Assignment: (1) select a cogent passage from a part of a work we’re reading [in philosophy of mind, PHIL 520]; (2) accurately explain what this passage says; and (3) explain how it fits with the gist of the entire article.
Engagement Paper 2: U. T. Place’s Is Consciousness a Brain Process?
(1) “[…] the philosopher is unlikely to be impressed by the considerations which lead Sherrington to conclude that there are two sets of events, one physico-chemical, the other psychical. Sherrington’s argument […] depends on a […] logical mistake […]. This logical mistake, which I shall refer to as the ‘phenomenological fallacy,’ is the mistake of supposing that when a subject describes his experience, when he describes how things look, sound, smell, taste, or feel to him, he is 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.’”
(2) The phenomenological fallacy, the way Place describes it, makes any attempt to characterize that which exists in the world by verbal report alone as absurdly contrived as Descartes’ “clear and distinct” ideas, and no doubt that’s the end to which Place is aiming. When we describe the world around us, we make the mistake according to Place of believing that what we are describing are the actual properties of the things. This may seem unequivocally true intuitively, but there are certain limitations on the way that we perceive things. For instance, even though a rational human being with moderate experience can give a fairly good estimation of the length, breadth, and depth of an object in space if he has encountered objects like it before, carpenters and contractors haven’t stopped using tape measures, plumb lines, and bubble-levels. Colorblind individuals cannot correctly assess the colors of certain objects—but even this way of phrasing implies that there is a “correct” color, which is fallacious in itself, it seems, for Place: when we report the color of an object and our friends and spectrographs agree, that proves only that the majority of minds perceive the reflections of certain wavelengths of light off of various objects in a comparable way. So the discussion of a phenomenal field is, for Place, utter nonsense: we want to ascribe our consciousness to some ethereal place, hidden somewhere metaphysical, away from our bodies, drawing judgments about stimuli and directing the body to act on them in various and sundry ways. But this common way of speaking, he says, is mythological, folk nonsense. Place postulates that our there is no difference between the brain itself and all the mental factors to which the brain gives rise, i.e., that the answer to the question he poses in the title of his article is affirmative: consciousness is a brain process.
(3) Place was a pioneer of the identity theory of mind, the idea that brain processes could explain every mental state, intention, and mode and aspect of operation. In this paper, Place likens the debate over the mind being more than the constituent neurons that make up the brain and the interactions between them as being the same as a debate over whether lightning is an electrical discharge. Calling lightning “lightning,” he says, doesn’t diminish the fact that it is an electrical discharge; and knowing that lightning is an electrical discharge doesn’t diminish the fact that we can talk about it as lightning. So it is with the mind: we are merely arguing over two different ways of speaking about an identical thing when we distinguish between brain processes and consciousness. This article attempts to set forth that argument by various means. The point at which he talks about the phenomenological fallacy is perhaps the most convincing part of the article, where he admonishes his readers not to carry such folk notions as of our bodily perceptions being paraded in front of our souls in the theater of the mind; but rather, he says, we can more accurately talk about and describe the things we perceive in different terms. Specifically, we can only say that we are having an experience like the others of which we have been conscious in which we perceive a like object. For instance, in the case of a green afterimage, we are not seeing something green, but only experiencing something like when we see something green. In this way, Place argues, we will be talking with more accuracy about the experiences of our brains, since we will be using one brain process to describe another.
