Chapter
One
What’s the problem?
things, giving something non-material properties which logically and gram-
matically apply only to material things. Ryle did not reduce mental processes
to physical processes; he tried to find a middle way between dualism and
behaviourism – between the two mistakes of claiming, for instance, that
saying is doing one thing and thinking is doing another, or that saying and
thinking are the same thing. For Ryle, behaviours are not caused by myste-
rious mental states, and many mental states are best understood simply as
dispositions to behave.
The view of mind as about doing rather than being is apparent in many modern
descriptions of mind and self: ‘Minds are simply what brains do’ (Minsky, 1986,
p. 287); ‘ “Mind” is designer language for the functions that the brain carries out’
(Claxton, 1994, p. 37); and self is ‘not what the brain is, but what it does’ (Feinberg,
2009, p. xxi). Such descriptions make it possible to talk about some mental activ-
ities and mental abilities without supposing that there is a separate mind. This is
probably how most psychologists and neuroscientists think of ‘mind’ today, and
they do not agonise about what ‘mind’ really is.
Some psychologists and philosophers, especially those interested in the limita-
tions of a brain-centric view, carefully avoid reducing the activity of the mind to
solely neural activity. And some, like the American philosopher Alva Noë, do the
same for consciousness itself: ‘Consciousness is not something that happens in
us. It is something we do’ (2009, p. 160). With consciousness there is generally
much less agreement, probably because a lot of the questions people used to
ask about mind and self (or even the soul) are now being directed at ‘conscious-
ness’ instead. But as we will see, how we think about any of the three will have
important consequences for how we think about the other two. And central to
them all is the thorny question of what the relationship is between mind and
matter.
FIGURE 1.2 • According to Descartes, the physical brain worked by the flow of animal spirits through its cavities. The immaterial
soul was connected to the body and brain through the pineal gland (H) which lies in the midline.