
The Best Books on the Philosophy of Mind - prismatic
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/philosophy-mind-keith-frankish/
======
justinhj
In the early 90's I did a short undergraduate course about the philosophy of
the mind. The main text was Searle's Rediscovery of the Mind. I was never
convinced by Searle's Chinese room thought experiment and I always wondered if
I lacked the sophistication to understand the argument or whether the argument
itself made too much of an appeal to subjective rather than objective
reasoning. And so I find it interesting that Searle is not mentioned in the
article.

~~~
bobthechef
Everyone in this thread keeps claiming that the Chinese Room argument is bad.
Nobody says why.

~~~
Analemma_
Searle does not prove that the distinction between "actually understanding
Chinese symbols" and "simulating the ability to understand Chinese symbols" is
a real one. Physicalists, including me, believe this is just a confusion
generated from our inside view of our consciousness, and that "really
understanding" is just something a computer program thinks it can do once it
gets complex enough to be conscious. At the bottom level it's still just
pushing symbols around via syntactic rules (in the case of the mind, natural
law).

~~~
noam87
> "really understanding" is just something a computer program thinks it can do
> once it gets complex enough to be conscious.

At the same time, consciousness might not be a requisite of higher
intelligence at all; it could merely have been evolutionarily advantageous
early on in the development of complex brains because of our natural
environment... it's hard to imagine an intelligent animal with no "me" program
doing very well.

But maybe a digital intelligence (one that did not evolve having to worry
about feeding itself, acquiring rare resources, mating, communicating
socially, etc.) would have no use for a central "me" program that "really
experiences" things.

Such a creature is kind of eerie to think about.

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mistidoi
Pretty wild to me that David Chalmers' The Conscious Mind isn't included on
this list.

~~~
incadenza
Similarly, I’d put Nagel’s “What It’s like to be a Bat” as required reading in
that group as well.

~~~
ebullientocelot
^ Agree. This is a great paper.

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f00_
I think the most interesting and relevant strand of philosophy of mind is the
connectionism of Rumelhart, McClelland and the PDP Research Group (including
"godfather of deep learning" Geoff Hinton), exemplified in the tome "Parallel
Distributed Processing" released in 1986

It even has an accompanying manual on how to implement artificial neural
networks.

[http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/~plaut/IntroPDP/index.html](http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/~plaut/IntroPDP/index.html)

More along this line is found in David Marr's Vision: A Computational
Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual
Information

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WcIiSCDqhE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WcIiSCDqhE)

There is a spiritual successor to the PDP books called "Rethinking Innateness:
A connectionist perspective on development" lead by Jeffery Elman who did some
of the first research on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). It makes heavy
reference to Chomsky's work on language and innateness

[https://crl.ucsd.edu/~elman/Papers/book/index.shtml](https://crl.ucsd.edu/~elman/Papers/book/index.shtml)

This line of work even has heavyweight ancestors in Donald Hebb's work on the
neural basis of learning in "The Organization of Behavior" (1949) and the
noted austrian economist(?)/classical liberal and anti-communist Frederick
Hayek covered similar lines in his book "The Sensory Order" (1952)

I think this tradition is carried on in the work of Yann Lecun, who recently
released a talk titled "Deep Learning, Structure and Innate Priors"

[http://www.abigailsee.com/2018/02/21/deep-learning-
structure...](http://www.abigailsee.com/2018/02/21/deep-learning-structure-
and-innate-priors.html)

~~~
zerostar07
that would be "5 books on the philosophy of connectionism"

~~~
f00_
connectionism is an approach to the philosophy of mind, the most successful
approach as evidenced by recent deep learning hype

the only book in the OP I thought was even mildly relevant was the one by
Dennet, and it's generally acknowledged that it's pretty bad.

A more interesting but flawed approach, that resonates as someone who loves
Dawkins and Hitchens (atheists and advocates of evolution), is Gerald
Edelman's Neural Darwinism (1978). There is even modern research (that is
real, working code) at the University of Texas that could be considered a
successor to Edelman: NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44)

------
thomasjudge
The problem with a list like this is that each of the books - and more
importantly here, the selection of the books - has a very distinct view of the
problems and arguments. It's not at all objective. So in that way it may be a
little misleading for neophytes to the field.

~~~
adrianN
Is there ever consensus in Philosophy? The field pretty much retreated to
questions where we don't have objective answers.

~~~
rhizome
Philosophy teaches us that there's no such thing as objective answers. All of
us are beholden to subjectivity and perspective, which means we can't reliably
judge whether something is objective anyway. Consensus is moot, and I'd go so
far as to say that consensus is how you get religions.

~~~
jmoss20
Philosophy teaches you that? How?

Most working philosophers do not hold this view.
([https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl](https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl))

~~~
rhizome
First, I'm speaking for myself, not the orthodoxy. Martin Luther was 500 years
ago, after all.

Second, what am I supposed to realize via that link?

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RivieraKid
I never read a book about philosophy but found an answer to most philosophical
questions just by thinking, discussing and occasionally wikipedia. Took a
philosophy course, but it was mostly lot of vague words with questionable
substance. The core ideas in philosophy could be summarized on one page with
little information loss. This probably seems horribly arrogant, but that's
just how I honestly see things.

~~~
Scea91
Finding such an ignorant comment at the top of HN is quite disappointing.

Obviously, you are still in the first stage of competence
[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Four_stages_of_competence](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Four_stages_of_competence)
and you don't know what you don't know.

~~~
placebo
When someone tells me they know how to fly, I first ask them to show me before
claiming they are full of it.

Of course philosophy has value but I too am quite disappointed how easily it
enables very basic flawed assumptions to exist over eons even in what would be
considered high academic levels. To me it feels like the equivalent of
physicists today being divided on whether the earth revolves around the sun or
vice versa.

Personally I think both Searle and Dennet are essentially dualists (though
they'd both vehemently deny it), but each practicing a different form of
dualism: Searle promoting some mysterious consciousness as some ghost in the
machine, and Dennet protecting physicalism which in my book negates any
subject from existing, in complete contradiction to the reality that any
object (physical or otherwise) will always be just a model in someone's
experience. I see Dennet as trying to squash dualism by giving the model more
validity than the very real experience from which it arises, where the better
path to eliminate dualism would be to try and get to the source of this
division.

------
willgriffin
Perhaps add 'The Mind Matters' by David Hodgson to this list. Especially
interesting as the author has a pressing need for practical pragmatic
guidelines to his behaviour, rather than engaging in a purely academic or
abstract exercise (Australian High Court judge in New South Wales).

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aaachilless
I use this site pretty regularly to bootstrap reading about topics that I
haven't much familiarity with. Even if the 5 books aren't the best, they're
almost always enough so that I can direct my own continued reading. A great
site for going from 0 to 1 in some topic, so to speak.

------
manjushri
"The mind is material" seems like a funny hypothesis to me, given the massive
unknowns in quantum theory --- we don't even know what "material" _is_
fundamentally.

~~~
edanm
By that logic, I can't say "this brick is material" either, because we don't
know what "material" is.

But really that's just arguing over words and definitions. We know what we
mean when we say material (certain properties and behaviors), and as far as I
know, we have just as much reason to think that a brick is material as that a
mind if material. We don't need to understand literally _everything_ to be
able to make predictions about how things behave.

~~~
manjushri
I can show you a brick. Can you show me a mind?

~~~
tebugst
This is irrelevant. You don't have to show brick every time. We say sugar is
sweet. No body experience how sweet is defined by other. Still we all believe
it is sweet.

~~~
edanm
That's a bit different. The definition of sweet is basically defined as "the
experience you get when eating sugar". It doesn't matter for this purpose if
that experience is completely different for you - all that matters is that we
both know that "sweet" is basically a synonym for "your experience of sugar".

Note that this definition allows you to predict a lot of things:

1\. You can predict that you'll have the same experience when eating other
things which are not sugar, but which you know cause the same experience in
you.

2\. You can predict, at least in broad outlines, whether people will find this
experience pleasurable or not (again, on average, broad outline, but still
better than chance).

3\. You can predict that someone without a sense of taste _won 't_ experience
anything when eating sugar.

That's why this definition is meaningful. Of course I can play word games all
day about "can you show me 'sweet'???". But those are word games that are
trying to hide the idea of what a definition is and what we use it for.

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tonyedgecombe
That's an interesting site.

