The Concept of Mind

"I actually remember his lectures almost better than anybody else’s, they were in a huge L-shaped room, with him standing on a podium in the middle—very dramatic. And the main burden of his lectures was that we should banish the ‘ghost in the machine’—dualism—which most philosophers had gone on believing since the time of Descartes. Exactly, and strangely enough, Anthony Kenny, who’s a Catholic philosopher, was still a dualist when he taught me and I suspect he still is. I have been told that there are still philosophers around in Oxford who are dualists. Yes, of course it does: if you want to believe in an afterlife, and you know perfectly well that the body decays, you are forced to believe that there must be something that can be independent of the body. The only experiment ever done to find out if that’s true was done by Peter Fenwick, a neuro-psychiatrist in London. He had this very good idea: some people, after heart attacks, tell you afterwards that they had out of body experiences and that while they were lying on the table in the operating theatre they were floating above their bodies. So he said, ‘I’ll test whether that’s true.’ So what he did—and he’s still doing it—is arrange a shelf high up, hanging from the ceiling in the operating theatre, and on it was a message; and he tested whether anybody ever read the message. He published a paper with Sam Parnia in 2014. Of course many people don’t have out of body experiences because they die; and of those that don’t die, lots don’t have out of body experiences; but of the few who report out of body experiences, none have yet read the message! Well, it’s not the beginning of philosophy of mind. [Bertrand] Russell wrote a book on the mind, and others such as William James. But I think that Ryle was a landmark, because most psychologists and neuroscientists now believe in physicalism—that is the belief that I am my brain, my body, and my past history. Ryle’s book was the start of that. The strange thing is that psychologists had independently decided that all there was was behaviour. I read psychology from 1964 to 1966 and behaviourism was still very dominant. I remember B F Skinner coming from the USA and giving a lecture in Oxford. He taught pigeons to do tricks by what is called operant conditioning. And the book that was given to students of psychology was by Charles E Osgood: Method and Theory in Experimental Psychology , which was extremely dull, all about rats running in mazes. The reason behaviourism was strong was that you can observe the inputs and the outputs, you can shine a light on a rat’s eye and see what it does, or you can present a pigeon with a choice between two lights and see what it does. You can control what goes in and measure what goes out. “The problem was, if that’s psychology, it’s deadly dull” Behaviourism at the time had banned words like ‘expect,’ ‘attend,’ ‘decide,’ because the dictum was that there was no objective way of knowing what, if anything, was happening in the head between the input and the output. Therefore, all you could talk about was the inputs and the outputs. So behaviourism ruled, and of course Ryle’s lectures were essentially arguing the same: you shouldn’t think of this ghostly mind in the machine, all there was was what people did and said. The problem was, if that’s psychology, it’s deadly dull. And indeed I found the first tutorials in psychology to be deadly dull. I was given, for example, tutorials on what are called taxes— Yes, it means movement towards or away from something. Worms, for example, move away from light. It didn’t seem to me to be very interesting from the point of view of human behaviour. Having gone into psychology because I was interested in crime, it seemed rather arid. Which is why, when I had tutorials with Anne Treisman, suddenly psychology perked up—Anne was interested in attention. Huh! That wicked word! She was doing experiments following up those that Donald Broadbent had done at what was then the MRC Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The idea was that you put headphones on and play different messages into two ears. The reason that Donald Broadbent had originally done this was that he was working on applied problems, one of which concerns the airport control tower. The controller will be speaking to many pilots so as to guide them in, and so will have to attend to what they say. The question is, how on earth, given the many voices coming in over the headphones, do you attend to one rather than the other? Donald had the idea that he would play different messages to the two ears, and he and Cherry Collins found that if you got somebody to repeat back what was in one ear, strangely enough they couldn’t tell you anything about what was played to the other ear. So it looked to Donald as if, somehow in the brain, what came into the second ear was being filtered out. When Cherry worked on it, he called it the cocktail party effect. Exactly: when you’re in a cocktail party, voices are coming from different directions, and you’ve got to use the direction of the voice that you’re interested in, even though the voices from other directions may be equally loud. So this was a very simple experimental way of looking at that effect. Yes, but Anne Treisman found if two messages are played to the two ears you do hear certain things on the unattended ear, like your name. So not everything is filtered out and meaning and familiarity are relevant."