4 years later and I’ve finished my Philosophy and German degree. Two excellent things have come out of this. One, an abundance of trashing photos for Instagram. Just the thing to pep up my slightly-neglected-during-finals account: unbridled, foamy, confetti-splattered hedonism sponsored by Gillette lemon-and-lime. Secondly, I think I’m on the brink of bringing a little more peace into the world. It might seem a surprising source but Philosophy of Mind has helped me to settle a 92-year-old conflict. The great question hanging over every British kitchen cupboard. Jaffa Cakes: cake or biscuit? I’ve pinned down why we’ve puzzled over it at every teatime and I’ve managed to phrase an almost-answer in neuroscientific terms. It all comes down to whether you’re a functionalist or a physicalist.
In Philosophy of Mind, that looks a little something like this: If you’re a functionalist, you believe that a mental state, like ‘pain’, is defined by its functional role. So ‘pain’ is that mental state that’s caused by, say, bodily damage, and causes things like wincing, annoyance, looking for painkillers. Nutshell: a mental state is defined in terms of its causes and effects. If you’re a physicalist then you think that what makes pain pain is the physical stuff it’s associated with, or instantiated by. So the mental state ‘pain’ is associated with the stimulation of c-fibres. (This is a very favourite example of philosophers which I suspect no philosopher has even bothered to run by a neuroscientist, but it'll do for our purposes). So to sum up: Physicalist define things by what physical stuff they’re made of. Functionalists define things by their ‘functional’ or causal roles. The physical stuff doesn't matter to a functionalist. Now we get to the juicy stuff. It’s pretty easy to see what a physicalist would think about a Jaffa cake. Physicalists define stuff based on their physical makeup, remember - and physically, not to mention nominally, Jaffa cakes are definitely cakes. They’re spongy like cakes, and if you are one of those people who can open a box of Jaffa cakes and NOT inhale every single one within minutes, you’ll notice that the leftover ones go stale like cake - not bendy like old biscuits. Physically, then, Jaffa cakes are cakes. That much is clear. But let’s muddy the water a little. Say you pop over to a friend’s house and they offer you tea and cake. If they emerge with a pot of tea and a box of Jaffas - your host isn’t wrong, you suppose, to bring out Jaffa cakes when cake is promised. We’ve established that physically, Jaffa cakes are cakes! Why should this seem so counterintuitive, then? Let’s flip this scenario: imagine you’re offered tea and biscuits, and are presented with a box of Jaffa cakes. You might be a little put out if you’re a dunker (and if you’re not, please, may I say, reconsider it) and chances are the biscuit-cake debate will rage while the tea brews, but. All seems relatively in order. You were promised tea and biscuits and you’ve more or less been given tea and biscuits. Why does this work, then, when we’ve established that Jaffa cakes are physically cakes, not biscuit? It’s because functionally, Jaffa cakes are biscuits after all. They occupy the same role that we expect biscuits to occupy. They might not physically behave like biscuits (don't try dunking them) but in all other ways - they seem to! They're presented as biscuits, shaped like biscuits (in general: not forgetting bourbons, pink wafers, Choco Leibniz, and any other key non-round players on the biscuit stage), they appear with biscuits in the supermarket, they're eaten when you'd expect biscuits to be eaten. If you’re a physicalist, then Jaffa cakes are a cake. They are made of cake. Same way that pain is pain because of the stuff it’s made of. The functionalist doesn't care what they're made of - Jaffa cakes are, for most intents and purposes, biscuits, and that's enough to satisfy the functionalist. But what's the right answer? In Philosophy of Mind functionalism might just, just be the preferred theory out of the two (if you're interested, check out if and how functionalism comes out top in the chauvinism problem) and I think, in the high-stakes biscuit/cake debate, we might come down on the same side: the tea-and-biscuits or tea-and-cake scenarios seem to provide a pretty tempting answer. But we've still made some juicy progress here. We've taken the fight to Philosophy. It's no longer just 'biscuit or cake?', it's 'physicalism or functionalism?' We might not have found the right answer but at the very least we've added some serious neuroscientific fuel to the fire that rages every teatime.
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The official website of Yorkshire-made, Oxford-based writer Isabel Parkinson. Want fewer words and more pics? Follow me on Instagram!
(Header Photo: Radcliffe Camera, Oxford - Isabel Parkinson 2016)
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