Peter Tse - Why a Mind-Body Problem?

How does the brain produce the mind? This is one of the most difficult problems in science, because how can physical qualities, no matter how complex and sophisticated, actually be mental experiences? Electrical impulses and chemical flows are not at all the kind of stuff that thoughts and feelings are. The physical and the mental are different categories.



Peter Ulric Tse is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College. He holds a BA from Dartmouth (1984; majored in Mathematics and Physics), and a PhD in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University (1998).


Closer to Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[danieladmassu]

I am beginning to like this guy. He is more concise in the way he formulates concepts than most philosophers in the channel. Khun should engage him more with related topics.

[Robinson]

Love Peter Tse making so much sense all the time

[alexgonzo]

Peter Tse has a high quality mind, i always listen carefully when he speaks.

[firsttimejonny]

As always with discussions of the mind-body problem, this doesn't actually solve the fundamental issue and gets us nowhere. Very disappointing...

[shehrosemian]

Great discussion! Amounts without time do not exist--again an 'Einsteinian turn'. Some argumentation, though, suffers from metaphysical world-type fallacy. But it is all quite persuasive, engaging, and trodden with a genuine aim to be precise in language and reasoning.

[AnimatedLines]

Peter Tse always paints a picture that you can clearly see and analyse.

[MrPlaiedes]

The greatest mystery of all:
If you get Robert a black turtleneck for his birthday, will he be excited or disappointed? 🤔

[Robinson]

And the pattern of the simultaneous firing is the product of evolutionary environment interaction, so a history of 'externally determined will' which now locally turns into mental causation of (free?) will

[realcygnus]

How does this even scratch the surface of the quantity / quality quandary ? From the shoes of mainstream anyway.

[JungleJargon]

I tend to avoid the typical knee-jerk reaction of the mind to a given stimulus. This is the way I discover more insight than I would have had I had the typical reaction and just moved on. Because most of our reactions are based on previous learning often from what other people say. We have to investigate everything for ourselves rather than rely on the repetition of others, swallowing it hook line and sinker.

[philochristos]

I think mental causation is a problem on both physicalism and dualism. The only worldview that escapes it is idealism since there isn't really any mental causation in idealism. But idealism strikes me as being crazy.

[neffetSnnamremmiZ]

Mind is the in principle invisible, because uncatchable, you can only be it, like freedom, you can not see it!

[guillermocuadra]

If his argument can be formulated as: Neuronal activity does not trigger linear causation necessarily but it allows for a disturbance of that linear causation to be ready or potentially deviate from its original input. I can state it as let x belong to N, where N is the set of natural numbers and x belongs to the values that are divisible by 2 only. But, the brain allows for a series of x's such that it has the potential to be divisible by 3 as well, and so on. I think I can come to a point where such series of mental states or neuronal activity cannot follow that logic always without falling into a contradiction.

[conantheseptuagenarian]

i applied to this guy's lab several years ago. didn't expect to see him here.

[davetubervid]

He seems to be saying that his theory about different patterns of input to neurons causing them to have a potential to fire in the future is not a reductionist solution to the mind-body 'problem'. But I am not so sure. Isn't he just proposing a different mechanism (unproven?) for how physical events in the brain cause mental processes (the mind or consciousness)? Ingenious, beautiful maybe but I don't see how it solves the problem. Quality of experiences - the feel of things- can never adequately be explained by the way neurons fire (except in the most trivial sense). Perhaps the 'problem' is better described as the 'quantity/quality conundrum'.

[bluelotus]

Conscious awareness is not reducible to neuronal activity. Even physical reality is irreducible at its very core. As a matter of fact proteins cannot form without DNA and DNA cannot form without proteins.

[whytepirate]

Having several out-of-body experiences myself I like the radio receiver analogy for the brain the best! I'm just sayin'!

[jamesruscheinski]

Do mental events need mathematics? Might physical particles in neurons have mathematics that can be used for mental events?

[LucasGage]

I think it only becomes a problem, when you cut an equation in half and only focus on one side, assuming that is where it begins, when in fact, it is one phenomenon happening at once.

[Arunava_Gupta]

There are two ontological entities involved; a pure, conscious personality transcendental to the brain but connected to it, and the (material) brain itself which, unlike the former entity, is by nature unconscious and insentient. It is through association with the sentient pure personality that the brain is set forth into motion, conveying sense data for conscious perception (qualia arises here) and receiving motor commands for moving (voluntary) muscles et al.
Really, is this so difficult to infer and understand?