Muhammad Haris Ijaz

Assignment 5
Philosophy of Mind
Taimoor Farouk
In his essay The Nature of Mind, D. M. Armstrong presupposes that
“the methods of science have enabled us to achieve an intellectual
consensus about many disputed matters”. Do you agree? Explain.
Science began gaining popularity as a discipline that sought provide coherent and sustained
understanding of reality, a discipline that challenged dogmatism and fanaticism. It sought to
prove its hypothesis by evidence and accepted challenging notions presented by others. It was a
method of inquiry based upon evidence, hypothesis and investigation. But ironically it has now
been exhibiting the very sort of hubris and fanaticism that it struggled against. It purports to
provide like a dogmatic system a complete and finished view of reality. It has become a belief
system. It ignores any and all other suggestions or explanations that slightly disagree with its
method and materialistic world view. The method which, like others, could as well be limited and it
is so because of its presuppositions. Like a machine designed to detect radiation will only do that
and not do anything else. Science has many dogmas, presupposes many things in its search for an
“objective” reality. A few of which are on the unconscious and machine-like nature of matter and
reality, a fixed set of laws governing nature and that mind is completely inside us or that mind
itself can be explained in “purely physio-chemical terms.”1 Such a view of science inhibits free
investigation and research which is the very heart of a scientific enterprise.
D. M. Armstrong’s claim that “the methods of science have enabled us to achieve an intellectual
consensus about many disputed matters.”2 It might be true in that there is more consensus but the
theory he puts forward based on this claim also employs a reductions approach. He says that
brain activity causes consciousness but in fact so far only correlation can be proved. He disagrees
with the behaviorist approach that physical behavior is mind and that it is an “outward act.” But
agrees that they were right to link behavior to our mental states and improves upon it. That
mental states are not just behavior but actually cause behavior. He supposes after doing this we
can pinpoint all these mental states with the purely physical state of the nervous system. Mental
states are the cause that actually are responsible for us having a certain disposition which is
actually brought about under suitable circumstances.
Functionalism does not care about the how a system is made but rather what are its functions,
what It does. But then a machine could be designed that could emulate the same functional state
and produces the same output as a human when given the same input. How then would that be

1
Armstrong, D. M. “The Nature of Mind.” The Mind-Brain Identity Theory, 1970, 67–79.
2
Ibid.
different from a human? Here a crucial drawback in current scientific methodology comes. Such a
machine should be considered human based on the functionalism and materialist approach of
science. When such a machine is upgraded and becomes a highly intelligent system and can do
whatever the humans can do with speed and precision, a calculating machine on speed, and is
then put to play a board game with a human, does such a machine think about its move when it is
the human’s turn to play or is it sitting there like a blender? Its obviously sitting there like a
blender. Does such a machine minds losing? No, it does not.
Such conscious subjective experiences are still beyond the domain of science and its current
methodologies because they still cannot “to explain the existence of conscious phenomenal
qualia”3. It might identify such subjective experience of losing with certain mental states and
mental states, according to identity theory, to certain biological features but it still cannot explain
why such a machine imitating the same functionality would not experience such a loss or be
stressed about making the right move.
It is impossible to have conscious mind without physical brain there is no doubt about that
understanding the material brain is inadequate to explain the nature of the conscious mind. What
is needed is an exploration of more radical ideas and new methodologies beyond the current
materialist-dogma of science. In future we might discover laws that enlighten us about the causal
nature of the two, but such discovery is beyond our current understanding and in future we might
hope to understand dhow certain neurophysiological states result in such conscious subjective
states.
David Chalmers who rejects completely materialistic theories of mind and suggest moving beyond
them. Churchland says “the two kinds of states would still be distinct in their essential natures,
despite the contingent causal relations between them.”4 Chalmers again says that even after we
have such a theory of consciousness “we would end up having some of the same metaphysical
arguments”5, we would have questions like “Is consciousness fundamental, are consciousness and
the associated physical state identical, or are they two distinct things?”6 Churchland says that the
“idea that we can reliably determine the essential nature of any phenomenon simply by
examining, from the comfort of the armchair, our current conception of that phenomenon is an
idea that is dubious in the extreme. It assigns to our current conceptions an authority that they may
not deserve.”7 And perhaps “we currently misconceive the real nature of our qualitative
phenomenal states”8 and need to be reconceptualized within a more comprehensive framework.
Further Armstrong might be right in terms of agreement and coherency of a knowledge system
(thought still insufficient) but what really does this consensus mean in broader philosophical,

3
Churchland, Paul M. Matter and Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013.
4
Churchland, Paul M. Matter and Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013.
5
Horgan, John. “David Chalmers Thinks the Hard Problem Is Really Hard.” Scientific American Blog Network.
Scientific American, April 10, 2017.
6
Ibid.
7
Churchland, Paul M. Matter and Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013.
8
Ibid.
political and social domains? Domains which are beyond science. String Theory (currently not
provable or falsifiable) might turn out to be right but then how will science explain why
specifically this and not something else? What if science really does figures everything out then
what of the political aspects of the arrogance resulting from its certainty and superiority over
other disciplines and people? That would be a real tragedy and that is why we are better off in
our continuous state of mystification to continue forever falling short of a complete understanding.

REFERENCES
Armstrong, D. M. “The Nature of Mind.” The Mind-Brain Identity Theory, 1970, 67–79.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15364-0_4.
Churchland, Paul M. Matter and Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013.
Horgan, John. “David Chalmers Thinks the Hard Problem Is Really Hard.” Scientific American Blog
Network. Scientific American, April 10, 2017. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-
check/david-chalmers-thinks-the-hard-problem-is-really-hard/.