Topics Mind

Question Many philosophers think that mental states can be reduced to physical states. It seems to me however that properties such as sadness and happiness are adjectives that apply to a person's mental states. It doesn't make any sense to say "this is happy brain tissue" does it?

Accepted:
March 9, 2011

Comments

That reasoning is suspicious, as you can see when you use it in another domain. You might say a certain ice sculpture really isn't just a bunch of H2O molecules, because the sculpture is beautiful; and surely the molecules aren't beautiful. That would be bad reasoning. We know the sculpture just is the molecules (what else could it be?), so we simply have to get used to the idea that a bunch of molecules can be beautiful. Likewise, we might have to get used to the idea that brain tissue is happy, if the reductionist view of mental states is generally well supported by arguments. Admittedly, that sort of talk sounded odd to me too when I first encountered the idea that the mind is the brain, but I can't say it sounds terribly odd any more.

The question of how emotions are related to brain states is an excellent one. Empirical research has long been underway to try to identify areas of the brain associated with emotions; the best-known exponent of this research program is probably Antonio Damasio, who has articulated his approach to the relation between emotions and the brain in several popular books, including Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Very few philosophers would deny that there is some relation between mental states and brain states--indeed, even the paradigm early modern dualist, Descartes, believed that there was some relation between most mental states, with the exception of clear and distinct ideas, and brain states--but there is considerable disagreement about the nature of their relation.

Some philosophers have claimed that mental states are identical to brain states; some philosophers have claimed that mental states supervene or causally depend on brain states; and other, far more sophisticated accounts of their relation have been articulated. A philosopher who wanted to claim that, for example, happiness just was a certain brain event wouldn't, however, say 'this is happy brain tissue', for such a remark would reflect precisely the sort of confusion of mental properties and brain properties that her reduction was meant to avoid: rather, she would say that the emotion of happiness just is a certain state of the brain.

The idea that mental states just are reducible to brain states, so that, to take an old example, pain just is the firing of C-fibers, or that some emotion just is the stimulation of the relevant part of the brain, however, seems problematic, for it seems to leave out the experience of the mental state in question, what might be called the 'qualitative feel' of the mental state. (This is not to imply that someone who makes this objection to the reduction of mental states to brain states is committed to identifying the mental state in question with a feel, or, to use the term of art, a 'quale': it is a further, deep, question, whether there are indeed qualia.) But if we grant that something goes on in the brain when one has an emotion, then, in addition to the empirical question of just what goes on, there remains a philosophical question: what is the relation between the mental state and the physical state? This question, a version of the 'mind-body problem', remains alive and well and continues to fascinate and puzzle philosophers.

I might just add one further observation here. At the risk of sounding pedantic, 'happiness' and 'sadness' are not adjectives (as you suggest). They're nouns. The corresponding adjectives here are the words 'happy' and 'sad'. Now, I would agree with you that there seems to be something deeply peculiar about a sentence like "this is happy brain tissue". Admittedly, and as Sean Greenberg indicates, philosophers don't tend to seek to reduce mental states simply to brain tissue but rather to states of that tissue. But still, that doesn't help: the sentence "this is a happy brain state" or "this brain state is happy" doesn't sound much less jarring. However, I think the reason why these sentences sound so harsh is not because we're here talking about a neurological state as opposed to a mental one. It would strike me as equally peculiar to say "this mental state is happy". That's because I disagree with your suggestion that we apply these adjectives to mental states at all. We do apply the nouns to them: the word 'happiness' is just the name of a certain mental state. But, when it comes to the adjectives, these are terms that we apply to people, not to states of those people. The proper thing to say is surely something like "this person is happy" or "this is a happy person". And the occasion for saying such a thing is when the person is in the state that we call 'happiness'. But this doesn't seem to depend in any way on the ontological status of that state. Regardless of whether happiness should turn out to be just a mental state, or alternatively a state that is in some way both mental and physical, we could still say all of the same things about the person: "this person is happy", "this person possesses happiness", etc.