In Our Time

This week's In Our Time, the 500th edition of the programme, is on free will and determinism and covers most of the topic in less than 45 minutes. You can download it as a podcast here or you can go to the programme's webpage and listen via the BBC I-Player here. Almost all of the programme's archive on culture, history, philosophy, religion and science is available to listen to. Search, for instance, for Socrates, or Good and Evil.

Computer Wins Quiz

An IBM computer called Watson has won the American quiz show Jeopardy. Its competitors were two of the most successful players of the game ever; Ken Jennings had won 74 time in a row and Brad Rutter had won the most money with $3million (£1.9m). 

The point of the victory was that Watson able to understand and respond quickly to natural human language and clues that rely on double meanings, riddles and other subtle aspects of speech. IBM expect to deploy the computer system shortly in helping with medical diagnosis; where accurate knowledge of large amounts of data is important. Other possible applications might include dealing with the enormous sets of data to be found in the law and in finance. 

No one is suggesting that Watson possesses artificial intelligence at this point. There is a short film about the final quiz here.

Berkeley, God, ideas and other minds

In his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge Berkeley stated:

Whatever power I may have over my own thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceived by Sense have not a like dependence on my will. When in broad daylight I open my eyes, it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or no, or to determine what particular objects shall present themselves to my view; and so likewise as to the hearing and other senses; the ideas imprinted on them are not creatures of my will. There is therefore some other Will or Spirit that produces them.

Thus the fact that he cannot change the world he perceives becomes evidence for some higher power that causes and maintains the world.

Berkeley divided human knowledge into two categories: ideas and spirits. Ideas are things that can be perceived whereas spirits cannot. Our souls perceive ideas but they themselves can only be comprehended by inner feelings or reflection.

John Locke used the term 'idea' to mean the object of reflection. (e.g. 'I have an idea for a novel')
Berkeley restricted the meaning of 'idea' to the passive objects of perception and used the term 'notion' when talking about spiritual substance and its operations. For Berkeley, we have no idea of spirits (we do not directly perceive them) but we do have a 'notion' of them.

Berkeley admitted that idealism could lead to doubts about the existence of other minds:

It is granted we have neither an immediate evidence nor a demonstrative knowledge of the existence of other finite spirits. (Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous)

But he thought it was possible to use arguments based on analogy to justify a belief in other people having similar inner lives to the one to which we have immediate and privileged access.

Folk psychology - should it be eliminated?

Astrology, alchemy, mesmerism and phrenology were all serious scientific subjects in the past. Nowadays they are either forgotten or no longer taken seriously. Eliminative materialists think that the language that we have been using to talk about our minds since the ancient Greeks is in serious need of reformation and that in the end neurology or other brain-based scientific insights will give us a better picture of what is in our heads.

Critics of folk psychology point out that it is mistaken about many important mental phenomena that are being successfully explored by neuroscience, such as dreaming, consciousness, some mental disorders, learning and memory. 

On the other hand unlike alchemy, or astrology we have direct and immediate access to our own thoughts and feelings. We might be mistaken about the external world but can we be mistaken about our own desires and sentiments? 

The nature of pleasure

Mind Lab

This excellent website explores perception from blind spots to Libet's experiment in a series of four interactive sessions. Sessions one and four are particularly interesting but all of them are worth working through Follow this link to go to the main menu. 

Brentano and Intentionality

Franz Brentano (1838 – 1917) defined psychology as “the science of mental phenomena”. He proposed a number of criteria to distinguish mental from physical phenomena including:
1. mental phenomena are exclusively the object of inner perception,
2. they always appear as a unity,
3. they are always intentionally directed towards an object.

By intentionality Brentano means that mental states are about, or directed towards, an object. You cannot just perceive; you have to perceive something. The same goes for intending, believing, imagining, recollecting, wishing, willing, desiring, loving, hating, judging, knowing, and so on.

Thus mental states refer beyond themselves to objects that may or may not exist; you can perceive an apple in front of you or you can imagine an apple that has no physical existence.