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

The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

The hosts of the Partially Examined Life podcast continue their analysis of mid-20th century philosophy of mind, focusing on U.T. Place's "Is Consciousness a Brain Process?" and J.J.C. Smart's

Key takeaways

• U.T. Place argues against the "phenomenological fallacy," claiming that describing experiences as having internal properties mistakenly reifies subjective reports into ontological entities.
• J.J.C. Smart defends strict mind/brain identity, using analogies like the morning star/evening star and seven being the smallest prime greater than five to show how different descriptions can refer to the same physical process.

Main topics

• Mind/brain identity theory
• Phenomenological fallacy

Notable quotes

"The phenomenological fallacy on which this argument is based depends on the mistaken assumption that because our ability to describe things in our environment depends on our consciousness of them. Our descriptions of things are primarily descriptions of a conscious experience and only secondarily, indirectly, and inferentially descriptions of the objects and events in our environments."

Conclusion

The episode provides a rigorous breakdown of classic identity theory while

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:07) Hey, you're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 401, part two. We've been talking about UT Place's article, Is Consciousness a Brain Process? We will, at some point here, fairly shortly, get to JJC Smart's Sensations and Brain Processes. But I think we are just about to get to section five, the Physiological Explanation of Introspection and the Phenomenological Fallacy. And Seth, you had finished us up last time by, I think, expressing some skepticism about the idea of scientific essentialism, that what somebody says lightning is, motion of electrical charges, they're not just giving a property of it. They're trying to establish what the scientific explanation of it is. And metaphysically, we might say he doesn't use this, that, you know, that's the... The essence, the real thing that is the lightning. Of course, we could be wrong about it. It's not like we're intuiting the essence. We're scientifically exploring the essence. But still, once we found it, and Kripke would go so far to say, once you found it, then even linguistically, like when we refer to water, we are in fact referring to H2O. We're not just referring to whatever liquid might be sloshy and clear and drinkable. So we actually are even the logic. Once you've established the essence, the logic comes to reflect the newly established Speaker 2 (1:29) essence. So there could be another world where, sorry, I'm just trying to piss off Seth. Yeah, let's. Mark, I thought you were going to resist referring to Crypto. Yeah. No, but. It was on my mind. No, but it's a good example. Speaker 1 (1:44) But Speaker 2 (1:44) the part, but to me, the more controversial thing is the phenomenological fallacy. That's the thing to get. pissed off about. Speaker 1 (1:50) Yeah. Well, and I think the thing here is this is not a negotiation. It's not like I'm upset with the situation. It's and not the interlocutor. It's this. Okay. We start with lightning is a motion of electric charges. And then lightning is, we say like, oh, that makes sense. That statement, lightning is a motion of electric charges is validated because in the cases, where observation and observation is made by the man in the street, as he says, of lightning, we are able to, we could, in theory, scientifically measure the motion of electric charges. And thus, we say the motion of electric charges is the cause of the observation by the man in the street of lightning. So, we've moved from a statement of identity to a statement about causality of perception or observation. Speaker 2 (2:56) Yeah, it's proposed and it's, he doesn't justify it, but he's trying to say, he's trying to ask the question of when are we entitled to make these identity statements in these particular types of cases? And the proposal is that we can make them when the one layer is what I'm calling it, right? Explains the Speaker 1 (3:20) other. Right. So my question is just simply this. Does it make sense to you to talk about a notion of causality and a notion of identity to connect the notions of causality and identity in this way? Speaker 2 (3:34) I don't know, but it's a way of distinguishing the moon tides example, right? Not all things that are correlated are identical. So it's a better candidate for identity. Speaker 4 (3:44) Well, right. So the moon is a causal one, right? The moon causes the tides. So he's not saying, so I think this is like I was saying last time about the, where smart will say, if it's correlated, then it's not identity. And likewise, if it's causal, it's not identity. You are identifying two things if you say they're in causal relation. But I think that. Smart just sees science as a matter of there's some fluidity in these categories, right? That correlation is the first level. Causation is a tighter level of connection. And identity is the tightest of them all, such that you could. I don't know that I'm completely answering your Speaker 1 (4:25) objection, Seth. Well, the idea that you're saying it's a continuum and that identity is tighter than causality gives me a different way of looking at it. Speaker 4 (4:33) In Speaker 2 (4:34) these cases, it must include the. I think intuitively we would say there's something about composition going on here too, right? The things are made up of, right? And this is what he wants to call the identity of composition. So we get composition plus causality. What is it made of? Speaker 4 (4:54) Well, and we had this notion of upward causality in Avicenna, right? It was one of the sort of Aristotelian. You don't necessarily for causality have to have two events. that are discontinuous in time, one is before the other. You could have the nails and the organization of the wood and the wood itself be all the causes together of the house in that sense of causality. So I think that's Speaker 2 (5:19) the Speaker 4 (5:19) sense of causality that Speaker 2 (5:20) would have to be at play here. So in the case of the brain and mind in section five, we need to be able to say that the subject's introspective reports can be explained by what? occurs in the brain. That's the identity at stake here. And then we get the, you know, what he calls the physiologist worry, which I think would be something like the zombie worry that we have, you know, that Chalmers brings up today, but it's right. It's not a logical self-contradiction. Speaker 2 (5:51) To think that we could have an experience that doesn't have a brain state behind it. Right. Or maybe I'm characterizing this wrong. No, Speaker 3 (6:02) that's the claim that that's trauma zombie argument, right? That there's no logical contradiction between these things. It might be that they're not like, it's not nomologically possible. It's not like physically possible, but there's no logical contradiction between you can have an experience without a brain state. Yeah. Speaker 2 (6:14) More narrowly. It's we can't logic, right? There's no a priori. derivation of particular experiences from what's happening in the brain. All we can do is say, oh, let's observe this brain state and then see what someone's reporting. And then they give us the report and then we establish a correlation. But we can't say why it's this particular, speaking of electricity, right? It's all electricity. We can't say why it's this particular pattern of discharges that is this thought and this particular pattern of discharges, which is that thought. So I think that's in the same domain, that kind of worry. Basically, the physiologist is Speaker 3 (6:49) worried about two parallel events, right? One that's mind stuff and one that's physical. One that's physical and one that's like psychic or whatever, cyclical. They're Speaker 2 (7:00) worried about those two things. So the physicochemical and the cyclical, and they interact, as Sherrington's claims. And to bring in one of the examples that we used in the Dennett, when you Speaker 4 (7:09) want to describe how somebody is hearing a stereo recording that makes it sound. It makes it appear to them like that the drummer is in front of you to the left and the guitarist is in front of you to the right. The physiologist is going to understand how the music was recorded onto the whatever the medium is and how the medium is coming out through the headphones. Give, you know, give your electronic account of that. And then physiologically, how the ear is taking it in and passing it to somewhere in the brain. But then he says, vision, this is a quote from this Charles Sherrington. Vision is saturated with a strange property called projection, the unargued inference that what it sees is at a distance from its seeing self. So in this case, the last steps of, well, how does the brain then convert it to the sensation of somebody hearing the drummer over there and the guitarist over there? It seems that there is, as we were discussing ad nauseum with the Dennett, a phenomenological, a phenomenal field in, you know, just based around this one sense, the auditory sense of some things being closer to the right and some things being closer to the left that we now see what smart and place they're going to say is like, well, the experience I'm having right now is as if the drummer were in front of me to the right, et cetera, but it's not then. So the, the phenomenological fallacy, when the subject describes his experience, when you describe how things look, sound, smell, taste, or feel to him, he's describing the literal properties of objects and events on a peculiar sort of internal cinema or television screen, usually referred to in the modern psychological literature as the phenomenal field. Speaker 3 (8:46) Which Speaker 4 (8:47) is the Speaker 3 (8:47) critique Dennett has of the Cartesian theater, essentially. Yep. Maybe a little less radical, but it's there. How do we feel about that? So yeah, Speaker 2 (8:55) we're up to the green after image. Wes, does that bother you? Well, it bothered me in Dennett, you know, because I don't, I never took the claim of Locke, for instance, to be that we have this right. And even as it's, is it smart? I think smart is the one who concedes this ultimately. is yeah they were never saying that ideas are green or something like that or that we have the that our experiences are simply of right intentionally of the ideas the ideas are the intentional medium and it's they are the thing through which we grasp reality or sometimes not you know sometimes we're deceived so i think it's it seems to me to be a simplification of the view, although Smart is fully aware of this. So I don't know. Yeah, Speaker 3 (9:48) this is where they Speaker 1 (9:48) diverge, Speaker 2 (9:49) the papers for sure, and how Speaker 3 (9:49) they deal with, we'll say, qualia. The phenomenological fallacy is one. And then, of course, Smart wants to say, well, we can translate this stuff into something more topic neutral. But he acknowledges, you're right, that there's something here that we should be concerned with. Whereas Place just thinks they're just making a mistake. Nothing is green on whatever television screen you think you're watching or whatever in your head or something like that. Speaker 2 (10:10) Yeah, so it's a little, I mean, I don't know. You know, the thing is, I feel like I don't fully understand. Maybe Mark can explain it. There's something here. There's something interesting about this idea that experience is a kind of process. And in a way, it's as a process, it's right. What is a process? You know, it's happening in the brain. We can think of that as a process. But when we. talk about what's happening subjectively at the process level, well, in a way, that is, there's no qualia at the process level. I'm giving a very vague, intuitive, trying to get at, you know, what I think might be appealing about this, but I don't think I can do a very good job of it. I don't know. Mark, do you have? Speaker 4 (10:55) Well, this is, I think, is very clearly not behaviorist, right? He starts this essay by saying, look, despite what the behaviorists are saying, And maybe you could say, you know, maybe we can translate you having a dispositional belief that the world is round to when it comes up in conversation, you will say things like, yeah, the world is round. You will make your travel plans. If you're going to go, you know, if you're going to visit all these places, you're not going to, you know, come back to your home. So you're going to go around the world. You're going to be okay with, you know, so maybe dispositionally we can be behaviorists, but there are certain experiences like the reporting of a pain where place says there's something going on inside us. And so he has no problem with saying, I am experiencing a green after image. That is, we're never going to get rid of your report. That the question is, is the. content is the intentional content of that, which seems to be the green afterimage. Is that an actual thing in our ontology Speaker 2 (12:00) or not? And he wants to say it is not. He's not a behaviorist, but he is an illimitivist. So in a way, there are no such thing as qualia, I think, which are which smart will say more. Yes. More openly and directly. And I think we. At an intuitive level, I think, at least I, and I assume you guys, you know, it's kind of hard to wrap your head around that. Maybe you got into this in the denet, any sort of a delimitivism about consciousness or qualia. I can say that I'm beginning to maybe understand the appeal of it a little bit more, but like Chalmers, right, I don't know how you do that. Because if you say it's an illusion, I forget which philosopher made this point first, but, you know, to say that my... the qualia read at this given time is just illusory. Well, I don't see the distinction between an illusory qualia and the actual qualia. I forget if Dennett responds to it, but he probably does. Yeah, I mean, some people say qualia are seemings, and Dennett does Speaker 3 (12:54) acknowledge we have seemings. So some people think that means he's wrong about whether we have qualia. That's alive. Yeah, to me, the seeming just would be Speaker 4 (13:02) the qualia. What are they seemings of? Are the qualia the mere having of an experience? Because then why even introduce the word qualia? Or are they the thing that the experience is of? And I really like that he's presenting this. You know, we had this detour into epistemology a couple years ago where we read Reed and then we read the Nyayas. And they had the idea that, you know, that was reiterating what was in Searle's book that we talked to him directly about, which Wes has already referred to, the accusation that the modern philosophers, Descartes, et cetera, Locke, We're saying that because of the problem of illusion, even in the veridical case, we are never experiencing directly the external object. We are always experiencing our own filtered idea of it. And of course, physiologically, we understand. that we experience via the senses. And the senses are not necessarily, in some sense, they might be passing an image back or at least there's a judgment that occurs. There's a discrimination that occurs somewhere along the way. So yes, there is, there are things that can go wrong in our perceptual system so that we are no longer, you know, we're not direct realists, you know, not the least. because of this basic Hegelian thing that like, well, we're always bringing in concepts, right? This is the Kantian point. So there's always this, some mechanism that hooks us to the outside world. But that is not to say that we are always just experiencing our own idea. In fact, let's just say we're experiencing the world. And then when we do have an illusion, we're saying I'm having an experience that is like. when I was experiencing the world. And in fact, we only are able to have illusions. We're only able to diagnose them as illusions because normally our experiences are veridical, are causally connected to the world in this way. Speaker 2 (14:52) Yeah. This is why he uses the phrase literal properties of objects. They want to leave the properties out there in the world. It's not that we have, right? It's not representationalism where there's some way in which the properties are inside of us and are representational. screen or whatever. And so the properties are out there. And yeah, we explain illusions by saying, yeah, we're having the sort of experience that we would have if we were experiencing the object and we were normal observers and blah, blah, blah. Speaker 3 (15:23) Yeah. I mean, this is again, I harped on this a little bit in the Denon episode. This is why I think visual metaphors aren't as good at teasing out why you might be interested in something a qualia or felt experience, because I'm totally on board with the idea that we don't see a green on some screen that we're When we have the kind of brain process that's causing a mistaken report, it's just the type of process