Ep. 221: Functionalist Theories of Mind (Putnam, Armstrong) (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: So I think we should just be done with Putnam. We're not quite done with the article, but we got a picture of his view. Let's just move on to Armstrong's the causal theory of mind. If y' all don't mind.

0:11 Seth: I have no mind, just brain.

0:13 Dylan: I don't mind.

0:14 Mark: So again the distinction between these two, these were supposed to illustrate the two kinds of functionalism. So Block calls Armstrong's theory, the one that we're about to talk about now, a priori functionalism. So it is the thing that is actually most directly developed from behaviorism that looks at the meanings of the words in our everyday language, you know, what belief and desire, and tries to give an analysis of those. Whereas Putnam's was this empirical functionalism, right? Kind of paralleling the type B materialism that we talked about in the Chalmers paper. So he's trying to give an account of not necessarily what our everyday intuitions about mental states might be, but what a really developed psychological theory would be. So he calls that whole class of views psycho functionalism.

1:01 Wes: You know, as the Stanford article points out, one of the big problems is it doesn't really satisfy our intuition regarding qualia to say that a mental state is. This algorithm obviously doesn't capture what it's like to or the being four element of mental states. Anyway, I thought I'd just interject that because you're drawing this contrast between behaviorism on the one hand and then the psycho functionalism on the other, which even though it's taking into account more than behavior, is still not giving us qualia.

1:33 Dylan: I'll just say for myself, none of those names mean anything to me. I don't find the categorization helpful at all. I mean like what you Just said, I don't even understand. I've read it like six times and I don't even understand putting the names on the distinctions.

1:46 Mark: This is supposed to just assure us going into Armstrong, maybe it's a false assurance that there's going to be something that's a little more attuned to our everyday intuitions. Like what we just presented with Putnam was a truly weird sounding theory. Like, you know what a belief is. You thought you knew what a belief is. You thought you could just introspect and say, I believe that it is raining and see what that belief is. But no, actually a belief is a complicated flowchart. It's an algorithm. It's a bunch of dispositions that you can only understand if you kind of understand really the entire contents of the mind and how all the beliefs knit together.

That's a very weird theory. It's a very analytic theory. Whereas what we're supposed to do now is supposed to be a little more paying attention to what the everyday meanings of the term belief is. Will it do better justice to qualia as Wes was just concerned about?

2:37 Dylan: We'll see that summary of Putnam for me, Putnam wasn't talking at all about what beliefs are. He was accounting for the way our mind works to account for beliefs, which seems to me to be something different. But I don't want to really talk about Putnam Armstrong. I got materialism out of him, not behaviorism out of him.

3:00 Mark: Right. I'm just trying to give Bloch's classification and I think having that higher level thing and then actually reflecting on the text might be helpful.

3:07 Wes: Yeah, let's go through. Because he starts out he's responding to behaviorism. Right. Critically responding to behaviorism.

3:14 Dylan: Well, similarly to Putnam. Right. He wants to talk about philosophy itself at the beginning, philosophizing about philosophy.

3:21 Wes: The very first one of these, you know, long time ago is our very first philosophy of mind episode. We looked at Ryle, who does fall into this category of analytic behaviorist. To understand mental states. You just take our terms for mental states and then you analyze them conceptually in terms of behaviors. By defining them in that way, through that kind of an a priori process, you say what mental states are. So even though, as Armstrong points out, Ryle denied that he was a behaviorist, really what he's doing is he's analyzing mental concepts.

4:00 Mark: He says that Ryle was doing that because he was following in the tradition of Wittgenstein, that Wittgenstein says that there's really nothing that philosophy has to do other than to kind of undo mistakes that philosophy has created. And so that is what philosophy is about. It's about conceptual analysis, which is about demystifying some of these problems that are really problems of language. And Armstrong thinks that no philosophy actually can do more than that. That this sharp distinction between science that actually does something on the one hand, and philosophy that just looks at concepts was actually based on too optimistic, too positivistic a view of science.

You know, we had an episode on Karl Popper. He mentioned this idea that, no, science is not the gradual accumulation of knowledge and we're certain more or less at every step of every discovery that we make, that when it becomes more of, you know, you see science as a more complex model building, and the whole model can change around that makes the distinction between science and philosophy less sharp. So maybe it gives philosophy more to do here.

5:01 Wes: And despite my unhelpfulness in that episode, that first episode, this is kind of what I was trying to say, right? Which is that, no, it's not just conceptual analysis. We're actually trying to build a theory of the mind in the same way as science would try to build a theory of something. And that's what Armstrong is saying that we can do. I think I love this line. The philosopher has certain special skills which immediately just makes me think of Liam Neeson. Yes, yes, you won't like me when I find you.

5:29 Dylan: Towards the end of the first page in this sort of turn where he points to Ryle and says, it seemed in many cases that it was this view of the mind body problem that led him to this particular analysis of particular mental concepts rather than the other way around. He was referring to behavior. As faced with examples like this, it began to appear that since philosophers could not help holding views on substantive matters and the views could not help affecting their analyses of concepts, the views had better be held and discussed explicitly instead of appearing in a distorted because unacknowledged form.

So in this case, it was on the philosopher's side recognizing that substantive and conceptual matters are linked. But the same kind of thing holds true on the science side, right, Is that you don't end up separating those two things. So you can have something like a conceptual analysis that is just on its own, or substantive work like science telling you about how the world works, that those two things are completely intertwined with one another.

6:27 Wes: And this really paves the way, right, for the identity theory which we've been talking about, which is to say, as Armstrong puts it, it will be very natural to conclude that mental States are not simply determined by corresponding states of the brain, but that they are actually identical with these brain states, brain states that involve nothing but physical properties. This is something that he's actually going to be responding to. Right?

6:49 Mark: So he wants to say this is bottom of page 81, second page, top of page 82. Is our concept of mental states such that it is an intelligible hypothesis that mental states are physical states of the brain. If the philosopher can show that it is an intelligible proposition, that is not a non self contradictory proposition that mental states are physical states of the brain, then the scientific argument where we found the correlations between brain activity and mental activity, so it seems like materialism is true. That scientific argument can be taken at its face value as a strong reason for accepting the truth of the proposition.

So it sounds like this whole thing is going to be about materialism, about identity theory. And he is known as a materialist. But we're reading this in the functionalism section. So he's using functionalism as a route to materialism, as a way to make materialism more palatable.

7:38 Dylan: The beginning sentence of the next paragraph, my view is that the identification of mental states with physical states of the brain is a perfectly intelligible one and that this becomes clear once we achieve a correct view of the analysis of mental concepts.

7:50 Wes: He's saying it's intelligible, right? But he's not saying it's right.

7:54 Dylan: No.

But, you know, on my second read through, I take him to be saying that functionalism is really the right way to understand materialism.

8:04 Wes: But he's not an identity theorist.

8:06 Dylan: Not an identity theorist, but that the physical states of the brain are the matter of the form of the mind.

8:15 Mark: Right. What the mental concept refers to is the form, just what we've been talking about with functionalism. It is something that the mind does and that is a way that we can understand how in a particular instance, yes, this pain, the pain event, is something physical that's going on in the brain. But to understand why it's a pain and why what it has in common with other pains, you know, in other people's brains and perhaps in other kinds of creatures brains, we're talking about a functional organization, not about, you know, a particular type, type identification between pains and C fibers or whatever.

8:51 Dylan: And the key to that is what he starts on next, which is the notion of a causal concept or this causal analysis.

8:57 Seth: I was struck by the example that he uses immediately following, and I was just rereading this while you guys were talking. And it Just like it is definitely a thing that makes me go, hmm. Let me cite the paragraph immediately following. The problem of the identification may be put in a Kantian way. How is it possible that mental states should be physical states of the brain? The solution will take the form of proposing an independently plausible analysis of the concept of a mental state that will permit this identification. In this way, the philosopher makes the way smooth for a first order doctrine which true or false is a doctrine of the first importance, a purely physicalist view of man.

The analysis proposed may be called the causal analysis of mental concepts. According to this view, the concept of a mental state essentially involves and is exhausted by the concept of a state that is apt to be the cause of certain effects or apt to be the effect of certain causes. And then he says what I think is maybe one of the most perplexing sentences in all of philosophy. An example of a causal concept is the concept of poison. How do you get from what he was saying to the idea that poison conceptually can shed light on causal brain states?

10:16 Wes: What does it mean to say something is a poison?

10:19 Seth: Well, he says it in the next sentence. The concept of poison is the concept of something that, when introduced into an organism, causes that organism to sicken and or die.

10:31 Wes: So what he's saying is that not every concept is this way, right? The concept of dog, we don't understand that in terms of its dispositions to have certain effects. And so this is a special type of concept.

10:45 Dylan: Whatever it is, it produces certain effects.

10:47 Mark: And we called it a functional one. Causal is maybe a simpler way of doing. I mean, can we say like a mousetrap is also a causal concept. That seems a little more complicated than poison, which is a straightforward. Like a mousetrap sounds like a system, but a poison is just a substance that is supposed to induce certain effects. And he stresses it does it in a certain way. Right? It does it in a biological way that if you just drop a brick on someone's head and it kills them, that is not a poison. It is not inflicting the damage in the way that a poison is supposed to.

11:22 Seth: Take me back to how this analysis of the concept of poison is an independently plausible analysis of the concept of a mental state that will permit the identification with the physical states of the

11:33 Wes: brain because philosophers have a certain set of special skills.

11:39 Mark: It's in the next column on the same page. 82. The concept of a mental state is the concept of something that is characteristically the cause of certain effects and the effects of certain causes. What sort of Effects and what sort of causes? The effects caused by the mental state will be certain patterns of behavior of the person in that state. For instance, the desire for food is the state of the person or animal that characteristically brings about food seeking and food consuming behavior by that person or animal.

12:03 Dylan: Yes, the effects are not just that the poison causes someone to die, but it's also that knowledge about the poison. In fact, understanding that something's a poison results in certain effects and behaviors of the person. Who knows that?

12:17 Wes: It's worth pointing out that we kind of went backwards in this episode. Logically we should have done this first.

12:23 Mark: And then, and I suggested that.

12:26 Wes: And it's my fault. It is entirely my fault. I knew that it would make more sense. It's just that I thought we should just start by explaining functionalism via Block and Putnam and then go backwards. But maybe that wasn't the best idea.

12:39 Mark: We did it chronologically. So maybe he's trying to be simpler here, that he's aware of Putnam's arguments but thinks that this whole talking about a machine state is just unnecessarily complex. That's at least my interpretation here.

12:52 Seth: What is the appeal to behavior? Oh, so it's not all that there is. It's just the effect of some mysterious thing we call a mental state.

13:02 Dylan: It's an effect. It's not the only effect, a likely effect.

13:06 Wes: But the mental state is dispositional. Right. And it's not just effects, but it's causes too. Right. It's where it stands in this cause effect nexus in terms of what's likely to happen. Which is very similar to what we saw with Putnam where you have these machine tables and you're saying what is the probability that one state is going to go to the next state based on certain inputs and based on the existing state. It's a lot of if then situations. And that is, you know, I've been calling it the algorithm and I hope that's accurate. It's another way of saying the algorithm is the mental state. Except he seems entirely behaviorist. Or am I wrong about that?

13:45 Seth: Well, he seems to be able to go either way.

13:48 Dylan: I thought it was completely materialist and it had implications for behavior. But maybe I just don't really understand what is meant by behaviorist.

13:57 Wes: We're only considering outputs that are behavioral as opposed to outputs that are just the next machine state or the next state of the organism, the system.

14:10 Dylan: But that's why I want to say that it does both. That's one of the things to me that he's trying to solve is that you have effects that are behavior effects and that's one of the signs of them. But you also have the effect of other mental states which may or may not immediately correspond directly to behavior. There may be multiple steps for mental states that affect other mental states that affect other mental states that affect behavior.

14:37 Mark: Page 83, first column is when he kind of gets into that. So he's talking about purposes as another example of a mental state. A purpose is only a purpose if it works to bring about behavioral effects in a certain sort of way. We may sum up this sort of way by saying that the purposes are information sensitive causes. By this it is meant the purposes direct behavior by utilizing perceptions and beliefs. Perceptions, beliefs about the agent's current situation and the way it develops and beliefs about the way the world works. It seems like he's recreating here. It's not pure behaviorism. He's recreating the idea that because pure behaviorism is supposed to reduce all talk of mental states to behavior, but here we're saying to explain the mental state you have to refer to other mental states.

15:18 Seth: So behavioralism reduces all talk of mental states to behavior Physicalism or identity materialism? Identity theory reduces all talk of mental states to the physical processes in the brain. This account says mental states are just the causal mechanism that bridges those two things. Or who gives a shit about the material part. Mental states are just the causal mechanism that results in the behaviors that we see.

15:47 Dylan: Yes. And in fact that account will allow for this multi realizability. Right. It won't matter whether it's brain matter or silicon or whatever the juice is in the nexus of mental states that are made possible by something like brain matter that can make that happen and results in, among other things, behaviors. But they are not correspondent. And in fact there are things going on independent of both the physical and the behavior. They don't have a one to one relation.

16:22 Wes: Yeah, it's the what it does. Right. Just like going back to the Axe example. It's not a matter of what the ax is made of. It's just important that it's cutting things.

16:29 Mark: But it's interesting that that point is not actually made in this article. Like this whole multiple realizability. And I think maybe that's a matter of if you're doing the Turing machine functionalism, then you're coming up with a specific algorithm and you're saying this is kind of like the software and we can have multiple instantiations on this in different hardware here we're just giving an analysis of the brain as it is right now. We're not pretending that we can get precise enough on our analysis that we can come up with an algorithm that we can then program into a computer or anything like this.

It's just more of a philosophical understanding of when I am using the term belief, when I'm using the term purpose. I am in fact referring to something in the causal nexus that. Something to do with behavior and sort of how we tell when other people, we think they have purposes because we kind of look at their behavior and we imagine what beliefs they have that are driving their purposes and what desires they have. And it's that kind of behaviorist motivation that gives us this understanding of, oh, this is how these mental terms actually work in language games.

So it is, you know, as Block said, I think, trying to give less a theory. It's not psychofunctionalism. It's not trying to give a new psychological theory. It's trying to give a ultimately Wittgensteinian analysis of how these terms work in the complex language games that we play.

17:49 Wes: What distinguishes it, though, from mere conceptual analysis, right, is you're not just doing semantics here. You're not just saying, okay, let's take a mental concept and say what it means when you do a causal analysis. You're actually focusing on, in a quasi scientific way on the real world, on these various, like, again, the causal nexus that ends up being the mental state.

18:12 Dylan: A good example of that, to me is this little side comment he makes on page 82 where he is just making a point about the notion of causes is not just having active powers, but having passive powers. So he says, poisons are accounted poisons in virtue of their active powers. But many sorts of things are accounted the sorts of thing they are by virtue of their passive powers. Thus, brittle objects are accounted brittle because of the disposition they have to break and shatter when sharply struck. This leaves open the possibility of discovering empirically what sorts of things are brittle and what it is about them that makes them brittle.

That little sentence right there is to me really, really important about the power of this causal analysis of mental concepts because it gives you an insight in a way of accounting for. For the process of figuring things out in the world, the process of science, right? That the very buildup of the structure of our mental states is a causal construction that allows us to make causal analyses, that allows us to have science and philosophy itself.

19:19 Mark: It would seem weird, the whole behaviorist program of, huh, we see behavior. Let's explain this behavior in a Roundabout way, by making this model of an algorithm of what would produce this behavior. But we're not actually saying that there's anything in the brain that corresponds to this. We're just giving a model of what would produce. Like that would be a weird way of doing science. Like no, the solution here is once you make this model and say there are beliefs, there are purposes, there are desires, then you say these are real things that are going on in the brain.

It's just if you want to talk about how it's instantiated, that's a different question. You could give maybe a materialist description of what these things are, but to really understand them, you have to talk about them at this higher level of abstraction. It's not a reductionist program, I think, unless you want to say like, huh, I see the behavior of particles in the particle collider and I will come up with this theoretical entity of the quark or something, but I don't think there's any quarks there. I'm really just. It's a shorthand way of talking about the behavior.

20:19 Wes: The difference between saying pain is a disposition to say ow and various other behaviors and saying pain involves certain beliefs and is influenced by other beliefs and have certain psychological effects. Before you even get to behavior again, you can characterize all these internal effects before you ever get to the output again. The causal nexus. There's causes internal to the system and not just at the level of sensation or stimuli.

20:49 Dylan: Perceptions and beliefs themselves are causes. It's not just that pushes and pulls are causes.

20:55 Wes: Right.

20:56 Dylan: But that's, you know, another piece of the power of that is one of the aspects of, of this internal interaction of mental concepts is that perceptions and beliefs themselves are causes.

21:10 Wes: You know, I think it's worth restating and hopefully this isn't redundant. But the thing that I said about qualia earlier, just because I think it might alleviate some confusion for listeners, because on the other hand, it's really kind of counterintuitive again to say, well, the mental state is this algorithm, this very abstract thing. So when you say pain just is this systematic interrelation between causes and effects. None of that adds up to the quality of pain. What it's like to be in pain. In other words, from the functionalist account, you're still stuck with the same mind body problem in the sense that you can't ever make any a priori derivation from the functionalist account of pain and what it's like to be in pain. There is simply no derivation from one to the other.

21:53 Mark: But Admitting that the pain is a real thing that is going on in your head seems to at least leave room for that. Maybe in the way that our guest Greg Miller was saying that Russell accounts for it, that like, well, this is just what it feels like from the inside to have this brain state or be in this functional state. Nothing in functionalism or materialism implies that. But if you're a strict behaviorist and you say what the mental state is. I'm not really positing mental states. I'm just giving an algorithm that would produce this sort of behavior. And let's follow Turing and say if any creature acts like this, then it's natural for us to attribute mental states to them. Like, that's just completely dodging the problem of qualia altogether. Whereas I think this leaves definite room for it in a way that it wasn't so obvious to me about Putnam's view.

22:40 Wes: Are you saying that it might at some point be possible to derive the. What it's like from the functional account?

22:47 Mark: No, I'm just saying it's compatible.

22:49 Wes: Yeah. It's compatible with dualism or property dualism or certain kinds of monism, whatever you like. And complete materialism. Right.

22:57 Mark: Yeah. Putnam had made the specific point, kind of the same point that Papineau had made this distinction between mental and physical properties, rather that there might be one single property, the mental event, that is going on, and then two different concepts, the mental concept and the physical concept. And so he made that distinction. I don't see that here in Armstrong. Papineau thought when he was drawing that, that he was, by saying it's a different concept, that he was leaving room for qualia. So is that what Putnam thought he was doing? It was not entirely clear to me. You know, both of them are critical of behaviorism in various ways, so it just doesn't seem that either of them is considering matters, is responding directly to Chalmers here.

23:37 Wes: This whole qualia thing that I've mentioned is something we'll go into detail in our next episode, where Chalmers with inverted qualia and things like that is going to give us more of a grounds for these objections.

23:50 Seth: Yeah.

23:50 Mark: How these two different topics interact that we've been talking about the last two episodes.

23:54 Seth: Can we go back to the poison and brittleness thing so I can ask a question?

I agree, Dylan.

When I read this, I thought, oh, I don't think I had the same reaction that you did. So there's nothing intuitive about the notion of active versus passive that helps me understand this. Brittle objects are accounted brittle because of the disposition they have to break and shatter when sharply struck poisons are accounted poisons in virtue of their introduction into the body and causes death.

Isn't it the case that we could

give a perfectly valid account of brittleness that was based on structure of the thing, the atomic structure, and say, yeah, I can put a scan on this, I can put an X ray or whatever on this and I can tell you whether it's brittle or not.

24:42 Dylan: But that won't tell you anything about the character of brittleness, because the brittleness is its behavior with respect to when something is done to it rather than what it does.

24:54 Seth: No, but what he says is brittle

objects are accounted brittle because of the disposition they have to break and shatter when sharply struck. But I don't have to sharply strike anything to account something brittle.

25:08 Dylan: But just because you came up with a different, maybe even more precise numerical characterization of the point at which the system breaks doesn't mean that that brittleness isn't a passive character of the system.

25:25 Wes: It's like talking about macro properties versus the micro properties they supervene on. Right. With water, you want to say it's clear, you want to say it's liquidy, and then, yes, you can give an analysis in terms of the molecules and what they do and when they freeze into a lattice. You know, brittleness is this macro level property that. Yes, I thought, Seth, you were saying you could give a scientific analysis of it in terms of, say, what molecules are doing.

25:51 Mark: You don't have to actually break it to know that it's just breaking a lot of stuff is the way you would discover this intrinsic property. But saying it's dispositional or saying it's passive doesn't mean it's not actually referring to something that is real in the thing. It's just the way that we find out about it.

26:06 Seth: How is it different than saying, if I say, you say I call this brittle because if I take a hammer and smash it, it breaks into a million pieces. And I say I call it brittle because it has a molecular structure of

26:19 Wes: A, B or C. That's not what brittle means unless you say, hey, it has this molecular structure. Therefore I predict that when some causal thing happens to it, you could also define that at a molecular level. It wouldn't have to be me dropping the plate. You could give a much lower level explanation of everything in terms of molecules and the interaction of the floor, the floor with the plate. You can't say that you're capturing the meaning of brittle unless you're describing a causal interaction. Between two objects.

26:51 Dylan: Yeah. So it's like a hardness scale. You can have a brittleness scale. There probably is, actually. I know for sure that there's a hardness scale in which you could place materials on that scale and have a lower order account of why they have that hardness character or why they have that brittleness character, why they're at that place on the scale based upon analyzing their molecular structure.

27:15 Wes: You still need hypotheticals about causal interactions with other objects.

27:19 Seth: Help me understand how this is not

behavioralist until it cashes out and actually breaking into a thousand pieces or not. Then it's a prediction, it's a hypothetical that really what this comes down to is it's only brittle if we actually break it, not if we can break it, not if we suspect that it will break.

27:39 Wes: I don't think you need to do the experiment necessarily if you think that you can derive. So your science were advanced enough that you could definitively say that, hey, here's this thing with this certain molecular structure, and if such and such happened to it, here's how it would behave. But the point is that you have to do that hypothetical. You have to think in terms of its causal interaction, interaction with something else. You can't just say, here's this thing with this particular molecular structure. And that's what I mean by brittle. Brittle doesn't mean that.

28:10 Dylan: The only distinction being made here is that there are things that have causal properties, that we are referring to them doing something. And then we have other causal concepts that refer to what happens when you do something to it. And that's the only distinction that's being made by passive versus active.

28:26 Wes: And we're talking about relationships, you know, instead of just talking about the internal structure of the object, we're talking about how it's related to other things. That's crucial, I think.

28:34 Seth: Okay.

28:35 Mark: But I still like the idea that the way that we understand it, the way that the semantics work is relationally, that we're talking about dispositions to action, but we're also saying the disposition is a real intrinsic characteristic that it has, that it only behaves this relational character because of something that it would have even if no one were to break it, even if no one were to come along and even see it.

28:57 Dylan: That's true, but you don't want to go down the rat hole of asking whether or not it's actually brittle or not, because brittle is a relational term, just like hardness and all these other things that require you to be comparing one thing to another. There's no such thing as Intrinsic hardness.

29:14 Seth: Right.

29:14 Dylan: I can have an account for the hardness that something has with respect to other materials that has to do with its intrinsic properties. But that character of hardness is relational.

29:27 Mark: See, the reason I'm insisting on this is because of that qualia consideration that I was arguing, that if you allow that these dispositional characteristics are actually intrinsic, then you can say they have an intrinsic nature. There's a way it is to be like them from the inside.

29:43 Wes: Yeah, let's take an example, a simpler example. Like maybe this isn't a good example, so you guys might be able to find a better one. But you could say, look, the universe consists of just one thing, one mass or free floating planet or massive object. And you could say it has a disposition that if it were put in proximity to another object, there would be force, there would be gravitational attraction between them, and that given its inertia, that it might go into an orbit around that. But no such other objects exist. So the point of all that is to say, even if it would never actually exhibit the behavior, there's something about that particular object that the disposition is there.

And you could say the disposition is a real property. And the intuition is that that's the thing that's intrinsic in some sense and that that might line up somehow with qualia. This is actually an intuition that we've seen before with Schopenhauer. Right. And it kind of leads into panpsychism, where you say, yeah, the intrinsic nature of objects is force, which we know about because of will. That's what force feels like from the inside, and that is the intrinsic nature of the thing. And that's how we bridge the gap from those sorts of dispositions to some sort of qualia like thing.

And then the rest of the qualia get built up out of the intrinsic nature of force. I don't think we did much panpsychism, did we?

31:12 Mark: Yeah, well, and this whole line of consideration is running against. I'm trying to emphasize how dispositions are in some way intrinsic. Armstrong in this article is trying to make even things that seem intrinsic be dispositional. We definitely should talk about teleology, which is still on this page. But just to look ahead, the last section, this is going to be on the secondary qualities. So something like red, he's going to say, is actually the disposition to reflect light in a certain way. Like that is actually what redness is. It is not some intrinsic property.

It is a relational property. Even though, unlike brittleness, like brittleness is in its semantics dispositional, whereas red doesn't seem so that's not the way we use the word. That's not the way that language game is played. We don't say that will be red if you show it in the right light. I guess we'll have to see it has an intrinsic quality of redness, whether or not the light in the room happens to be bright enough for us to see it the way it actually is.

32:11 Wes: Those properties of a physical surface, whatever they are, that characteristically produce red sensations in us.

32:16 Dylan: Yes. And in fact, if it was a red surface and we saw it as orange, we would account for that distinction in the same way that when we look in a pool of water and we see the fish is bigger than it is when we pull it out of the water, or we see that the stick is bent, it's not that the stick changes its shape when it goes into the water. There's a causal account.

32:39 Wes: He understands why people might not want to say that with redness. And then he tries to give an account that I frankly don't understand about using gestalt psychology and the idea that secondary qualities like red may not be unanalysable and simple in the way that we think. I don't know if anyone understood that.

33:00 Mark: So I used this in my intro. This is Mark Linsenmayer actually seeing color as the reflection of certain wavelengths of light in Madison, Wisconsin. So he thinks that maybe we could train ourselves if we've really understood the physics. Or is he saying that maybe we could train ourselves? I think he's leaving it as kind of unknown. Like that is what to see things truly would be to see that, as opposed to just say, oh, it's just a red qualia. No, to actually see it as it is. And so I think he thinks that's an illusion.

33:29 Wes: The simplicity of redness is epistemological, he says, so we can't analyze it within our experience as an appearance, it's unanalysable, but ontologically and what it really is, it's complicated. And yeah, Mark, I think you're right. He's trying to get to the idea that if we could conceptualize it as it is, we could understand the redness in terms of that. I'm not sure it's confusing, but doesn't

33:55 Dylan: that make redness like all sorts of other things that are qualities or characteristics of our experiences of the world and the way we talk about them, that have more detailed underlying descriptions that aren't our first order experience of them? We bring that understanding to our interpretation of our perceptions and maybe question what we Actually see and refine it, because we know more about. We have beliefs and understandings of the world that affect the way we interpret things. Like redness or bent sticks in water and that kind of thing.

34:32 Mark: Yes, I think that's right. So ugliness comes to mind. Like, you could imagine a young child who just sees something and goes, ugly. And ugly can be just like a primal, unanalyzable thing. Just like red.

34:46 Seth: No, it can't.

34:47 Mark: But maybe if somebody says, come on, that's mean. Stop calling that ugly. You might question, like, why you find this ugly. Oh, okay, I'm paying attention to certain shapes of the face or something. You know, if there's a whole group of people, let's imagine somebody who's super racist or something is just ugly. Like, that's the initial impression. But as you kind of understand more like where you're getting this intuition, I think you would actually start to see things differently so that you would no longer use ugly as, like, a primal way of categorizing the world anymore. Like, it might even drop out of your vocabulary altogether. And maybe he thinks that could happen with red. Once we really understand physics, you know, at a gut level.

35:26 Wes: So if we understood that what we find ugly in faces is a matter of a certain proportion between length and width, let's say, just to be very simple. But then imagine that being more complicated and involving all sorts of ratios and other factors. And the idea is, at a certain point, we could somehow relate that abstract conceptual knowledge to the gestalt feeling that something is ugly and even come to mean that when we use the term ugly.

35:55 Mark: Seth Gadackitane is disgust.

35:57 Dylan: Go ahead.

35:58 Seth: Ugly is not a perception. It's a judgment. So if you're like, oh, I judged this thing red. No, you have a perception. You have an experience of red, or you don't. You don't judge it to be red in the same way that you judge something to be ugly. I can't see those two things are analogous.

36:16 Dylan: I completely disagree. You judge it to be red.

36:19 Wes: Red is an opinion, Seth.

36:21 Dylan: It is a processing of perceptions such that you render a judgment that it's

36:26 Mark: red because you could see it under different lighting conditions, because you could see it from different angles. You do judge that it is red. Your actual perception, if you were really paying attention to it, if you had, you know, a electronic monitor that was taking in what, the wavelength of light that's going to vary over time, and you're making the gestalt judgment that, oh, this is, in fact, red.

36:46 Wes: Yeah, not to mention the manifold and the data that are coming in, which get processed.

36:51 Seth: And, you know, the manifold and the faculty. Okay, so,

all right, so you have perception of color, perception of depth. I don't know, perception of number.

37:05 Dylan: I would say that in this line of thinking there's no such thing as a primal perception that you can talk about.

37:12 Seth: I'm just saying I'm having perceptual experience and I'm making judgments about what that is. I'm counting one wine glass and one microphone and two screens or whatever. Okay, that's one kind of thing. Then there's a disposition like I'm hungry, which is not perceptual of the external world or something like that. It's I'm hungry, which disposes me to go and want to act in a certain way. Then there's, you know what? I'm depressed, I'm upset, I'm angry. Which is also a disposition which may or may not result in any kind of external action. I may or may not actually do anything with that. I'm just sort of like. Then there's just.

I'm sad.

There's these emotional attributes that are affiliated with us. Is it the contention, because using this analogy of poison and brittleness and whatever else that. Is it the contention that all of those things are of the same kind? Mental states that have causal. That are apt to be caused by certain things and apt to cause certain other things.

38:18 Dylan: So, yes, the cause is true. But you have to go past the example of poison and get to the fact that perceptions and beliefs are also causes and that leads to the explanation of intentionality.

38:31 Seth: So you have this perception, perceptions and beliefs.

38:36 Dylan: Perceptions and beliefs are causes. So this is on page 83 in that full paragraph there where he gives the explanation that you have a logical dependence of purpose on perception and belief and of perception and belief upon purpose, and that you must introduce these concepts altogether or not at all. And that what falls under mental concepts will be a complex and interlocking set of causal factors which together are. Are responsible for the minded behavior of men and higher order animals. In this case, poison is a very straightforward, simple causal notion of something doing something else, which is why he picks it. But you get three other categories of things of purposes, perceptions and beliefs that are also causes and part of this whole nexus of the causal account of the mind, they have effects.

39:28 Seth: All right, so if I buy into this and I say, wow, okay, mind is just this complex of beliefs and perceptions and chemical reactions and variety of other things that cause me to act in one way and change my behaviors in another way. What do I get out of that explanation? I get it counters the identity theorists and the materialists. I get that it's a counter to behavioralism. But does it have any explanatory power that somehow enriches my view, that makes me something other? Does it do anything beyond make me not a behavioralist or a materialist?

40:07 Mark: Well, so he claims explicitly. The whole reason he's doing this is to just, again, make it sensible to talk about mental states being physical states. And because it seems like those are fundamentally different things, that those, at the very least, would have to be different properties of a single underlying substance.

40:27 Seth: The way he makes it sensible is instead of identifying mental states with physical states, he says physical states.

40:35 Mark: Cause he says mental states are a different level of explanation of physical stuff

40:42 Seth: as causes and effects, as opposed to straight identity.

40:45 Mark: Yes.

40:46 Seth: All right.

40:47 Dylan: Seth is asking a question of when he says to me, I think you could tell me if I misinterpreted you. But when you preface it, well, how does this cash out? How does this make a difference? It makes me think that you're just wondering, well, why do I care about this kind of thing? And I think that you probably will only care in the sense that something that is basically an ontological distinction, an account for, I guess, how the mind works, is interesting and worth knowing.

41:18 Seth: That's not at all what I'm saying, although I am saying that, too. That's not just what I'm saying. He seems to think he's undertaking a program to create a conceptual underpinning for some kind of scientific research program, as if that program requires just what Mark said, that he's trying to create a conceptual framework that would make it possible or make it plausible to give an identity theorist type explanation. What he's saying is if you think one equals the other, that's not going to work. The identity thing does not work. But if you think that one causes the other and you can find a plausible way to describe, quote, unquote, the other, AKA the mental, without positing it as a substance, a different kind of substance from the physical, then in fact you have a framework for allowing the scientific program to go forward.

And much like all of the other history of philosophical endeavors, to provide a conceptual foundation for science, I think, okay, well, science is going to go ahead and do whatever it does without you. You're not needed here.

42:29 Wes: So I don't think this is about saying the physical causes the mental. I think people who are saying that mental states are brain States are avoiding that and the problems that that come with that, including dualism. So if the physical causes the mental, then you might be inclined to think of two different entities with causal relations between them. But I think the point is to say there's a certain kind of identity theory in which you say mental states are physical states. Going back to our example with the diamond. They are these particular properties of brain matter.

And the functionalist wants to think more in terms of what the brain is doing to reduce it to that level. The structure and activity of the brain, let's say, even though we can't really talk that way, we have to talk in terms of the algorithm or the causal nexus being the brain state. But it allows us. There's a lot of advantages to it. It satisfies the intuition, right, that mental states, just like you could make a calculating machine in many, many different ways with many different types of materials, from matchboxes to silicon chips. You could make a thinking thing with many different substrates, many different materials.

And so we don't want to identify the mental states with the materials in that sense. We want to talk about them in terms of the function and structure and activity instantiated in those materials. And that's what functionalism allows us to do.

43:56 Mark: So I've been tempted here to kind of think of the physical as the intrinsic property of the thing and the mental as the relational property. Because we're talking about mental terms in terms of dispositions. And even if the disposition is not merely a disposition to produce behavior, but a disposition to produce behavior in the presence of other mental terms as well. Those mental terms are in turn also defined dispositionally. But I think we could actually say that even the physical characteristics are also dispositional. It's just that they're dispositional at a different level.

So why do we call something a hydrogen atom or whatever? It's because it reacts in certain ways if you subject it to certain experiments. And so the attribution of a physical property is kind of a model. It's a model based on a bunch of experiments. So it really is dispositional. But you can see clearly how it's a different kind of attribution of disposition than the attribution of a mental state. And you can see that most clearly when there's a breakdown. So the one big quality that we didn't get to, that's in this paper is him bringing up intentionality.

He does this in a way that's a little irritating. If we think back on our Husserl, and he talks about Brentano specifically, the guy that introduced intentionality, because it doesn't mean exactly what we mean in those other circumstances. When I think of a unicorn, the intentional object is the unicorn. The way he's using it here is just each mental state has something that is actually striving toward its objective. So it's like if it had an intention in the normal sense of the word, I intend to go outside. Really?

45:31 Wes: I thought it was just aboutness.

45:32 Mark: I'm just saying the way he's actually using this here at the bottom of 84, their intentionality. This was the feature of mental states to which Brentano in particular drew attention. The fact that they may point towards certain objects or states of affairs, but these objects or states of affairs need not exist.

45:46 Wes: Okay, so it's the aboutness thing.

45:48 Mark: But here. But when a man strives, his striving has an objective, but that objective may never be achieved. When he believes there is something that he believes, but what he believes may not be the case. This capacity of mental states to point to what does not exist may seem very special.

46:02 Wes: I think he means it in precisely the sense that Brentano meant it, but

46:05 Mark: he wants to connect that to our more ordinary understanding of the word intention. So he brings up again. Suppose, however we consider a concept like poison does not provide us with a miniature and unsophisticated model of the intentionality of mental states. Poisons are substance apt to make organisms sicken and die when the poison is administered. So it may be said that this is what the poisons point to. He's generalizing this notion of intention from intentionality to all teleology. And he says, look, even cells. Or he uses the idea of a rocket.

The homing rocket may point to a certain target, but something might go wrong with it. This is why I was saying that there's an interaction between the two, the physical explanation and the mental explanation. Because if I perform an action because I have a brain aneurysm, that is a different kind of explanation than if I perform an action because I forgot I was supposed to do something. You know, I give a more ordinary, you know, I had desires, beliefs, memories, or the lack of thereof that would point me in a certain way.

47:03 Wes: So we understand that intentionality is about ness. And I may have a mental state that is about unicorns. So it has this feature of pointing to things whether or not they exist. But the point of talking about the things that don't exist is to say that there is something external to them despite the fact that they don't exist. It's that paradox? I think he's saying you could give an account of that. You could say, well, how does that aboutness happen? How does a mental state point to something outside of itself? And I think he's saying you could give a dispositional account of that.

On the analogy of poison, where poison points to something outside of itself. The outside of itself thing that it points to is organism sickening and dying when poison is administered. And how does it do that? It does that by having a certain dispositional quality belonging to that again, to this causal nexus. So I think to cash out the intentionality of beliefs, you'd have to talk about them belonging to a certain causal nexus. And I think we saw some of that with Wittgenstein, with language as use. Right. So if you understand a concept not in terms of.

You understand that you don't have some basic explanation of, oh, when I think of a dog, I'm thinking of a certain image, and that's what the word refers to. Or there's a Platonic entity that it refers to. Really, it cashes out in terms of potentiality. And that's what I think we're talking about. I think this is kind of continuous with Aristotle in that sense. To understand the mind, we have to understand potentiality. And you could think of the word dog or any concept in terms of a bunch of if then statements where when I'm reading something and I'm fleeting past all the words very, very quickly as each word goes by, my understanding of it is not predicated on me attaching an image to it or anything else like that.

It's predicated on potentiality. It's predicated on what I could do with the word under certain circumstances. It's purely potentiality. Like, I could use it this way in a sentence. If someone used it in a certain way, it would have a certain effect on me. It's behavioral dispositions in relation to that. I think that that's the connection here.

49:13 Dylan: I think you've made a nice articulation of what one would mean by a language game.

49:17 Mark: It's just interesting that when we talk about a desire having an intention, well, I intend to get the thing I desire right. That is kind of built into the logic of desire. Now, it could be that the thing that is desired actually doesn't exist, or it's not desirable or something like that. And so the desire fails in a certain way. And I think that way is comparable to the way that a belief fails. That I could have a belief about unicorns and there's a normal way, a causal way in which beliefs are supposed to be hooked up to the world. That there are perceptions and then there are concepts that group those perceptions are.

You know, he doesn't spell out any of that here, but we can sort of imagine what the procedure should be. And somehow in unicorn something has gone wrong. The imagination has linked in and hooked up or I've heard tales of unicorns. So it's not hooked up in the correct causal manner that would actually make it hook up to something real in the world. There are no real unicorns at the end of the causal chain. To say I have a belief is a disposition and that it aims at something. It aims at a correct causal chain to the world. A belief's aim to be true.

50:23 Wes: This came up in our episode on Truth with Simon Blackburn and his little book on truth. This came up in the sense that if you really want to say what it means for something to be false, you would cash that out. In terms of hypotheticals, the cat is on the mat is false because if I opened the door and looked out, I wouldn't see it. And a bunch of those different things, a bunch of different hypothetical cause, effect relationships. And that's hooked up to the pragmatic way of seeing truth as the ideal limit of inquiry and all that.

50:53 Mark: So to say seeing a color, something that just seems like a raw qualia, the sensation of red, that that is actually, as Dylan was saying before, it's a judgment. You're judging that something is red. It's a belief that is aimed at the world like any other belief. I think this is what Armstrong's analysis is. He ultimately does think that in order to explain why materialism could be true, you ultimately do have to explain qualia using this model. You could say that he just failed. I mean, I think we'll see this in Bloch's response to this that it doesn't really work.

51:28 Wes: We talked about this with Wilfrid Sellars, right? And the theory ladenness of perception. I think the theory ladenness of perception doesn't mean that there's no raw experience in perceptions, right? So to believe that the cat is on the mat is a much different thing. To actually have the sensation of a cat on a mat, those are actually two different things. And. Or to have the sensation of red. I understand wanting to say it's a judgment. I get that if you're trying to get at the theory ladenness of perception. But the way Kant distinguishes this, right there's the constructive moment. That's his way of capturing theory Ladenness. We construct things according to the concepts. When we get to the point of judgment, we're breaking them down again according to the concepts. The construction itself does give us a perception, and a perception is not a judgment.

52:18 Mark: The way that he puts this right at the end of the paper here is that secondary qualities, which is how he's talking about seeing a color, a raw qualia. If the material says right, they have to be ultimately identified with respectable physical characteristics. The thing he sees is the barrier to that is because these experiences seem simple, that I just have the qualia of red. There's nothing more to it. But he says, why should not a complex property appear to be simple? There would seem to be no contradiction in adding such a condition to the model.

It has the consequence that the perception of the secondary qualities involves an element of illusion, but the consequence involves no contradiction. It is also true that in the case of the secondary qualities, the illusion cannot be overcome. Within perception, it is impossible to see a colored surface as a surface emitting certain light waves. So on the one hand, he seems to be recognizing there is an illusion. In other words, the qualia is there. But he's saying the qualia does not reveal intrinsically what an experience is. And maybe the experience itself is an illusion that is underlyingly a judgment about the state of a surface.

And the truth about the state of the surface is a complex thing, and it points outward. It has an intentionality about the state of the surface in the world.

53:32 Wes: Remember Searle on the transparency? I think this is like one of those views which tries to reclaim naive realism where you just say, we're asking the question, hey, we're a qualia. How does a functional account get at that? And the whole idea here is to say, well, these properties are not in the head anyway. They're just out there. When we describe our causal relationships to them, then we've done enough. We don't need to specify these internal things, the quality of experiencing red and all that stuff, because red is just out there. We have a place for it. Doesn't need to be in the mind.

54:07 Mark: Red is a causal dispositional connection between things out there in the world and our sense organs. But it's still an event happening in the world. It's an externalist view of the mind. You can't even describe what the contents of your mind are by only referring to the contents of your experience. Like, that's the fundamental Wittgensteinian discovery, is that you can't have something like that, like a private language. It always is Relying on a shared world, an environment.

54:35 Wes: I find these views very appealing until you get to error and illusion and dreams and things like that, and all the cognitive science that shows that the bulk of what's going on in our experience is not actually from the inputs and the enormous constructive role played by brain activity, but just the idea that we want to locate red out there. But if I'm hallucinating red, how do I locate it out there? I've lost my place for it, except in the head.

55:02 Dylan: That seems perfectly consistent with what we have here, Right? That I can easily have a causal concept of red that isn't at that moment directly associated with any specific inputs is my memory of red. And that can have a causal effect. That and all kinds of other concepts can have causal effects within my way of thinking about things.

55:24 Wes: You understand red as this big matrix of hypotheticals, our machine table. What's so difficult to understand about the mental is that we move into the realm of potentiality when we talk about the mental and not just actuality. And we like to talk about all of this stuff and strictly in terms of actuality, because that's the way we understand things. But you have to start talking about all these hypotheticals, and it's intuitively difficult.

55:50 Mark: I should qualify that this externalist view of the mind. This is entirely the reason for having a functional level of talk and a biological level of talk. Because of course, when you have the experience of seeing red that is physically in the brain, it's the red neuron firing or whatever the hell the actual physical instantiation of it is. It's partly this addition of intention and the idea of a causal network that includes the world, that includes things outside the brain, that makes it entirely necessary to have a layer of mental talk versus a layer of physical talk.

56:22 Wes: Yeah. So for instance, if you like to say, hey, this thing I'm doing is releasing dopamine and that's why I'm feeling pleasure, or something like that. I don't even know if dopamine is the right thing, when really, if you just looked at it at the level of the brain and what it's doing in the brain. There's nothing in the brain that indicates it's designed to give you a certain feeling. All it's doing is it's making sure it's altering the brain in such a way that the behavior is more likely to happen again in the future. That's it. More complicated than that. But you get the idea.

56:52 Mark: You don't think that it's activating the pleasure center or something?

56:55 Wes: No, but the pleasure center is just our way of describing it from the standpoint of subjective experience. All that's happening when we say pleasure centers are activated or anything like that, is just that the brain is changing structurally such that that certain behaviors are reinforced and are more likely in the future.

57:13 Mark: That can't be all there is to it. There are plenty of ways in which the brain is accultured to do things more easily the next time that are not accompanied by pleasure, not conscious pleasure.

57:23 Wes: The details of it are more complicated. But the point is that when we talk about pleasure, we are talking about a different layer on top of those physical accounts. There's nothing in the brain that you would look at. This is the mind body problem in a nutshell, where you would infer from what's going on physically in the brain that there's something called pleasure. If you were an alien scientist who had no idea what any of these particular internal states that we feel are particularly pleasure, you'd never be able to derive the subjective experience, but you'd be able to figure out what something like dopamine is doing purely in behavioral terms or dispositions to behavior.

57:58 Mark: So it sounds like you're saying that Armstrong has taken a stab at taking something that's seemingly simple, like red, and saying actually no. Red is a belief, it's a judgment, and it could be pointing at something in the world and it could be pointing at something that's more complicated than it. But it seems like at least I'd have to think further to say what he would say specifically about the qualia of pleasure. You don't want to say, oh well, just pleasure is functionally whatever makes this behavior repeat more in the future like that clearly does not capture the qualia of pleasure. And it's not merely that it makes us seek out more or something like that, because there are plenty of reasons why you wouldn't do that. And it's fundamentally different than even just wanting something.

58:41 Wes: Well, the only thing you can say about pleasure functionally, right, are that it's caused by certain things, certain inputs, that there are certain behavioral outputs, and that in between that there are certain steps in the machine states, right? And the total we could think about it in the holistic temporal slices of brain states, right? One sequence from the other, all that in between stuff, and that's all you can say about it at a biological or a functional level. On the functional level it's just abstracts. But at the physical level, we would be talking specifically about brain states.

But there's Nothing else to it. At the functional level, we could say things like, pleasure gives me the belief that I should do it again, or it gives me the opinion, or it gives me a desire. We could map out these certain relationships between certain subjective components. But once we start doing neuroscience, all that can just be cashed out in terms of certain brain states. It's a simplified account to say, yeah, it's just being more likely to do it again. There are all sorts of other dispositional things that are happening, but when you do that, you're never talking about, hey, here's a particular brain state that's so structured as to give me this subjective experience.

Because there is no scientific causal account of that. Scientific causal accounts have to be between material things in the world. There'd be no causal nexus even. What do you even mean by a cause and effect? That's one of the points of doing the identity theory. It's really, really difficult or impossible, I think, to make sense of, hey, here's a brain state and it's causing this mental state. And why does this brain state cause this mental state? Well, that's impossible to say.

1:00:22 Mark: Maybe what was throwing me about pleasure. Of course we have pain as the example throughout these things, which is somehow less problematic because pain, according to the functional account, is supposed to report that the body's being damaged. And so you could have an erroneous pain that is very much like, I think I see red, but there's not actually red there. So if you feel pain, but yet you know it's a phantom limb, or you could not feel pain when there is damage going on. Like you could. You could see how pain functionally is supposed to hook to the world. But pleasure, it's not as obvious. Like pleasure is supposed to indicate that something nice is happening to the body. Is that what that means? I guess you'd have to say that if you follow that.

1:01:00 Wes: Well, yeah, it's something that's gonna allow you to survive. We don't need to get into all these details because that's one of the points of doing functionalism instead of behaviorism. Right. Is to take into account all these complicating factors. But we only talk about it it abstractly because it's so frigging complex. It would be impossible to map out all these in the detail required. It's practically infinite the number of different factors in this causal nexus.

1:01:27 Mark: Any closing thoughts on this entire voyage into functionalism?

1:01:33 Dylan: Sure, we'll come back to it.

1:01:35 Wes: We do have a whole other episode on it, sort of.

1:01:40 Mark: Seth, any Further thoughts at this point. Are you a little more assured that there's something interesting going on here or

1:01:47 Seth: there's something about this that I just feel as though the conversation is happening? It's impoverished in some respect. Let's try to take a very simple example. Let's try to find an analogy to something.

And I can't help thinking that if

you can capture the concept of a historical being that has decades of life experience that inform the dispositional states that somehow have causal effects in this whole nexus, if that's captured in, you're apt to be this way in certain ways, then so be it. But it feels like a very impoverished. It doesn't have a ton of explanatory force to me other than against other competing theories. It's not compelling in any meaningful way to me as a description of my experience and help me understand how I could understand my own experience of my own mental states?

1:02:43 Wes: Yeah, I feel the same way. But I think that's why I've been talking about the qualia problem, because that's the way I understand the sense of impoverishment, which is something we'll do more of in the next episode.

1:02:54 Mark: We were really straining here to try to relate the qualia issue from the previous episodes to the functional analysis here. And, and so Block makes that explicit. I mean he has a section called Are Qualia Psychofunctional States. So his article this troubles with functionalism what we're going to talk about next time. It's a long article, it's like 58 pages plus notes. Luckily a lot of it is just kind of outlining what functionalism is. And then we're also reading David Chalmers absent Qualia, fading Qualia, dancing Qualia. It's actually a response to some of the points that Block makes.

So it's Chalmers defending functionalism against Bloch's dismissal of it. So I think we can be kind of selective in which parts of the block that we pull out since we don't need to repeat all this stuff about machine table theory that is just as difficult when Block presents it, if not more so than when Putnam was presented it.

1:03:47 Wes: Well, I would like to spend some time on Ramsey sentences. I'm just kidding.

1:03:52 Mark: I think the interesting part is starts about 17 pages into his homunculi headed robots. Well, so that's what's happening next time folks should email us@plpartialexaminedlife.com make comments on what we've said here about how stupid we are because we're missing the obvious as people already have been doing on the previous episode.

1:04:13 Seth: Easy to throw darts, people.

1:04:16 Mark: Why aren't you paying attention to the experimentalists? Why do you care about Qualia? This has been totally solved already. Like we're getting.

1:04:22 Wes: Yeah. Notice that there are never any details

1:04:24 Mark: in those criticisms or people giving like wild like mystical consciousnesses everywhere that are equally unhelpful. They're interesting philosophers that hold things related to all these positions, but the response

1:04:38 Wes: to those points of view is that you are not interested in philosophy. Go be a mystic.

1:04:44 Mark: I would be a little more sympathetic and just say give us a specific other reading to look at if you feel like these people we're reading are totally mysterious, missing the point. I wouldn't mind even spending some time on the easy problem and just ignore, you know, if there's really philosophically interesting stuff that is completely sidestepping Qualia and things. I think these folks that we read today try to sidestep some of these things, but because they're serious philosophers, they do not entirely do so. And then somebody even more serious, like Block comes along and like, makes them talk about Qualia in ways that.

That we'll find out about next time. You know, I almost mentioned the title of our closing song during the discussion proper today when we were talking about the function of pain. The song is called Pain Makes You Beautiful. It's by Judybats. I interviewed Jeff Heiskell for Nakedly Examined Music Episode 5, and he came back to talk more on Episode 63. Get those both@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com thanks. Good night, everybody.

1:05:42 Seth: Good night.

1:05:42 Wes: Good night.

1:05:43 Dylan: Good night. You just made me think of someone being tied to a chair, forced to talk about Qualia.

1:05:48 Wes: Mark.

1:05:49 Dylan: Pain makes you beautiful. I give you what you want. The pain and the pleasure. I. I'm no good for you. But then you're no good for yourself. I give you pain. Pain makes you beautiful. I'm no good for you. You're no good for yourself. Strange and it's wonderful how you tell me what you need. The joy and the treasure of pains. Guilty pleasure. Love's pressure. Painfully I bring you pain. Pain makes you beautiful. Love. I'm no good for you. You're no good for yourself. Your sorrow tied. Tied to my. We delight in every touching I put you through. How did we find this place, this state where we satiate where pain makes you beautiful. Strange and so wonderful. Well, you're no good for yourself. I bring you pain. Pain makes you. You take careful. I'm no good for you. You're no good for yourself, no sorrow. T tied your mind to the compromising position. To all the painful things I do. I.