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Knowledge Mind & Language |
The great difficulty you may think behaviourism runs into is the reality of conscious experience. What the identity hypothesis does in a way is to take conscious experience seriously, but to say it is not anything non-physical.
It concedes that besides the reality of physical events in the body (and particularly in the brain) there is the reality of conscious experience: yet it proposes that these realities are one and the same.
A conscious experience, for example a pain I have, is to be regarded as being a particular neurophysiological event or sequence of events in my brain.
It is vital to see that this suggestion is not simply that each conscious experience has a pattern of brain activity associated with it (which would be a dualistic view).
It is that the conscious experience just is a particular pattern of events in the brain.
One way (potentially misleading) of expressing this idea is to say that there is one thing that looks differently from two points of view.
A neuro-surgeon looks at a patient's brain and sees it from the outside as a physical object, and perhaps, indirectly, he observes some of the processes within it. But the patient him or herself, whose brain it is, has an inside view of the brain and it is this inside view which constitutes his or her conscious experience.
The same physical process which the neuro-surgeon observes from outside constitutes for the insider his or her conscious thought.
As the lightening is to the discharge, so a person's sensation of pain, for example, is to a certain pattern of events in the brain.
Is this a difficulty? :-
It may be argued that if I were to day-dream about a forthcoming holiday it would not make sense to ask exactly where in the brain my thoughts were.
(It is partly the fact that it seems inappropriate to locate conscious experiences spatially that leads us to say they are not physical.)
But a particular event or sequence of events in the brain can be located precisely. How can the daydreams and the brain events be one and the same?
The article to read is UT Place's: 'Is consciousness a brain process?' (Lycan, 2nd edition, 1.)
Straw vote
What does your neighbour think at this stage:
that consciousness is a brain process
For
Against
Place carries on where the behaviourist leaves off. He says that a great many mental concepts are to be understood as the behaviourist says: as dispositional, as about dispositions to behave and not about mental events.
'In the case of cognitive concepts like 'knowing', 'believing', 'understanding', 'remembering', and volitional concepts like 'wanting' and 'intending,' there can be little doubt, I think, that an analysis in terms of dispositions to behave is fundamentally sound.' Place, in Lycan, p.30.
But he says, as we said, that that leaves a residue. There are some mental concepts for which it is difficult to think of a plausible dispositional analysis.
His examples are: pains and twinges 'how things look, sound and feel', 'things dreamed of or pictured in the mind's eye'.
His thesis is that there is nothing logically confused in thinkng that these may turn out to be processes in the brain.
He has no wish to deny, he says, that these things are events and processes which 'are in some sense private or internal to the individual', so that in that sense he thinks they may continue to resist behaviourist analysis. They are events and processes that do occur, and they are events and processes that are in a sense private to the individual.
He is not trying to show that statements about sensations are to be understood as statements about brain processes.
Note that this is the type of claim we have just been seeing the behaviourist make. A statement about someone motive Ryle proposes should be understood as a statement about the person's disposition to behave in a certain way. If he is right, it should be possible to translate the statement about motivation into a statement about a disposition to behave.
This is not the type of claim Place wishes to make.
He is not claiming that statements about sensations (eg) are reducible to, or analyzable into, statements about brain processes.
He does not want to say that statements about sensations (eg) simply are, if properly construed, statements about brain processes.
They are, he says, clearly not, and he gives three proofs of this.
What is he saying then?
His claim that consciousness is a brain process, or that sensations (eg) are brain process is meant, he says, to be a reasonable scientific hypothesis.
Most philosophical commentators misunderstand this point and attack the thesis because they take it to be emplying the 'is' of identity.
His thrust therefore is to attack those that have denied this.
Place says some people assume straightaway that there is an obvious logical absurdity is saying that consciousness simply is a brain process.
In terms of an example
they say there is an obvious absurdity
in saying that my feeling a pain just is a physical event going on in the grey matter.
Those who think there are probably making a mistake about the meaning of 'is', Place says.
There is an 'is' of definition and an 'is' of composiition.
Here is the 'is' of definition:
And here is the 'is' of composition:
Sentences with the 'is' of definition are necessary statements, true by definition. They are are true in virtue of a link between the meanings of the expressions on either side of the 'is'.
Sentences with the 'is' of composition are contingent, have to be verified by observation.
It just so happens that the expressions on either side of the 'is' are applicable to the same object.
Which of the 'is's is involved in the claim that 'consciousness is a brain process' or 'my toothache is a brain process' ?
Place says critics who accuse the claim of logical absurdity are probably think of it as involving the 'is' of definition. They are taking it that it relies for truth on the meanings of the expressions on either side of the 'is' being the same. - on 'consciousness' meaning the same as 'brain process'.
They then point out that these do not mean the same! They point out that it is not a logical contradiction to say
'Consciousness is not a brain process'
or
'I have a toothache, but nothing is going on inside my brain'
But Place is not saying that these are logical contradictions.
He is saying that the 'is' involved when he defends the claim that 'consciousness is a brain process' is the 'is' of composition.
He is saying it is a contingent claim, needing verification through observation.
The first example he develops, as a possible parallel for the claim that 'consciousness is a brain process', is the statement that a cloud is a mass of tiny particles.
Here we do not have the 'is' of identity. If we say that a cloud is a mass of tiny particles, , we do not mean that statements about clouds are to be understood as statements about masses of tiny particles.
Nor that statements about clouds are reducible to, or analyzable into, statements about masses of tiny particles.
To say that a cloud is a mass of tiny particles is to report a discovery. It could have been otherwise.
'Cloud' and 'mass of tiny particles' actually mean quite different things, so that, for example, 'there is no contradiction involved in supposing that clouds consist in a dense mass of fibrous tissue.'
It is just that observation has led us to see a contingent truth, that this is what clouds are.
There is though a limitation to this analogy.
You see what a cloud is by going closer and closer to it, magnifying it. You don't get at the composition of consciousness by subjecting it to ever more detialed scrutiny.
This is why he introduces a second analogy.
'Consciousness is a brain process' is like
'Lightning is a motion of electric charges'
Once again, as in the cloud case,
If we say this, we do not mean that statements about lightning are to be understood as statements about motion of electric charge.
Nor that statements about lightning are reducible to, or analyzable into, statements about motion of electric charge.
Empirical enquiry leads us to conclude that a certain kind of electric discharge gives rise to the type of visual stimulation which would lead an observer to report a flash of lightning.
Place argues that scientists are often beguiled into dualism (and so into opposing the identity theory) by the thought that when you see something 'before the mind's eye' eg when remembering a place you've been to - there must be an object which you are looking at: not an object in the environment but a mental object, an 'image'. But this is an invalid inference. When we are imagining a place we once went to, we are not seeing a 'mental object' at all. What then are we doing? Place says all we are doing is having an experience which is like the one we had when we were actually there.
Imagine you ask someone to imagine the holiday they had last year.
They close their eyes and say:
' I see a glorious long beach of white sand.'
You commit the phenomenological fallacy, says Place, when you construe this as you having an entity in your mind - eg an 'image' - which is literally long and white.
He says this is a mistaken interpretation of what is happening. You are not, when you close your eyes, looking at an object (eg an 'image') which has certain properties (long, white).
The correct account is this. The experience you are having when you shut your eyes and think of your holiday is like the experience you had when you were actually in St Tropez or wherever and looking at the beach. Its not 'looking at something': ' it's having an experience which is like looking at something.
The significance for identity theory is this.
If you think of your report of remembering the beach as having an object in the mind which has certain properties you are committed to their being such objects in the mind. But these supposed objects can't be thought of as literally in the brain - you surely can't suppose that if you opened up the skull and poked around a bit you would eventually find one. The critic has an argument against identity theory therefore. S/he can say: there are objects - mental objects - which aren't physical. Eg there are 'images' which aren't physical. (They are 'mental'.)
But if you construe remembering the beach not as seeing a mental image but as having an experience which is like the experience you had when you looked at the beach all sense of there being mental images has gone. You are not reporting 'looking at an image': you are reporting having an experience that is like one you had before.
(Of course you have to be able to give an account of that (the original experience) which doesn't involve reference to an image as a 'mental object' either.)
(I'm not saying this is plausible - I'm just trying to give Place's argument.)
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VP
Revised 10:05:03