Philosophy: Arguing that thought is material?

Question

In my philosophy class, I made the claim that the mind is material. Mind is the essence of a person. The essence of a person is the way in which each individual thinks. The class agrees on this.

I say, chemicals and electrical signals make up thought, and since they are material, thought is material. I went into a little more depth, but that is the gist of it.

I girl in class critiqued me by saying that the thought process has a non-material property, but she cannot describe to me what it is. She says it is there because it just is.

The teacher now says I have to defend against this, but he does not want me to use scientific evidence on how the brain works. He says I shouldn't have to research the brain in order to defend my argument.

So... how can i defend my argument that the thought process is all material?

Answer 1

But it isn't.  It may be triggered by material and electric functions, but thought itself is still a mystery.

Answer 2

you actually got it the other way round.

Thoughts aren't materials, rather materials are made of thoughts!

Every object that has matter is nothing but a bundle of fluctuating energy and information.

Answer 3

your teacher is full of $hit and so is that girl, "it just is". what kind of an answer is that. i think she is just saying that because she cant come up with a proper explanation, she just fobs the question off with 'non-physical' talk because the mind is a very complex thing.

people used 'non-physical' explanations for many complicated things until the physics behind them was eventually discovered. one day we will understand the way the mind works and it wont require any non-physical things to explain it.

anyway, of course the thought process is material, how can it be anything else. if it exists in this universe then of course it is a physical thing. a person who is in a vegetative state has no thoughts, and brain scans show no electrical activity (thoughts) in the brain. i dont see what more proof anyone needs.

this is why i dropped philosophy long ago... its a bullshit subject full of ridiculous questions i think.

PS. that andrew guy below me is absolutely spot on about the conservation of energy bit. he has hit the nail on the head there. that is the perfect way to defend your argument, even it it probably is too scientific for your teacher.

Answer 4

Wait. Firstly, you question asks whether thought itself is material. Later you proceed to ask a second question: "how can I defend my argument that the thought process is all material"? Now, the thought process is not identical to thought itself anymore than the process of imagination is identical to the object of which we imagine. So, which is it? Do you want to defend that thought itself is material or the process by which we come to a thought is a material one consisting of chemicals and electrical signals?

Now, I'm not one to believe that thought itself is material; for anything material contains mass; and, what has mass necessarily has weight. Thus, our thoughts would contain weight. Am I to assume that when I have a thought of an elephant that I also gain that much weight from the thought of the elephant? Secondly, people would be losing weight and gaining it rapidly; for thoughts, in our everyday lives, our rapid. However, this is contrary to observation.

Further, even if the process of thought can be shown to be in some way material it doesn't necessarily follow that the thought itself is. You would have to find away around the critique that you would be committing the fallacy of composition.

Answer 5

The simple answer is that her theory is unnecessary.  We can understand the phenomenon of thought without postulating an unknown factor.  So the law of simplicity comes into play: why theorize chemicals, electricity, AND spirit, when just chemicals and electricity does the trick?

Answer 6

This is a bit long. That’s what she said. Sorry for both the joke and the length.

Well the first problem with dualism is that it claims there is some non-material part of my mind which interacts with the physical part of my mind. That’s not possible. If I have a thought, I can see things firing off in my head. Something physical happens. It’s why if you have a head trauma you can’t always think straight. The physical bit plays some role one way or another.

If my ‘non-physical’ thought is starting this process off then the law of conservation of energy, one of the basic tenets of physics, is violated. We can’t destroy energy and we can’t make it either which is what it seems would be required in order for a non-physical thought to have a physical effect.

Now, there might be an answer to this in microbiology but a) I don’t really understand it and b) we’ve got a few back up arguments.

First we can look at Occam’s razor. Occam said that we should not multiply the objects of the universe for no good reason. If we can fully explain something then there is no reason to postulate other things interacting.

The classic example is the motion of the planets. We can explain this fairly simply with physics. This means that we can do away with the medieval notion that the planets are being pushed by angels. Sure, they could be moved by angels but we have no reason to suppose that as we can already explain their movements without angels.

In this case, what does non-physical add to our concept of mind? The only real argument for the introduction of the non-physical is that it seems to rid us of the notion of fate that a pure physicalism seems to tie us to. If we are nothing more than atoms then all of our atoms could be mapped out and we become just another physics problem (albeit a very complicated one). We don’t need the non-physical for this though. We can instead use something like quantum physics wherein states are not determined. We can reintroduce some sort of ‘randomness’ into our minds.

So the non-physical doesn’t add anything there. What is it good for then? We can describe feelings and thoughts more easily (or in some cases at all) but our failures as scientists don’t determine the nature of the world. In all likelihood, we will solve those problems of description.

The last bit that dualism gets us is a sense of self that cannot be accessed by others. We alone are privy to our thoughts and there is no way someone else could get in there and fiddle with us or watch what we think. Fair enough. There is a comfort blanket to the idea of personal thoughts that are not aligned with the physical but again, it doesn’t add anything to our world and it makes the ‘physics’ of the non-material very complicated. Occam says no.

If you need more just ask. Again, sorry this is so long.

Answer 7

you need to separate form and content -for example just becasue a computer contains a novel (which is great creative work)  it does not mean there is anything like  creativity in the flip flops that store the data or the electrical signals that transfer the raw data into a comrehensible format. would "girl in class" claim the same of a computer - a non material  process must exist for a work of art to get from the hard drive to being displayed on a computer?

Answer 8

I think your philosophy teacher just wants you to not think of everything scientifically and work in your own opinion and unchanged thoughts about how the brain works. Simple as that.

Answer 9

"Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it . . . Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification." Ayn Rand

Existence and consciousness are "irreducible primaries."

"An axiomatic concept is the identification of a primary fact of reality, which cannot be analyzed, i.e., reduced to other facts or broken into component parts. It is implicit in all facts and in all knowledge. It is the fundamentally given and directly perceived or experienced, which requires no proof or explanation, but on which all proofs and explanations rest." Rand

The consciousness you wish to call material is NOT the action and reaction of chemicals and electrical signals. Those are the neuropathway substances; but a "thought" is a concept, and substances are not "concepts."

"Concepts" are a genus that is 'sui generis', precisely because it cannot be "reduced to other facts or broken into component parts." It is MORE than the sum of its parts in the same way that life is more than chemicals and electricity.

"Consciousness is the faculty of awareness—the faculty of perceiving that which exists." Rand

Surely "faculty" is more than the "material" you say it is. Is wisdom not more than words? Is life not more than birth, eating, procreation, and the other things that describe its appearance? Is not love more than chemicals and electricy? Emotions are reactions to value judgments about things that exist--are value judgments "material"?

You can argue reasonably that the "thought process" is CAUSED by material; but you cannot say that a thought is not an EFFECT. Effects are non-material.