Minds and mental phenomena: an introduction

Course reviews

• 
  Kevin McCarthy 16 February 2026 7:00PM

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  Personally, section 5 alone earned this course the 𝗳𝘂𝗹𝗹 𝟱 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘀, despite the fairly frequent philosophical issues that a subset of readers might raise throughout the rest of the course. Put simply, read section 5 and then start from the beginning!
  
  2 “It might even be able to have limited visual, auditory and tactile perceptual capacities, in the sense of being able to discriminate accurately among various colours, shapes, sounds and surfaces” ...in terms of “limited visual “ this has surely been massively surpassed by AI humanoid robots for years.
  
  2 “a computer, for example, could never invent anything or produce a work of art” …(despite the later reference to “popular culture”) is a perfect example of how confidently people draw boundaries around what is possible, only for those boundaries to dissolve as soon as reality catches up. AI can already: generate original images; compose music; write poetry; design molecules; invent algorithms; create architectural forms; produce novel scientific hypotheses. However, one could argue that “a computer cannot intend to invent”, since AI does not have desires, goals, self-awareness or a sense of meaning, at not least currently! However, the line between “simulated” and “real” desire will, in time, become blurry; at some point, the distinction may collapse entirely.
  
  2 “there is no mechanical device that exhibits even a modicum of the affective side of mental life” …in particular the highly definitive “even a modicum”, especially given that affective like mechanisms are already present: reinforcement learning systems have reward and aversion signals; robots with homeostatic control have stress like states; adaptive agents show preference formation; affective computing systems detect and respond to emotional cues; large models exhibit valence like patterns in text generation; embodied agents regulate behaviour based on internal state variables.
  
  2 “romanesque mosaics” -> “Romanesque mosaics”
  
  2 “if angels have no material bodies, then they have no sense organs. Since they have no eyes or ears or noses, it seems that they cannot perceive the world in any way similar to us earthly mortals” and “For certain followers of Aristotle, such as Aquinas and other medieval scholastics, angels did not even have the power of imagination, for they thought imagination, like sensation, is a bodily process.” …this creates an assumed equivalence between no physical senses and no perception. In Christian angelology (Aquinas especially), this is simply not true. In actuality. Aquinas explicitly argues: Angels do not have bodily senses; Angels do not need bodily senses; Angels have higher forms of cognition; Angels perceive directly, not through organs. So, the sentence is misleading because it treats human sensory limitation as the standard. In classical theology angels have superior perception, not inferior, thus “Angels do not perceive through bodily senses, but through a higher, non material mode of cognition.”
  
  2 “according to scholastic theological tradition, since angels do not have bodies, they must borrow unused ones in order to deliver messages to earth” …in reality Aquinas calls these assumed bodies (corpora assumpta). They are not: corpses, borrowed humans, possessed bodies or anything remotely like that. They are temporary material manifestations, created for the purpose of interacting with the physical world. They should be thought of as: a projected appearance; a constructed physical interface; a materialised form suited to human perception; but most certainly NOT a “borrowed body”.
  
  2 “Descartes appears to have thought, despite the apparent agnosticism of the previous quotation, that the mental life of a temporarily embodied angel would have no sensuous phenomenological dimension at all; it would have no sensory experience but would simply make intellectual judgements about the state of its borrowed body. As he said in one of his letters explaining how mind and body are related in humans: ‘if an angel were in a human body, he would not have sensations as we do, but would simply perceive the motions which were caused by external objects, and in this would differ from a real man’”
  
  …Descartes is 𝗻𝗼𝘁 stating that angels were 𝒅𝒆𝒇𝒊𝒄𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒕. It is because he thought angels were 𝗽𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁. In his system: sensation is a 𝒎𝒊𝒏𝒅–𝒃𝒐𝒅𝒚 𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒑𝒐𝒔𝒊𝒕𝒆; angels are 𝒎𝒊𝒏𝒅 𝒘𝒊𝒕𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒕 𝒃𝒐𝒅𝒚; therefore, angels cannot have sensations. This is consistent within his dualism. Descartes’ actual meaning: the angel would intellectually grasp what is happening in the body, without experiencing it as a sensation.
  
  2 The neurological deficit in an embodied human that is described in the ‘The Disembodied Woman’ is 𝗻𝗼𝘁 a model of higher cognition and is thus 𝗻𝗼𝘁 relevant to the discussion. Descartes’ actual point is the opposite of what the text implies: angels 𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒍𝒍 𝒑𝒆𝒓𝒄𝒆𝒊𝒗𝒆 and they perceive 𝒎𝒐𝒓𝒆 𝒄𝒍𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒍𝒚 than humans.
  
  3 “some philosophers think, as Descartes seems to have, that the entire mental realm is itself the realm of consciousness and experience” …Descartes did 𝗻𝗼𝘁 think the entire mental realm is the realm of consciousness and experience. Descartes’ “consciousness” is 𝗻𝗼𝘁 our “phenomenology.” Descartes’ “experience” is 𝗻𝗼𝘁 our “sensory experience.” Descartes’ “thought” is 𝗻𝗼𝘁 our “cognition.”
  
  3 “The converse may not hold, however: it may be possible to be experiencing something when one is not conscious” …”may not hold” seems strangely tentative, especially given that modern cognitive science already provides clear examples where experience occurs without consciousness.
  
  4 Activity 3 “Having a belief, for example, does not seem to be any kind of experience, nor does having an intention or a memory.” There is perhaps a problem with saying beliefs have no phenomenology: Think the thought: “I left the stove on” vs. “I am absolutely certain that I turned the stove off”. These have different felt qualities — anxiety vs. reassurance — even if the propositional content is abstract. The argument that beliefs have no phenomenology attempts to isolate the propositional attitude from the emotional colouring; however, the separation is a theoretical move, not an introspective fact.
  
  4 Activity 3 “After all, you can want something, intend to do something and believe something all while you are in a dreamless sleep.” This is surely true only in a dispositional sense. When you are asleep, you still have the belief that Paris is in France, but you are not currently entertaining that belief. This is the same distinction as: 𝗢𝗰𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗯𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗳 (actively thinking it) and 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗯𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗳 (stored, available, but not active). Only the occurrent version is a candidate for phenomenology. So, the argument appears to equivocate between two senses of “having” a mental state.
  
  4 Activity 4 The argument assumes that the “pain feel” is metaphysically separable from its biological function, which is not obviously true.
  The underlying question: Is pain a representational state whose phenomenology is part of its representational format? Is the heart of the debate between: Pure qualia theorists; Representationalists; Hybrid theorists and Embodied/affective theorists. The discussion appears to be giving the qualia-first argument, but not the representationalist pushback.
  The discussion is circling around a fundamental issue: Is the essence of a mental state determined by its feel or by its function?
  Pain is clearly the perfect test case for “Is the essence of a mental state determined by its feel or by its function?” because it sits right at the intersection of sensory experience, bodily representation, affect, motivation and evolutionary function. Which makes it a microcosm of the entire philosophy of mind.
  
  4 “Some mental phenomena… …(with their intentional and visceral sides).” the spectrum model presupposes a modular mind. The text assumes: phenomenology is one “module”; intentionality is another “module”; mental states are combinations of these modules in different proportions. This is a very cognitivist, analytic way of thinking, whilst alternative traditions argue: Phenomenology and intentionality are not separable dimensions — they are two aspects of the same structure. This is the view of: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Contemporary “phenomenal intentionality” theorists. They hold the view, for example, that: pain is intentional, belief has phenomenology and fear is not a mixture but a unified mode of being-in-the-world. The spectrum then collapses.
  
  4 “Some mental phenomena seem to lie close to one end because they are virtually all attitude, as it were, such as belief…” Surely there is a distinction between believing reluctantly vs. believing confidently? There is a strong case that beliefs have a subtle but real phenomenology, if so, belief is not at the extreme end of the spectrum.
  
  4 “…some lie near the other extreme, being all but experience, such as pain…” Pain has the intentional properties: location (“my left ankle hurts”), evaluative (“this is bad”), motivational (“withdraw now”) and representional (“damage here”). So, pain is not “pure feel” unless you adopt a very specific qualia-first metaphysics. Representationalists argue that pain is essentially a representation of bodily damage and the feel is part of the representational format. If that is right, pain belongs in the middle of the spectrum, not at the end?
  
  4 “…others lie somewhere nearer the middle, possessing both attitudinal and experiential features, such as fear and disgust (with their intentional and visceral sides).” Fear has: a bodily feel (heart rate, tension); an intentional object (the dog, the cliff edge); an evaluative component (danger); a motivational component (avoid, flee). Disgust has: visceral sensations; an intentional object (rotting food, contamination); a moralized dimension (in humans). These are not “mixed” in the sense of being composites of two independent ingredients. They are integrated affective–intentional states. Phenomenologists would say: the intentionality and the phenomenology of fear are inseparable; the fear is the world appearing as dangerous.
  
  Section 5 Proved to be extremely fascinating, especially with regard to the AI implications for predictive processing. Some AI systems are at least moving in promising directions:
  • World models (DeepMind’s Dreamer, MuZero)
  • Generative embodied agents
  • Predictive coding networks
  • Active inference architectures
  • Large multi-modal models with internal simulation
  
  Further reading: perhaps also the following texts…
  • Andy Clark — Surfing Uncertainty (predictive processing)
  • Jakob Hohwy — The Predictive Mind
  • Shaun Gallagher — How the Body Shapes the Mind (embodiment)
  • Evan Thompson — Mind in Life (enactivism)
  • Lisa Feldman Barrett — How Emotions Are Made (constructivist emotion theory)
  
  References The following more recent editions updates would seem relevant:
  • Kim — Philosophy of Mind, 2nd ed. (2006)
  • Lowe — An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, 2nd ed. (2008)
  • Lycan — Mind and Cognition, 3rd ed. (2010)
  
  References
  Crane — The Elements of Mind (2001)
  • Crane’s later work (The Mechanical Mind, 3rd ed. 2015) is more up to date.
  
  Damasio — Descartes’s Error (1994)
  • Damasio has written major follow ups: The Feeling of What Happens (1999); Looking for Spinoza (2003); Self Comes to Mind (2010); The Strange Order of Things (2018).
  
  Dennett — Kinds of Minds (1996)
  • Dennett’s later work From Bacteria to Bach and Back, 2017, updates his views.
  
  Guttenplan — Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (1994)
  Superseded by:
  • The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind (2009)
  • The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Mind (2013, 2nd ed. 2021)

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• 
  Pamela Adam 28 November 2017 3:58PM

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  Good introduction to enable reflection to some of the philosophical issues of working in a mental health service. I liked the inclusion of spiritual beings as this gives a more holistic look at the subject. 

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