yeah, yeah.

8:05 Marco: I found that I had to do that same kind of thing actually with these readings. You start reading some of these and then mention some ism that you haven't heard in a while or perhaps never heard of before. And so you start looking that up and then next thing you know you're reading a completely different paper and that points you to something else. It's kind of like the web, right? Except there's no links between these articles. I shouldn't have read them.

8:27 Mark: Well, they're often ours, but yeah, well

8:30 Marco: I printed some of these, so that was a problem.

8:33 Mark: Well, it's also like a quarter, at least a fifth, I would say of my philosophy books are philosophy of mind related. That was like one of my. As a potential Cogsci person was one of the things I was invested into. Not that I remember a lot of them, but you know, so I really used this time we had an extra long time this time. We had like over four weeks, right, since the last recording. So I just really immersed myself in this stuff. Plus it was way last summer. We were actually planning on doing this originally. So I read sort of dipped already into that at that point. And then, I don't know, Wes and I were fighting too much online about what we were going to read or something and Seth said, not now, let's read some other stuff.

9:09 Wes: Wait, what were we fighting about?

9:11 Mark: I think it was the same thing that your irrational hatred of Dan Dennett,

9:15 Marco: who I think is perfectly fine.

9:17 Seth: It had everything to do with Dan Dennett, whose name you're hardly able to speak without adding an expletive.

9:24 Wes: Yeah, he's fucking Satan.

9:29 Mark: And I'm just especially curious about that in particular.

9:32 Wes: I think it's more his style than Anything. So it's not, we're probably not as far apart on any substantive issues.

9:39 Mark: Right, well, that's what I figure. But it also, you know, if you read something and say this is absolutely worthless, there's not even a single argument in there.

9:46 Wes: Yeah, I regretted sending that. I regretted that.

9:49 Mark: That's all right, it's email. But then if I read it and I'm finding it reasonable, I mean that like, is there something wrong with my faculty of judgment? Like, I don't know. But on the other hand, some of the philosophers, at least we're reading, approach this topic as metascience in some areas. Philosophy is just kind of science before it's figured out what it's doing. Right? That's what all old time astronomy, old time chemistry, they were all philosophy when they started. And mind is still definitely at that point. Which means a lot of these guys are trying to work with scientists and really get themselves informed by psychologists, by guys in artificial intelligence, the whole cognitive science thing we're talking about, which means first the stuff is going to get out of date much quicker.

All the stuff we're reading is fairly recent in the first place, actually since 1950. Who knows if anybody's going to read any of this stuff 50 or 100 years from now. It's not like Descartes or whatever, that's already in stone. And also I don't feel very competent when somebody says, oh, based on all the neuroscience and psychology that I've been reading, here's what I think is a reasonable model for the mind. I don't really have good criteria for deciding whether their judgment is good in that respect. All I know is which experiments they're telling me about and whether what they're saying sort of makes sense.

And I can sort of judge the degree to which they seem to be engaging with the literature as a whole and the degree to which they seem to work hard.

11:04 Wes: I mean, there's questions of internal coherence and things like that. I don't think you have to be a scientist to evaluate arguments in which science are used. You take the experiments as a given, you accept it entirely and eat scientific evidence they're offering. But that's generally not what's at issue. It's the consequences that you can draw from that. So you know, Dennett gives some experiment and then draws some absurd consequences from it that everyone else rejects. Then I read other papers where people who are far more steeped in all this stuff give very convincing rebuttals.

And it confirms my intuition that something was wrong there or my sort of rough argument that I hadn't really chiseled out. Now, many of these people are very charitable with Dennett, including Nagel, by the way, who in his Nagel's review of consciousness explained is very, very kind and complimentary. But there are other philosophers of mind, like Colin McGinn, who just despised Dennett as much as I do. McGinn sort of has a dualist tendency.

12:05 Mark: So Wes and I, we decided to experiment with this one, or at least I decided, which is to instead of saving everything for the podcast, just like let's email it a lot in advance just to sort of practice these things and get some things out. But we know that we're not going to resolve a lot of our issues, which might just mean there'll be a future episode covering more of this stuff, reading some of the books, some of these authors maybe hold books by them or whatever. I'm not going to make you read a whole Dennett book, but maybe we'll see. Also we'll have some more follow up probably on the blog.

I was thinking of posting some mini reviews of some of these books that I've been thumbing through, like the David Chalmers the Conscious Mind or Zoltan Torey's the Crucible of Consciousness, which is one I picked up just because it was really current was 2009, only to learn that it was actually originally written in 1999 and was just picked up by MIT Press in 2009. So I still don't know what's going on right now in the area. It seems most of the references are to these things from the 90s at best.

13:04 Wes: Yeah, I think Chalmers is where it's at. Right. And he incorporates Dennett and others and you know, he's sort of a synthesizer.

13:12 Mark: Yeah.

13:12 Wes: So that's David Chalmers, even though obviously he has his own big monist panpsychical view, which is really, I think, the most appealing one.

13:19 Mark: Yeah, we'll put up a. There's already a link up for his. A paper by him called Consciousness and its Place in Nature, which is supposed to just sort of go through the various positions and sum them up. So it's a nice. As well as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy thing is a nice overview of some of these positions. Another short book that maybe I'll put a link to that I was reading for this because I think I read it in the first place. That's how I learned some of these things is Paul Churchland's Matter and Consciousness, which I think even a much more Straightforward way goes through the various.

Here's substance dualism, here's property dualism, here's functionalism, here's eliminative materialism and these things and gives good descriptions and arguments for and against them. The Churchland is from 84, not too current. So before we dive in, I mean, what are your backgrounds like? Seth, where are you at with this? Did you ever take any of these a Phil Mind course at the time?

14:11 Seth: No. I studied logic and I knew a lot about not CogSci, but computer science and ended up of course going to work in technology and doing that sort of thing. But I never studied any formal philosophy of mind or any cognitive science or anything like that. I had written my undergraduate thesis on modality and logic and so like I understood some of the issues that were involved, but particularly on the subject of dualism and the mind body problem, I have literally like very little exposure. So when I was of course doing all the background reading and I was deciding what I was going to spend a little extra time on, I focused on the Turing stuff. So I suspect that I will have very little to contribute tonight.

14:55 Mark: Well, what was your. As one who's maybe less tainted than we are, any overall reactions? What did you enjoy, not enjoy about what was going on here?

15:03 Seth: I think the question is fascinating and I think it's exactly the problem that it's made out to be. You know, it seems like it's one of those things that is truly perplexing. And when people say it's still one of the critical issues in philosophy, I agree. And what I thought was interesting, Mark, is on an email exchange earlier you said something about like how talking to your friends and family or whatever, they just don't get it or they don't seem to understand that that was me actually.

15:28 Marco: Yeah.

15:29 Seth: Was it you?

15:30 Wes: Yeah.

15:30 Mark: That students in intro courses tend not to understand.

15:34 Wes: No, no, no. Not just intro courses, just people, you know, office co workers and things like that. I used to, you know, over drinks try and get into it and it's, I think a lot of people. It doesn't even register that there is a problem.

15:45 Mark: Do you want to tell us why there's a problem to start us off in?

15:48 Wes: Okay. Throughout history? No, I think the basic problem is that there's some beings for whom there's what it's like to be. So while a rock is non sentient, sentient beings generally, you know, say a bat or a human being, there's a. What it's like to be in the sense of having a subjective experience or a bodily Sensation and so on and so forth. Now, the confusing thing is that human beings are composed of physical substances which themselves don't have that quality of being. 4. Right. And generally, we expect that the properties of a. Of a whole have some derivable relationship to the properties of the parts.

But where atoms and chemicals aren't in themselves conscious, they somehow give rise to the whole, which has consciousness. So I think that's one way of describing the problem. And there are a few other, I think, intuitive thought experiments which we could. I don't know if we want to give those now or later.

16:52 Mark: Well, it's interesting that. I mean, the problem itself evolved that the issue was originally not just what is it like to be something? That's the way Thomas Nagel, whose article he read, puts it. But it was more thinking in general. Where Descartes, at least, is often described as thinking that everything mental is conscious. Whereas now with the rise of Freud and psychology, we think a lot of what we might call thinking information processing. Right. How we recognize something to be what it is is not conscious at all. This is something that is computational, maybe.

So the whole notion of mind has been separated to some extent from the notion of consciousness. And I was really struck by this when I took a Philosophy of Mind class. How a lot of time it was like, well, what are the steps that we go through to understand a story or something? Can we program these into a computer and have a computer understand the story in some way? And it wasn't really touching on our conscious experience of what it's like to be something at all. So just the fact that there's been that shift that now we think, oh, matter can contain information.

It can do information processing. Computers do that all the time. So that's not such a mystery. What remains the mystery is consciousness.

18:00 Wes: Well, I think even calling it information, information can be a word that's equivocated. Right. Because then we get into the whole problem of semantics. But I think we should wait until we get to the Chinese room.

18:12 Seth: I feel like you guys might have already. It's already more complicated than I thought it was.

18:16 Wes: I wanted to step back to Descartes, though, because I think we should say what his view was. But, Seth, did you.

18:22 Mark: I want to hear. Yeah. What Seth thinks the simple way of putting it is.

18:26 Seth: So, you know, we talk about there being a mind body problem. So the question is, what's the problem? Well, the problem is your body is physical. It exists in space and time. It's subject to physical laws. You can be pushed around you can be forcibly restrained and all that. But we think there's such a thing as we have a mind and the mind has ideas or something, you know, states as emotions, whatever. And those things, they might be in time, but they're not in space.

18:53 Wes: So this is actually Descartes formulation.

18:56 Seth: Okay, there you go. And what's weird is you say, okay, well ideas are not spatiotemporal, they're not physical.

19:03 Wes: Right.

19:03 Seth: Yet somehow we have this head that contains all this stuff, but it's kind of not containing it. And then the question is, well, how do those things that are not really spatiotemporal and not really physical actually make you lift your arm and grab a glass or fall in love or something like that? It's this weird disconnect between these physical and this non physical thing that we think can influence and control it. And it's giantly perplexing. It is a very difficult thing to understand. And if you say, well, we have a brain and the brain does the controlling, you've just inserted another level and you start to figure out how the mind connects to the brain.

19:38 Marco: Yeah, that's a great way to put it. It's a problem of going both ways. How does the mind affect the body and how does the body affect the mind?

19:45 Wes: And for Descartes, yeah, it was. He gives two arguments for the whole idea that mind and matter are radically separate. One of them sort of comes out of his clear and distinct ideas thing. So his premises are. I have a clear and distinct idea of the mind as a thinking non extended thing. So non spatial cannot be cut into pieces. Yeah, well that's another, that's actually another argument. So that's the second one. So the first argument, the mind is non extended and that's its essence. The body's essence is to be extended. And so they must be different substances because things that have different essences must have different substances.

So that's how we get what's called substance dualism, where there are two basic entities in the world. Yeah. And then the other argument is that the mind is indivisible. We experience ourselves as a whole. In a sense, the body is divisible and those are their essences and so they must be different. One thing I do want to say is that Descartes didn't say that everything mental is conscious. So for instance, here's a quote. There's a lot of things arise, he says, from the intimate union of mind and body, like appetites, hunger and so on, emotions, passions.

So he's actually not as straightforward about what consciousness is as I think some of the caricatures of them have to be.

21:01 Mark: Well, he believes that there's a lot of mechanism, like when you feel an emotion. I believe he said some impression puts itself on the pineal gland, the little part of the brain that he identified, which is not important. It's just a thing to snicker about of how he thinks the mind and the brain connected. And if it's a particularly scary thing, then, well, the mind itself, the soul that is attached, this mental substance, is the thing that gets scared. However, at the same time, this perception somehow causes juices in the body to start flowing so that our heart gets faster.

And a lot of the physical things that we would attribute to emotion are actually just caused entirely mechanically. And once he introduces that, then he's able to say animals, he thinks, don't have a mind, don't have a spiritual substance that's connected in this way. But they do have a lot of the same mechanisms going on. So they could appear to be in pain, they could thrash around, they could sweat, they could do all these things. But it's pure mechanism. Certainly it's not conscious.

21:53 Wes: Well, let me read to you from one of his letters. Just because it's. You get more than the pineal gland and I mean the pineal gland. Yeah. That's a glaring thing that people.

22:01 Mark: Is it a letter to you?

22:02 Wes: But he wrote me a letter. He actually, it's to the partially examined life. But he wrote it to me, emailed it to me specifically. No, but he said, but we also experience within ourselves certain other things which must not be referred either to the mind alone or to the body alone. These arise, as will be made clear in the appropriate place, from the close and intimate union of our mind with the body. This list includes, first, appetites like hunger, secondly, the emotions or passions, and so on and so forth. That's kind of a side thing. But I, you know, I have always had the need to defend Descartes.

But one of the other things is we should know what motivated Descartes mind body dualism, which is that he was reacting to a scholastic Aristotelian tradition in light of advances in modern science. So he wanted to get rid of final cause explanations from the description of physical phenomena. So, for instance, gravity is because there's a final cause tendency for things to go to the center of the earth. He thought people were attributing mental qualities to physical phenomena in order to explain them. So he wants to separate those for scientific reasons as well as Arguably for religious reasons.

23:06 Marco: So do you think that Ryle's characterization of Descartes is pretty good? It's on the money. It sounds like it is in many ways.

23:13 Wes: I don't think it's about Descartes.

23:15 Mark: The chapter of the Gilbert Ryle book that we read, the Concept of Mind, he has a whole thesis in there, behaviorist thesis that we didn't read and we're not really going to go into. But the chapter we read, Descartes Myth, a lot of it was just spent describing the Cartesian view, which again I don't think necessarily has to be. It doesn't even matter if it's something. That's exactly what Descartes says. At the time that Ryle was writing, what he thought, the standard view that everybody believed, the establishment view, which is never as good as what Descartes himself actually said or whoever. Aristotle.

23:46 Wes: Well, it's just not Descartes specifically, it's dualism and what he thinks dualism in general is. We'll describe Ryle's position first and then I'll give you my response to it. I don't think he's second on my list after Dennett of intellectual enemies. What do you take his argument to be? Marco?

24:04 Marco: He spent some time going over what he calls the official doctrine. And then what I found interesting was the position where he says that he tries to explain after he talks about how absurd it is, goes into the origin of this. And it sounded like he was characterizing somebody like Descartes being conflicted between both wanting to say that there are mechanical rules for the body and so on, and that there is something similar going on in the mind. But the way I read it was because he said that Descartes had some other beliefs, perhaps belief in God and so on, religious beliefs, that he couldn't go that far.

He couldn't actually say that everything that goes on in his mind was actually the same kind of thing that was going on in his body. And so according to Ryle, it seems like Descartes basically had to sort of take an escape route by just denying what he knew about as a science man, what he knew about the body and the mechanical rules, and just say basically, well, the mind is non mechanical, while the body is in space, the mind isn't in space. And so he came up with this whole idea of the mind as just being something that's in some ways opposite to the body, is defined by what it's opposite about it, but it also at the same time is somehow in the same category.

It's similar, it's the same kind of thing. It still has laws, it still has this kind of organization, but it's not. It's a different substance. Right. And that's then the problem of course is how do these two interact with one another?

25:36 Wes: Yeah, I think that's right in the way he talks about it. Right. He thinks that the dualists went wrong when they were looking for a functional description and they ended up with a causal hypothesis, an illegitimate causal hypothesis. So if you're looking to talk about mental conduct predicates, you can do that according to Ryle, in terms of dispositions, you don't need this occult cause. And Descartes went wrong because where he should have been looking for a criterion to distinguish intelligent from non intelligent behavior, he got mixed up and looked to get at this cause. And that cause had to be reified like a physical object. And yet it was invisible and ghostly and so on and so forth.

26:16 Marco: That's right. And he calls that categories thing.

26:18 Wes: Right, right.

26:19 Mark: And in Descartes defense, you know, it sure seems like I cause my own will. I want to think of an elephant. Bam, there's a picture of an elephant in my head. Like it seems like we witness causality in our heads all the time, but it's obviously different than the causality that we see in the external world. So we've talked about that in terms of Kant analysis and stuff. So it does seem like there are causal laws for both of these areas. But I picked this because I felt like he was representative of one of the major strains of people writing about philosophy of mind where they see this fundamental problem that whether Descartes caused it or not, who knows?

But I mean, that arose out of this view of Descartes and they just find it intolerable. They find that if you're going to posit a substance, a spiritual substance to be the mind, when really we don't know what's going on. I mean, again, just going a little farther in the way Kant would look at it. Well, we've got these mental appearances, we have no idea what's going on behind it. So deposit an actual mental substance. Right. Kant doesn't want to do that. He's going to be a skeptic about this.

27:18 Wes: But Ryle is arguing not just against substance dualism.

27:21 Mark: Well, that's what he talks about. And I don't think people have thought through these other kinds of dualism that are maybe more reasonable. And this is, I think maybe where our big disagreement sort of before reading this came in Is that I feel like the enemy of just about everybody that we read for this time is substance, dualism. It's not all kinds of dualism. Not everybody, like Ryle thinks we have to get rid of mental talk altogether or deny that we are conscious beings or something, something like that. It's just this idea that Descartes put forward of two separate kinds of substances that then we have this hard issue of how they interact that's just intolerable.

Maybe if we can't push forward on this and we do things like, oh, you know, we weigh a body after it dies, does it weigh any less? Oh, then the soul must not weigh anything. You know, people were taking the soul, spiritual, substance seriously for a long time before we reached this point where people like Ryle got fed up and said, is there a different way we can think of this? And this whole talk of a category mistake that, oh, no, the mind is not a substance. When we use mental terms, we must be talking about something else. And as far as what we read, he doesn't actually go any farther than that.

Now, you're right, Wes, that the view that he eventually takes is a behaviorist, that what a mental state is, is a disposition. Right. If you desire something, that's really. It's a disposition that you will get it if you want it. Of course, I use the word want.

28:36 Wes: Or if you say someone is vain, for instance, you're giving a series of hypotheticals. You're saying, well, if this happens, they're going to do this, they're going to boast under these conditions, blah, blah, blah. But I think Ryle's the one committing the category mistake here. Should I tell you why, or do we want to characterize his position more?

28:54 Mark: First, let me say two things. So his eventual position on this is this dispositional account of desires and wants. And historically, that has not done well because it's really hard to say what the disposition exactly is without using other mental language. Right. So if I want to say, what's a dispositional account of a desire? Well, it's. You go and get things. Right. I'm trying to give you just observable behavior.

29:17 Wes: Right.

29:17 Mark: But it's not. You always go and get things. You go and get things if you think that it is there to be gotten. Oh, I used the word think. No, no, I have to get. Okay, well, how do we define think in dispositional terms? Like then I. If I think it's there, then I'll go and get there, but only if I want it. So.

29:33 Wes: Yeah. And this is where we get some more contemporary versions of functionalism. They don't try and reduce everything to behavior. They want to say that you have to also be able to talk about other causes that are mental.

29:47 Mark: Just the definition, since you brought it up, of functionalism is to say how we define a mental state is that it functions in a certain way in relation to other mental states or behaviors or causes or whatever. So if you want to say, what's the definition of a desire? Well, it's a desire that interacts with beliefs in the way we were just talking about to produce certain actions. You could sort of lay things out like a flowchart, which is why computer scientists really like functionalism. Like, that's what most of them basically are is if you want to say, program a computer to understand a story well, you have to say, what background information does it have?

How does it pull on that background information to answer questions about the story? So you just sort of put all these little pieces of information in different functional boxes that grew out of Ryle's basic intuition, though let's think of some other way to talk about these things than focusing on our own conscious experiences, which seem really hard to analyze.

30:44 Unknown speaker: Yeah, thanks for listening to this episode preview.

30:48 Wes: I know it stops just when things

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