Symbolic Systems Forum - Richard Rorty

Richard Rorty, "Is there a problem about the relation between the

mind and the brain?"

ABSTRACT:

Recent attempts to keep the mind-body problem alive typically divide it into a problem about how brains can have intentional states and another problem about how brains can produce consciousness. But intentionality is just aboutness. There is no problem about assertions can be about things, and one should think of beliefs and desires as modeled on sentences. Consciousness will only seem mysterious if one believes it to be possible that a being that behaves exactly like me or like you might nevertheless be a zombie--might lack consciousness. But that possibility is an hypothesis for which there could never be any empirical evidence. Whatever cognitive science may do, it is not going to shed light on the "mysteries" of the mind. For there are no such mysteries.