English Philospher Gilbert Ryle cane up with this thought experiment called “Ryle’s University Seeker” to help try and figure out the mind-body problem. Here is how it goes…
"A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments, and administrative offices. He then adds “but where is the university? I have seen where the mumbers of the colleges live, where the Registar works, where the scientists experiment and the rest. But I have not yet seen the University in which reside and work the members of your university.” It has then to be explained to him that the University is not another collateral institution, some ulterior conterpart to the colleges, laboratories, and offices which he has seen. The University is just the way in which all that he has already seen is organized. When they are seen and when their coordination is understood, the University has been seen. His mistake lay in his innocent assumption that it was correct to speak of the Christ Church, the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum, and the University, to speak, that is, as if “the University” stood for an extra member of the class of which these other units are members. He was mistakenly allocating the University to the same category as that to which the other institutions belong.
Ryles University seeker makes what many call a “category mistake” in assuming that the university exists in the same that libraries, museums, and laboratories do. Similarly, dualists make a category mistake in assuming that minds exist in the same that bodies do. Minds, like universities, are similar complex patters of behavior according to Ryles. To believe otherwise is to accpet what Ryle calls “the dogma of the ghost in the machine.” For Ryle, there’s nothing more to having a mind that having a tendency to behave in certain ways.
My question then is what relevence do you feel Ryle’s “University seeker” story has to a theory of the mind-body problem, if any at all in terms of it being a substantial entity, material or immaterial. I personally have found it helpful resolving mind-body questions even though it is more of a materialist theory in my opinion.
I studied some of this stuff in uni, although i can’t really remember the details all too well. Surely though the story is meant to illustrate that the mind doesn’t exist in the same way the body does, and to talk about them using the same terms is meaningless. Hence the mind-body isn’t a real problem but simply a result of incorrect use of language.
I agree with it. I find the idea of there being a seperate, immaterial mind which is the real you, your soul if you like, to be slightly ridiculous. I don’t see why ordinary matter, organised in an extremely complex manner, can’t produce subjective experiences. I am the matter that makes up my body and brain, or perhaps more precisely, i am the way my atoms are organised.
it is more or less the “system response” to searle’s chinese room “problem”. in discussing that, i have found ryle’s “category mistake” to be useful, but right now, it only makes sense for people who might dismiss dualism. one can simply contend that ryle was wrong, and that there is a mind that is separate from the body (perhaps the mind is the library, or some such).
i don’t believe such a position, and i think ryle has added something to the discussion by way of providing an example of the wittgensteinian idea that all problems of philosophy are merely problems with how we use language. the same idea came up in the current thread on free will. the theory there is similar; when people refer to a “will”, they do not refer to anything specific, but rather a conglomeration (a “system”) of things that bring about something we consider useful, though it may not be novel or distinct.
pointing out problems with how we use language is almost always useful, and i think “consciousness” may be one of the next victims of this solution-by-clarification process.
I agree that there is not a separate “mind” and “body”. But it is also important to understand that all matter is energy doing things in a pattern in such a way that you observe the pattern. As pattern it is noun, but underlying that noun, making and remaking it, there we have the verb, the activity.
We say “mind” to reference the activity that exists on a certain level, the thinking, the consciousness, self as verb, the mind. We know that underlying it, physically, is the body, including the brain, neural tissue, matter, self as noun, as thing. We forget that underlying that is more activity: processes, interactions, relationships, everything in motion, doing the energy dance that weaves the matter-nouns.
Consciousness is. It is not an illusion, insofar as if there were no consciousness there would not be anything it could be an illusion for, or to. So we wonder, speculate, argue about what consciousness is or where it is housed and how it is delimited. And here we commit our own category mistakes all the time, dismissing one accurate (if limited) description because there exists, on another level, another accurate (if limited) description. Is consciousness mind, or brain, or the dance of electrical activity, or the behavior of neuron cells, or the interplay of subatomic particles? Well, yes, those things and more.
The thought experiment seems to assume what it wants to prove. There may or may not be a mind that exists in the same way a body exists. Or, the mind may in fact be simply an emergent property. While the thought experiment describes two different categories of existence, it doesn’t prove anything about what the mind is or isn’t
The larger motivation in that methodology, such as it is, is to note that we normally don’t notice any problem with language. Usually only when we are doing philospohy do we come across such strange beasts as disembodied minds. I can’t remember the last time I used the word “mind” outside of a philosophical discussion and meant something that would be picked out by philosophical discussion.
I do have a problem with declaring that looking for the object that “university” picks out is a “category mistake”, because that usually implies a method of selection i.e. a way to determine membership in a set. While it is true that “universities” do have such a selection criterion (they grant recognized degrees, for instance), the same cannot really be said of “minds” or many other philosophical nouns that have been rerouted from everyday speech.
I rather struggle to see the significance of this “experiment”, since questions regarding the real or actual nature of that which a mere word describes have been flying around since Heraclitus and Plato.
Is a rainbow real? The foreigner could be told about white light and water droplets and still ask “but where is the rainbow?” - indeed, since water droplets are conglomerates of hydrogen oxide molecules, “where is the water?”, or “where is the molecule?” since it is really just hydrogen and oxygen atoms sharing electrons.
If he asked where the electrons were, I think I’d have to punch him.