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Editorial
Thoughts on Thought
by Rick Lewis
The title of this issue’s special theme, ‘Thoughts On Thought’, is partly a tribute to our onetime contributor Antony Flew, who wrote a well-known book called Thinking About Thinking. Flew’s book though was about informal logic including various kinds of fallacies. Despite the similarity in titles, the theme of this issue is completely different. It isn’t about logical fallacies, even if here and there it probably contains some. So if you spot any, we encourage you to honour Flew’s memory by writing us a letter!
Instead, this issue of Philosophy Now contains articles on a whole range of questions about our minds and the workings of our brains, the relationship between them, the nature of perception, consciousness, the evolution of intelligence and more. Perhaps we should have called it Minds on Brains, or even Brains on Brains?
This reminds me a little bit of the homunculus theory of mind. I first learned about this from a comic called The Beezer, when I was about ten years old. One of the regular comic strips in it was called ‘The Numskulls’, and was about a crew of tiny humanoids living inside the head of an average man (who they called “Our Man”), working the controls to get him through his life. Each had a particular job: they were in charge of his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his ears, reasoning and so on. Without their efforts pulling levers and taking decisions, the man was basically just a complex but inert mechanism. Naturally, they had all sorts of hilarious adventures. In one episode Our Man developed a nasty cough, which caused the numskull who operated his mouth to be temporarily lost overboard. As a result, of course, Our Man lost his voice. So, as you can see, this picture of the mind did have some explanatory power. I was dimly aware even then that there was something not quite satisfactory about it. Much later, I learned that people quite often (seriously or not) described the workings of the brain by reference to an inner observer, perhaps one who is watching the outside world on a kind of screen inside our heads. This is sometimes called the ‘Cartesian Theatre’. The flaw with this theory is known as the ‘homunculus problem’. It is a problem of infinite regression that was summed up particularly clearly by Daniel Dennett in an interview in Cogito. He said:
“If a little man in your head is looking at the little screen using the full powers of human vision, then we have to look at a smaller man in his head looking at a still smaller screen, and so on ad infinitum. That’s what’s wrong with the little man in the head.”
So now finally, Philosophy Now has ascended to the philosophical level of 1970s children’s comics! This is a special moment for me, I can tell you.
The problem of how the mind relates to the brain, and whether they are two separate entities or just somehow a single thing, has been a central question in philosophy for a very long time. This ‘mind-body problem’ has long been of particular interest to our Editor, Grant Bartley, and you can find his videos about it on his YouTube channel. So, what is consciousness and how does it arise from our brains? The articles in our theme section mainly don’t tackle this question head-on, but instead discuss a whole host of enthralling questions which relate to this central one.
For example, one popular solution is that when brains and their activity become sufficiently complex then consciousness appears as an ‘emergent property’ of the physical processes involved. But what does this mean? Jonathan Moens in his article explains that examples of emergent phenomena can be found in many aspects of nature, and that emergence is a fascinating phenomenon in its own right, well worth studying but very hard to fully understand.
A central problem with consciousness is understanding why there is anything it is like to be you, to have the perceptions and experiences that you do. It is a hard problem indeed, but philosophers are chipping away at it with ingenious thought experiments. Nigel Hems considers one that has become famous, and goes by the name Mary’s Room.
Perhaps a particular kind of first-person experience – that of being in love – sometimes so wonderful, sometimes distressing, always intensely meaningful, proves that we cannot be merely biological machines? Peter Westergaard puts physicalist theories to this test.
Rogério Severo and Roger Haines both explore different aspects of how our minds and brains work, and how the physical brain processes and the mental processes of consciousness and directed attention at least relate to one another. And lastly in this special section, a surprising claim: James Miles argues that we are the smartest creatures in the universe. On the face of it, this seems unlikely. One glance at the bloodsoaked headlines and anyone would doubt this. Furthermore, over centuries of intellectual and scientific progress we humans have painfully divested ourselves of the belief that we are central to some cosmic plan, that we are the pinnacle of creation. Yet Miles makes a pretty strong case, involving natural selection and brain evolution, and I couldn’t see the flaw in it. See what you make of it.
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