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These areas give rise to some very difficult problems and questions, and there are many opinions as to their solutions and answers. This article attempts to suggest the scope of the philosophy of mind and indicate some of the important questions, but does not provide answers.
Is the mind nothing more than a series of particular thoughts, feelings, and so forth, or is it something over and above those particular thoughts, feelings, and so forth? When we ask that, we are simply asking what the relation is between the mind and mental events. In other words, we could simply restate the question in terms of mental events, like this: Is the mind nothing more than a series of mental events, or is it something over and above the mental events that we say occur "in" it? This article does not try to answer this question.
But of course there are other questions we could ask about what the mind is; we might raise the mind-body problem. Are our minds something that goes beyond our physical bodies? Suppose we think that the mind is a substance of some sort -- a mental substance. We might still ask: Is there some way to explain what the mind, a mental substance, is in terms of physical substance? Or will we maintain that the mind is something totally different from physical bodies, and that we cannot explain what the one is in terms of the other at all?
Suppose instead that we deny that the mind is some mysterious substance, and we hold instead that there are only mental events and that "the mind" designates no more than a series of mental events? We can still inquire about the relation between mind and body a different way, in terms of the relation between mental events and physical events. We can ask: Are mental events totally different from physical events, so that you can't explain what mental events are in terms of physical events; or are mental events somehow explainable as being the same as physical events - a view known as token-physicalism? For example, when John feels a particular pain P (at a particular time T), a particular mental event M is occurring (at a particular time T); now is that pain, P, even possibly the same as something that occurs in John's brain, such as the firing of some special group of neurons, M?
Another question commonly asked is whether mental properties (or states, or kinds, or [equivalently general term]) just are physical properties. Is the mental phenomenon we call 'pain' really just, say, firing C-fibers in the brain? This view is known as type-physicalism (or type-identity theory). A common argument against this view is known as the argument from multiple realizability: since animals we commonly attribute as being in pain have completely different neurophysiological systems, and thus completely different physical properties, it follows that pain cannot be one particular physical property, i.e., firing C-fibers found in humans. After all, surely dogs, other animals, and even reptiles are capable of feeling pain. (We could go as far as saying that aliens with utterly disparate physical systems are also, at least possibly, capable of feeling pain.) This type of argument is generally taken to be an argument against another related view known as scientific reductionism.
Identifying the mind with physical substances or properties is one direct form of materialism, and claiming that psychological theory (whichever flavor you wish) is reducible to scientific theory is another, albeit indirect, form of materialism. If we can show that all of psychology is reducible to neurophysiology, and in turn, neurophysiology is reducible all the way (perhaps via other special higher-order sciences, like chemistry) down to physics, then what we've shown is that mind is nothing above and beyond the physical. In effect, it is a two step process: i) reducing languages to each other, and ii) then claiming that the ontology (or objects) of the reduced science (psychology) is identical to the ontology of the reducing science (neurophysiology).
As alluded to above, many philosophers accept the thrust of the multiple realizability argument and thus reject both type-physicalism and redunctionalism wholesale. The argument has motivated another view known as functionalism which holds that mental states aren't physical, rather, they're functional. A functional state describes a relationship between certain inputs (sensory stimuli), outputs (behavior), and other mental states. A pain is functional in virtue of having a certain causal role. That causal role is determined by certain input stimuli and mental states, and determines future behavior and mental states. So although pain may not be identical to some one (first-order physical property like) firing C-fibers, it's at least identical to some (higher-order) functional state F. Generally, functional states are specified in terms of Turing machines states, which are completely describable by Turing machine tables. And so, one version of functionalism, machine-functionalism, identifies mental states with Turing machine states. Arguments such as Putnam's Twin Earth thought experiment, and Lucas' Godelian argument have been the forerunners against functionalism.
So far we've presented several different questions that the philosophy of mind asks: What is the mind, a substance or just a series of mental events? Is the mind somehow reducible to, or explainable in terms of, the body? Are mental events somehow reducible to, or explainable in terms of, physical events? Each of these questions are ways of interpreting the more ambiguous questions we started with, such as, "What is the mind?" and "What are mental events?"
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