Mental event

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A mental event is any event that happens within the mind of a conscious individual. Examples include thoughts, feelings, decisions, dreams, and realizations. [1] These events often make up the conscious life that are associated with cognitive function. [2]

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Some believe that mental events are not limited to human thought but can be associated with animals [3] and artificial intelligence [4] as well. Whether mental events are identical to complex physical events, or whether such an identity even makes sense, is central to the mind–body problem.

Relation to mind–body problem

Some state that the mental and the physical are the very same property which cause any event(s). This view is known as substance monism. An opposing view is substance dualism, which claims that the mental and physical are fundamentally different and can exist independently. A third approach is Donald Davidson's anomalous monism . The Philosophy of Action states that every action is caused by prior thoughts or feelings, and understanding those mental events would in turn explain behavior. [5]

Physicalism, a form of substance monism, states that everything that exists is either physical or depends on that which is physical. [6] The existence of mental events has been used by philosophers as an argument against physicalism. For example, in his 1974 paper What Is it Like to Be a Bat? , Thomas Nagel argues that physicalist theories of mind cannot explain an organism's subjective experience because they cannot account for its mental events.

Epiphenomenalism, according to Stanford, "Is the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effect upon any physical events." [7] This stance then brings up the idea of introspection. According to David Lieberman, introspection is the ability for a person to observe his or her own mental state or events. [8] Mental events can happen consciously and subconsciously at any given point. All mental events take place due to external stimuli. Which then must be processed via working memory.

Mental Events and Working Memory

Mental events must occur in the working memory of short term-store. Both working memory and short-term memory are essential to mental events and cognition. According to Lieberman (2021), Baddeley and Hitch (1974) proposed that working memory consists of three distinct subsystems: what are called a phonological loop, a visuo-spatial sketchpad, and central executive. [9]

The phenological loop is responsible for holding speech-based sounds while the visuo-spatial sketchpad holds visual concepts in the mind. Both work independent of each other. Whereas the central executive is responsible for controlling both systems. The central executive is also responsible for aiding in tasks such as reasoning and understanding language. [10]

In order for mental events to occur, in Homo sapiens, situations and events must be processed through working memory in order to be perceived as a mental event. Without this system of memory, situations cannot be stored as mental events. All thoughts, feelings, decisions, dreams, and realizations must cycle through this process indefinitely.

Examples

See also

Further reading

Related Research Articles

Epiphenomenalism is a position on the mind–body problem which holds that physical and biochemical events within the human body are the sole cause of mental events. According to this view, subjective mental events are completely dependent for their existence on corresponding physical and biochemical events within the human body, yet themselves have no influence over physical events. The appearance that subjective mental states influence physical events is merely an illusion. For instance, fear seems to make the heart beat faster, but according to epiphenomenalism the biochemical secretions of the brain and nervous system —not the experience of fear—is what raises the heartbeat. Because mental events are a kind of overflow that cannot cause anything physical, yet have non-physical properties, epiphenomenalism is viewed as a form of property dualism.

Neutral monism is an umbrella term for a class of metaphysical theories in the philosophy of mind, concerning the relation of mind to matter. These theories take the fundamental nature of reality to be neither mental nor physical; in other words it is "neutral".

In philosophy, physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that "everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the physical, or that everything supervenes on the physical. Physicalism is a form of ontological monism—a "one substance" view of the nature of reality as opposed to a "two-substance" or "many-substance" (pluralism) view. Both the definition of "physical" and the meaning of physicalism have been debated.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philosophy of perception</span> Branch of philosophy

The philosophy of perception is concerned with the nature of perceptual experience and the status of perceptual data, in particular how they relate to beliefs about, or knowledge of, the world. Any explicit account of perception requires a commitment to one of a variety of ontological or metaphysical views. Philosophers distinguish internalist accounts, which assume that perceptions of objects, and knowledge or beliefs about them, are aspects of an individual's mind, and externalist accounts, which state that they constitute real aspects of the world external to the individual. The position of naïve realism—the 'everyday' impression of physical objects constituting what is perceived—is to some extent contradicted by the occurrence of perceptual illusions and hallucinations and the relativity of perceptual experience as well as certain insights in science. Realist conceptions include phenomenalism and direct and indirect realism. Anti-realist conceptions include idealism and skepticism. Recent philosophical work have expanded on the philosophical features of perception by going beyond the single paradigm of vision.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mind–body dualism</span> Philosophical theory

In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable. Thus, it encompasses a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, as well as between subject and object, and is contrasted with other positions, such as physicalism and enactivism, in the mind–body problem.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hume's fork</span>

Hume's fork, in epistemology, is a tenet elaborating upon British empiricist philosopher David Hume's emphatic, 1730s division between "relations of ideas" and "matters of fact." As phrased in Immanuel Kant's 1780s characterization of Hume's thesis, and furthered in the 1930s by the logical empiricists, Hume's fork asserts that all statements are exclusively either "analytic a priori" or "synthetic a posteriori," which, respectively, are universally true by mere definition or, however apparently probable, are unknowable without exact experience.

The knowledge argument is a philosophical thought experiment proposed by Frank Jackson in his article "Epiphenomenal Qualia" (1982) and extended in "What Mary Didn't Know" (1986).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Panpsychism</span> View that mind is a fundamental feature of reality

In the philosophy of mind, panpsychism is the view that the mind or a mindlike aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. It is also described as a theory that "the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe". It is one of the oldest philosophical theories, and has been ascribed to philosophers including Thales, Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, and Galen Strawson. In the 19th century, panpsychism was the default philosophy of mind in Western thought, but it saw a decline in the mid-20th century with the rise of logical positivism. Recent interest in the hard problem of consciousness and developments in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and quantum physics have revived interest in panpsychism in the 21st century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hard problem of consciousness</span> Philosophical concept, first stated by David Chalmers in 1995

In philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness is to explain why and how humans and other organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experiences. It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining why and how physical systems give a (healthy) human being the ability to discriminate, to integrate information, and to perform behavioral functions such as watching, listening, speaking, and so forth. The easy problems are amenable to functional explanation: that is, explanations that are mechanistic or behavioral, as each physical system can be explained purely by reference to the "structure and dynamics" that underpin the phenomenon.

A philosophical zombie is a being in a thought experiment in philosophy of mind that is physically identical to a normal person but does not have conscious experience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Baddeley's model of working memory</span> Model of human memory

Baddeley's model of working memory is a model of human memory proposed by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch in 1974, in an attempt to present a more accurate model of primary memory. Working memory splits primary memory into multiple components, rather than considering it to be a single, unified construct.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frank Cameron Jackson</span> Australian philosopher

Frank Cameron JacksonFBA is an Australian analytic philosopher and Emeritus Professor in the School of Philosophy at Australian National University (ANU) where he had spent most of the latter part of his career. His primary research interests include epistemology, metaphysics, meta-ethics and the philosophy of mind. In the latter field he is best known for the "Mary's room" knowledge argument, a thought experiment that is one of the most discussed challenges to physicalism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Property dualism</span> Category of positions in the philosophy of mind

Property dualism describes a category of positions in the philosophy of mind which hold that, although the world is composed of just one kind of substance—the physical kind—there exist two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties. In other words, it is the view that at least some non-physical, mental properties exist in, or naturally supervene upon, certain physical substances.

In the philosophy of mind, psychophysical parallelism is the theory that mental and bodily events are perfectly coordinated, without any causal interaction between them. As such, it affirms the correlation of mental and bodily events, but denies a direct cause and effect relation between mind and body. This coordination of mental and bodily events has been postulated to occur either in advance by means of God or at the time of the event or, finally, according to Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, mind and matter are two of infinite attributes of the only Substance-God, which go as one without interacting with each other. On this view, mental and bodily phenomena are independent yet inseparable, like two sides of a coin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Type physicalism</span> Theory in the philosophy of mind

Type physicalism is a physicalist theory in the philosophy of mind. It asserts that mental events can be grouped into types, and can then be correlated with types of physical events in the brain. For example, one type of mental event, such as "mental pains" will, presumably, turn out to be describing one type of physical event.

Anomalous monism is a philosophical thesis about the mind–body relationship. It was first proposed by Donald Davidson in his 1970 paper "Mental Events". The theory is twofold and states that mental events are identical with physical events, and that the mental is anomalous, i.e. under their mental descriptions, relationships between these mental events are not describable by strict physical laws. Hence, Davidson proposes an identity theory of mind without the reductive bridge laws associated with the type-identity theory. Since the publication of his paper, Davidson refined his thesis and both critics and supporters of anomalous monism have come up with their own characterizations of the thesis, many of which appear to differ from Davidson's.

Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addressed, such as the hard problem of consciousness and the nature of particular mental states. Aspects of the mind that are studied include mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and its neural correlates, the ontology of the mind, the nature of cognition and of thought, and the relationship of the mind to the body.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mind–body problem</span> Open question in philosophy of how abstract minds interact with physical bodies

The mind–body problem is a philosophical problem concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human mind, and the body.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Qualia</span> Instances of subjective experience

In philosophy of mind, qualia are defined as instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term qualia derives from the Latin neuter plural form (qualia) of the Latin adjective quālis meaning "of what sort" or "of what kind" in relation to a specific instance, such as "what it is like to taste a specific apple — this particular apple now".

Interactionism or interactionist dualism is the theory in the philosophy of mind which holds that matter and mind are two distinct and independent substances that exert causal effects on one another. An example of your mind influencing your body would be if you are depressed, you can observe the effects on your body, such as a slouched posture, a lackluster smile, etc. Another example, this time of your body affecting your mind would be: If you struck your toe very forcefully on a door, you would experience terrible pain. Interactionism is one type of dualism, traditionally a type of substance dualism though more recently also sometimes a form of property dualism. Many philosophers and scientists have responded to this theory with arguments both supporting and opposing its relevance to life and whether the theory corresponds to reality.

References

  1. Bunnin, Nicholas; Yu, Jiyuan (2004). "Mental event". The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy. Blackwell Reference Online. Retrieved 2016-11-23.
  2. Mental Events. Oxford Reference. Retrieved 7 Mar. 2023, from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100150420
  3. Griffin, Donald R. (2001-05-01). Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness. University of Chicago Press. ISBN   9780226308654.
  4. McCarthy, John (1995). "Making Robots Conscious of their Mental States" (PDF). Stanford University. S2CID   10544902. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-12-23. Retrieved 2016-11-23.
  5. Bunnin, Nicholas; Yu, Jiyuan, eds. (2004). The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy (1 ed.). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. doi:10.1002/9780470996379. ISBN   9780470996379.
  6. Stoljar, Daniel (2016). Zalta, Edward (ed.). "Physicalism". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition). Retrieved 2016-11-23.
  7. Robinson, William, "Epiphenomenalism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/epiphenomenalism/
  8. Lieberman, D. A. (2021). Chapter 10 Working Memory. In Learning and Memory (2nd ed., p. 13). Cambridge University Press.
  9. Lieberman, D. A. (2021). Chapter 10 Working Memory. In Learning and Memory (2nd ed., p. 284). Cambridge University Press.
  10. Lieberman, D. A. (2021). Chapter 10 Working Memory. In Learning and Memory (2nd ed., pp. 286–287). Cambridge University Press.