A Collection On the Mind-Body Problem

A collection of articles has been translated to Farsi and will appear soon in Iran, together with introductions to each part. The collection has five parts: dualism, behaviorism, identity theory, functionalism and eliminative materialism; it concludes with Kim's "Mind-Body Problem after 50 years" and McGinn's "Solving the Mind-Body Problem". I thank Ned Block for his detailed introduction to my translation of his "What Is Functionalism?" and "Troubles With Functionalism", Lynne Baker for hers to my translation of chapter 7 of her Saving Belief : "Instrumentalism: Back from the Brink?" and Dennett for his to my translation of his "True Believers". Here's Dennett's nice introduction:

Scientists are making dramatic progress on figuring out how the brain works. In a few special sorts of cases they are even quite good at saying how, and why, brains cause bodies to act as they do. The brain is an extraordinarily complex collection of biological mechanisms, but its operation is not too complex to resist science forever. Meanwhile, non-scientists—everyday folk, and even children—continue to do what they have always done: figure out what people are going to do by recognizing what they want, what they know, and how they intend to achieve their goals. Our anticipations are not always right; sometimes even our closest friends baffle us with their unexpected behavior, but in general we are confident in our expectations, and those expectations are confirmed in due course. For instance, we all casually risk our lives by riding in cars on highways, quite certain that the drivers in the oncoming cars (1) see us, (2) believe correctly that a collision would probably be fatal, (3) strongly desire not to die or to kill, and (4) know how to avoid that unwanted outcome by guiding their intentional behavior, safely steering their vehicles on non-collision courses. This is all obvious to us, and it is couched in the terms of what I have called “folk psychology”: seeing and hearing, believing and wanting, hopes, fears, intentions, decisions, and so forth. Minds are easier to read than brains! How do we do it? We do it by using a strategy—adopting a stance—that treats all people (and most animals, and even some robots) as rational agents. We do this instinctively, without having to understand the reasons why it works. This permits us to ignore the unbelievably messy and unknown details of their brains’ hardware and concentrate on the informational level, where much more simplified, if slightly risky, calculations can be effortlessly made. This is what I call the intentional stance. We can compare it to other strategies to understand both its power and the risks associated with it. It works because evolution has designed us to be quite good approximations of (ideally) rational agents. If we understand our competence at mind-reading in this way, many of the traditional conceptual problems about the relationship between mind and body dissolve. The huge gap between knowing and wanting on the one hand, and neurons and brain waves on the other hand, is accounted for in a scientifically conservative way: no miracles, no mysterious emergent properties, no ‘wonder tissue’. Minds are what brains do, seen from the perspective of the intentional stance.
Much of this account of the nature of folk psychology is now accepted by both the philosophical and scientific community, but there remain significant pockets of skepticism. There is a widespread belief that on this analysis beliefs and desires and thoughts do not emerge as “real enough” entities in their own right. I have tried to assuage that suspicion in subsequent essays, especially in “Real Patterns,” Journal of Philosophy, 1991. But “True Believers” remains the best introduction to the concept of intentional systems and the intentional stance we use to understand them.