Ep. 401: Mind/Brain Identity Theory (U.T. Place, J.J.C. Smart) (Part One)

The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

The episode explores the foundational 1950s papers by U.T. Place and J.J.C. Smart regarding Mind-Brain Identity Theory. The hosts debate whe

Key takeaways

• U.T. Place argues that consciousness being a brain process is a contingent identity rather than a definitional one.
• J.J.C. Smart utilizes the distinction between sense and reference, following Frege, to support identity of reference.

Main topics

• Mind-Brain Identity Theory
• Philosophy of Mind

Notable quotes

A sensation just is a brain process. Full stop, nothing extra, nothing left over.

Conclusion

The episode provides a deep dive into the historical roots of physical

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:07) You're listening to the Varsity Exam in Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 401 is something like, how can the mind be the brain? And we read two foundational articles in the Mind-Brain Identity Theory, UT Places, Is Consciousness a Brain Process? from 1956, and JJC Smarts, Sensations and Brain Processes from 1959. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see PartiallyExaminedLife.com. This is Mark Lintemeyer Speaker 2 (0:40) and nothing else in Madison, Wisconsin. This is Wes Alwan having an experience which is like what someone would be experiencing if they were podcasting from Cambridge, Massachusetts. And this is Christopher Heath running Speaker 4 (0:54) back and forth in North Hollywood, California. Speaker 1 (0:58) This is Seth Paskin walking into... A mass of tiny particles in suspension in Austin, Texas. Speaker 2 (1:06) You didn't want to say you were seeing like a striped multicolored Speaker 1 (1:10) patch or something? No. I genuinely could not have disliked the smart paper more than I did. Wow. Wow. I was surprised to Speaker 2 (1:21) enjoy them both, given my past prejudices. Yeah, I'm surprised to hear that, Wes. But yeah, when you see the multicolored patch example. It's the kind of thing that made me want to quit grad school as soon as I read this kind of writing. Sure. Speaker 1 (1:36) And then just the tenor of it is so, I don't want to say... Arrogant? Speaker 2 (1:42) No, I was going to say it's so cold and, you know, hey, maybe we don't have any consciousness at all. No one's feeling anything. That kind of thing. But now I understand, I think, the kind of important point. Yeah, Speaker 4 (1:56) it's important to contextualize it too, right? Like they're in the midst of behaviorism and dualism and they're where some of these, to me, pretty outlandish things are being stated, both behaviorism and dualism. And so knowing that they're responding to and trying to make sense of a middle position between those helps me with it coming across as kind of void of any passion. I don't know. Yeah, interestingly, we got to Speaker 3 (2:17) as optional additional things. Both these writers who were both at Adelaide University in Australia at the time in the 50s, we got to hear later from them. So the Stanford Encyclopedia article on the mind, brain, and identity theory is actually by JJC Smart. And of course, he's referring to himself in the third person. He could have written the whole thing as a diary. So fucking annoying. Describing his own article. But you get to see a little like what he sees the landscape as of, it was written in 2000, updated in 2007. He passed away in 2012. And then there was also an article, which I overall would not recommend, but by UT plays called 35 Years On, Is Consciousness Still a Brain Process? From 1989, where he actually responds to the Davidson paper that we read. So that was interesting, even though I didn't really understand all of it. It wasn't super interesting, but. No, but in both cases, I feel like the intro where they just like, yeah, we're still here. And these arguments are still relevant. And but one of them says, you know, at the time that these were written in the 50s, like dualism was the standard view. And now it seems like you can't even find somebody that thinks dualism is the preferred view. Although on this podcast, I feel like we have following the sentiments of Wes when we have treated these in the past. We have run into folks like. Chalmers and Ned Block and the what is it like to be a bat and all these people that Dennett was arguing against who seem to think, yes, there is some irreducibly mental thing that even if in some sense it is the same as a, you know, we want to be modest and say mind and body or mind and brain are the same thing overall. Still, there are properties that are irreducibly mental or properties that are irreducibly physical. And we'll look at these folks. I don't think they're entirely foreign to this. They admit that mental talk is different than physical talk and has a different logic to it. So it's not like for every mental term you can just translate. But I should have really changed my question for this episode, not from how can the mind be the brain, which is like Dennett's huge question that he takes up his giant book for. It's these, are there any a priori arguments that the mind can't be the brain? So they just go through them and rule them out. That's Speaker 2 (4:27) all. That would be a long question. But yeah, Chalmers would call himself a property dualist, and he might have the dominant position or he's at least the preeminent. And I think he does. Yeah, he does call himself a property dualist. And I think it's hard to get away from a dualism of some kind, as we saw in the smart paper, because even if you're doing identity, even if you're saying something is identical, there's the question of how it's identical. And then it's not clear the either you know, right, that one term on one side of the identity is going to reduce to the other. He has to add some arguments for that. So, for instance, if, you know, the standard example of an identity comes from Frege, the morning star is the evening star. This is the same planet, Venus, under two different descriptions. And one is not simply reducible to the other in some. obvious sense, right? Those descriptions don't just go away. Those descriptions are real, those different experiences of Venus. So it's not directly, it's not that the identity gets rid of one of those descriptions, although SMART is going to go a long way toward trying to do that by giving us a way of talking about qualia that does seem to be reductive and skeptical that qualia even exists. And that's going to involve something that sounds behavioristic, right? Talking about people's discriminatory behavior, and then this very general sort of language where it's the kind of discriminatory behavior that someone would engage in under certain circumstances. So you try to get rid of subjective experience talk, and then you can make an identity statement, which is more deflationary. But I just wanted to say, because I think it's important that Mark brought this up, that talking about identity doesn't necessarily immediately get rid of dualism. And because there's the dualism of the terms on either side of the identity. So that's a sort of dualism of meaning for sure. Yeah. Where we're not Speaker 4 (6:27) getting rid of the distinct meanings. We're just, just because we say they point to the same reference. Yeah. Speaker 2 (6:32) And for Frege, right. Those had ontological status. Those were like real things out in the world. Platonic. Speaker 4 (6:38) Yeah. He Speaker 2 (6:39) did think that. meetings, which these guys wouldn't like, but it actually wouldn't hurt their argument for them to be that. Seth, opening thoughts? Well... Give us the full brunt of it, of the dissatisfaction. It's quite Speaker 1 (6:49) different from the Dennett response. Yeah, you were so excited. I was very excited about Dennett because he's a much better writer. Sure. So I think the place paper, which was nice in the sense it's very concise, but he's very clear. He lays out kind of like, here's what I'm trying to say. And basically... It's a very modest thesis, right? Which is, I'm going to make an argument that tries to preserve the possibility that consciousness could be a brain process. Basically, I'm not going to argue for anything. I'm just going to say, if you believe this, it doesn't necessarily mean that you can't believe that. And then the smart paper was the one that really kind of frustrated me because the tone, for sure, is super annoying. But it had the feeling to me of being... like the worst example of the way analytic philosophy will just take something that potentially is not clear and misses the point and just hammer it over and over and over again. But also in his case, he bounces around. So there are whole paragraphs in there that could just be eliminated from the paper because they just, he seems to go off on a tangent, which, you know, we'll get to. But I think fundamentally I got put off just right at the very beginning of it. because, you know, he's talking about, he kind of falls into this Wittgensteinian, he references Wittgenstein and the idea that maybe consciousness is just a disposition to report or a reporting of things or something like that. And, you know, anytime you cite Wittgenstein, but don't actually pursue it, like that's already, he's an inveterate name dropper. But I was asking myself, okay, what if I don't report it? So if the experience is not happening externally, it's happening internally. How do you account for that? Is it different? Is it not different? And of course, you know, it just kind of glosses that. So I just got frustrated with it. But, you know, I, in my new life, as I'm trying to become fully conscious and connect with all living beings on the planet and be compassionate, I did attempt to extract. what goodness and what insight I could out of it, which I'm sure we'll have an opportunity to get to at some point. Yeah. It'd be very uncompassionate of you not to report. Speaker 2 (9:08) Sorry. I was laughing because I was imagining you, one of these guys quizzing you. Are you imagining the roundish blurry edge after image with the yellow? And you saying, I refuse to report. I'm just not going to report. So what are you going to do now? Speaker 3 (9:22) We should say welcome back, Chris, for Dylan's, our continued summer absences or Dylan getting a new job absences and this train on philosophy of mind. So I think this is the last one, Speaker 4 (9:37) but who knows? I mean, I've enjoyed it. I've enjoyed talking with you guys and immersing myself in the stuff we've read and also sort of tangential things that I've... become interested in and reading through all the physicalisms and all that stuff. So it's been a pleasure. Although I do feel, I feel similarly frustrated like Seth does with especially the second paper. Maybe it's just because it's poorly written, but I appreciate the historical significance of these papers and sort of starting the program of identity theory and stuff. I do feel like in the philosophy of mind, I feel like an orphan, like I'm looking for my parents or something. and I can't find them anywhere. And so I'm just this lost orphan in terms of figuring out what exactly I think and where my own beliefs sit relative to the other positions. And then sometimes I feel like I just want to like put all of the concepts and the intellectual history from philosophy of mine. in a building and just set it on fire. I just feel like there's, I mean, I guess Dennett's kite example is another great sort of metaphor for that kind of thing. It feels very cluttered and difficult to clarify and it can feel Speaker 2 (10:39) overwhelming. I couldn't come on the Dennett episodes. I wish you had. Just, I, you guys should be so happy I wasn't on this. Wait, Speaker 4 (10:47) but did you listen to them, Wes? It's Speaker 2 (10:49) not. The second one's not out yet. I'm still holding out. I have Speaker 3 (10:52) one more. article that I had read by Dennett, you know, the more recent one that I'm trying to get Wes to do on Close Reads so that we can bear Speaker 2 (11:00) the brunt of that. I find consciousness explained to be so intellectually dishonest. That's all I'm going to say about it. That's what makes it unreadable to me. But these papers, I don't. I think these are honest. Their overall conclusion is uncongenial to me. And I think even Smart, in the end, admits that there's a very strong objection to him. that is very, very hard to overcome. And if it could be overcome, he gives you one of the ways that it might be overcome. It's very useful to know, to me, to know about this line of thought. It seems to terminate. It doesn't seem to work, I think, but it's very useful for someone to sketch out this direction and to see where it terminates and see, do you want to bite the bullet? And we'll get to that when we get to SMART. Speaker 4 (11:45) It does feel more cautious and exploratory than maybe someone like Dennett who feels more matter of fact in some sense. Yes, I'm surprised you guys Speaker 3 (11:51) are reacting to Smart's tone because I felt like he was not a smart ass. I felt like he was kind of following place and just like, we're careful. distinguished 1950s analytic philosophers and we're just laying out the premises and the, and whereas Dennett.