ABSTRACT
What is it to have a mind? I’m certain that anyone reading this book has a mind, and I am certain that tennis balls do not have minds. But what are the special properties we consider ‘minded’ beings to have? Do other animals or human infants share them? Is it possible for nonorganic things like computers to have these properties? This chapter considers some answers to the question of what it is to have a mind (henceforth the Question). We begin by examining the claim that minds are made of a substance
which is completely different from the stuff that our bodies are made of. This view has become known as Cartesian dualism (or ‘substance dualism’) after its most famous proponent, the French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650). It is dualistic because it posits two kinds of substance: material substances occupy a certain amount of space (and our bodies and everything else in the world are composed of them), while immaterial substances do not occupy any space. According to Cartesian dualism, minds are made of immaterial ‘thinking’ substance which does not occupy space. As a consequence, the part of me that thinks exists independently of the body. Cartesian dualism answers the Question by claiming that having a mind requires having an immaterial ‘thinking’ substance. Few contemporary philosophers defend Cartesian dualism. However,
it is important to understand the shortcomings of this view in order to properly grasp the significance of the theories of mind which followed it. This is a technique frequently employed by philosophers facing a tricky question: by understanding why a particular answer to a question fails, one is then in a better position to try to construct a new answer that does not fail in the same way. As we will see, certain philosophers thought that Descartes’ dualistic approach to the Question was the root
of its failure to provide an adequate answer and that a better strategy would be to claim that there is only one type of substance of which everything, including minds, is constituted. We will examine two different ways of developing this strategy. Through exploring the transition from Cartesian dualism to views
which only posit one kind of substance we will gain the conceptual tools we need to tackle a different kind of answer to the Question. It is common practice in philosophy, psychology and related disciplines to treat the mind as a kind of computer. We explore their reasons for doing so in the second half of this chapter. A word of warning before we continue: much has been written about
the issues discussed in this chapter and my aim is simply to give you some insight into a few of the formative questions in this field. At times I will relegate to a passing remark questions that philosophers have devoted their entire lives to examining. This is not to demean the importance of these issues, and where I can I will point you to other resources which explore them more carefully and rigorously than I am able to do here.
