Q&A w/ Yale Professor David Charles - The Mind-Body Problem | UCD Agnes Cuming Lecture Series (2018)

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00:00 Thanks so much for this. So I completely agree with you that the Cartesian way of thinking causes lots of trouble and I really like the way you try to bypass this problem with Aristotle.

I was just wondering what would be your view about other ways of dealing with this. There’s many traditions that could help us with this problem. I am thinking of Buddhism that do a much better job of [dealing] with questions of the mind.

What would be other traditions that could be helpful to get out of this problem? And really the question is, to what extent is modern science … committed to this sort of physicalist project?

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04.14 So this is meant to be a question rather than an objection but there may be an objection behind it. Some of the examples you use, but not all of them, clearly involve psychophysical processes, capacities, etc, and not events, weaving as your primary example, and revenge, but they involve something further, namely the world.

You can’t weave unless you have material. So it seems to me that an extended mind would be a better picture, a fuller picture let’s say, than just an embodied mind of capacities etc. So I just wanted to see what your reaction (was to that).

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06.00 So these are world-involving processes because you don’t want to lose the process either.

06.26 So the understanding of process becomes very complicated because it’s a process that actually involves something beyond the process. So the weaving involves an object that is not necessarily part of the process.

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07.38 This is really more about what you said yesterday. It occurred to me when you summarised it today. You talked about the two-component theory again. It seems to me that really there are two very different kinds of component theories and yesterday you talked a little bit about component theories of emotion.

It seems to me they don’t really fall under the same … devices because typically what they would do is they would isolate the cognitive component and then there is sort of the non-cognitive component but they are not really committed to this non-cognitive component as purely physical. Where there would be desires, feeling, sensations.

So okay granted they are well, psychological (inaudible). So one part of the question is whether you want to reject both types of component theories and I think one must (inaudible) to reject this second type of component theory because I think there is a really, really convincing case in support of it.

So when I think of some emotions that have a peculiar feature that one small bit of information can just completely pull the rug underneath so if you learn something or if you just see something in a different way, the emotion just evaporates in an instant.

And it looked like the cognitive component, once you take that away, the emotion has a self-sustaining dynamic to it, and once you take out the cognitive component, so once the thought

“I have been wronged”, once that is, in one flash, is overturned, the whole emotion collapses in itself.

And that seems to me something the component theories of the second type are in a much better position to explain than the non-component theory of emotion.

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12.38

So I have a question, and it might have to be the last one I’m afraid.

It was interesting in introducing teleology quite late on in your talk and my question is, is it doing work for you in explaining, or perhaps persuading us, of the fact that a certain kind of psychological capacity can’t be reduced or understood in terms of non-psychological, physical, or certain other physical capacity, I beg your pardon, psychophysical capacity, can’t be understood in terms of brute physical capacity.

So in terms of weaving, is it really the capacity to weave properly, one might say, as opposed to (inaudible) the capacity to weave, understood in some kind of non-normative or non-teleological way, that makes that capacity somehow the sort of capacity that would be absurd to think of consisting of, or reducible to, other capacities that aren’t characterised in that normative or teleological way.

So one can get, if you like, a kind of capacity of a chemical substance, understood perhaps in capacities of physical molecules and so on.

So one can make certain kinds of reductions on capacities, arguably, you may not think so.

So just talking about capacities and processes doesn’t automatically rule out this kind of reduction, so the question really whether the introduction of teleology is the key.