Philosophers tend to be very smart and creative thinkers. Research shows that philosophy graduates, along with physics graduates, are among the smartest people, Stephen Law tells Simonne Pace.

Philosophy encourages us to take a step back and ask ourselves searching and difficult questions about how we are living our lives and why we believe in what we do. It’s only by asking such questions that moral progress is made.

British philosopher Stephen Law says “research into those who rescued the Jews during the Holocaust reveals that the rescuers tended to be brought up to not passively accept whatever they were told but to think for themselves and take responsibility for making their own moral judgements.

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“If we want to avoid the moral catastrophes that marred the 20th century, I think raising young people to reflect and question in a philosophical way is a very good idea.”

In a world in which we are working harder and facing more problems, we are constrained to think more. Is the strain on our brain or on our mind? Are the brain and mind one and the same thing or two separate identities?

Law argues that the brain and mind cannot exist independently of each other. 

According to Law, the strain is on both “if your mind is your brain. Maybe it is. And if your mind is not your brain, why is it so busy?” he asks.

“The claim that the mind and brain are two separate substances is still believed by some religious people, but I think it’s now a minority view among both philosophers and scientists. However, if you reject Descartes’s ‘substance dualism’, you might still think that there are more properties than just physical ones,” says Law, who discovered philosophy while he was a postman in Cambridge and hasn’t looked back since.

“Perhaps the brain has certain physical properties, but also mental ones, such as the property of thinking about Paris, or wanting a glass of water.”

Dr Law, who describes philosophy as being an armchair discipline that solves conceptual and logical problems and puzzles, says science, on the other hand, is grounded in observation of the world around us using our senses. 

“I think many people think of science as being grounded in certain experimental techniques and other methods, which have been around for a few hundred years. To establish something through observation is not ‘doing science’. Science is a very refined way of finding out about the world by means of observation,” he explains.

It’s hard to see how minds could, even in principle, be brains

Is what goes on in our mind non-physical? Dr Law argues that if it isn’t physical, that raises a puzzle. 

“How does it affect what’s going on physically? If I say, ‘my arm now raising is caused by physical activity going on in my brain’ (and it is), can my mind have any effect on what my arm does? What if my mind decides not to raise my arm? My arm would go up anyway because of what’s happening in my brain! This is one reason why many believe that what goes on in the mind must be physical – it couldn’t otherwise have effects on my physical body.”

It seems to some people that minds cannot possibly be brains, Law points out. 

“There’s some sort of conceptual impossibility involved in minds being brains. But where there seems to be a conceptual obstacle to one thing being another, philosophy might perhaps be able to show that the appearance is deceptive. By doing some conceptual work we might be able to show that minds can be brains after all. If there is an apparent conceptual obstacle to minds being brains, science won’t be able to remove it. You will need a conceptual engineer to do that – a philosopher.”

Law hopes to show his audience that the mind-body issue stems from a scientific problem but also from a more fundamental philosophical and conceptual problem.

“It’s hard to see how minds could, even in principle, be brains. Many think they just cannot be brains. Just recognising that there are two very different kinds of puzzles involving minds and brains can be helpful and avoid arguing at cross-purposes,” he says.

Dr Stephen Law will be giving a lecture entitled ‘Philosophy of mind. Can physicalism be true?’ on Friday at 6pm at the Excelsior Hotel, Floriana, as part of the Philosophy Sharing Foundation’s annual conference. To register, e-mail philosophysharingmalta@gmail.com. Registration closes today at 10pm.

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