Reading Notes: March 3rd, 2023

“If it is asked what is the difference between those brain processes which, in my view, are experiences and those brain processes which are not, I can only reply that it is at present unknown.” (Smart, Sensations and Brain Processes, 65) 

“Men have minds, that is to say, they perceive, they have sensations, emotions, beliefs, thoughts, purposes, and desires…But if we are convinced, on general scientific grounds, that a purely physical account of man is likely to be the true one, then there seems to be no bar to identifying these inner states with purely physical states of the central nervous system. And so consciousness of our own mental state becomes simply the scanning of one part of our central nervous system by another. Consciousness is a self-scanning mechanism in the central nervous system.” (Armstrong, The Nature of Mind, 67-79) 

“In my own paper…I argued that there are certain logical conditions which must be satisfied to enable us to say that a process or event observed in one way is the same process or event that is observed (or inferred from) another set of observations made under quite different conditions. In that paper, I suggested only one logical criterion, namely, that the process or event observed in or inferred from the second set of observations should provide us with an explanation, not of the process or event observed in the first set of observations, but of the very fact that such observations are made…. What is important is that there must be some logical criteria which we use in deciding whether two sets of correlated observations refer to the same event or to two separate but causally related events. The problem of deciding what these criteria are is a logical problem which cannot be decided by experiment in any ordinary sense of the term; and since we cannot be certain that the criteria are satisfied in the case of sensations and brain processes unless we know what the criteria are, the issue is to that extent a philosophical issue. Moreover, even if we agree on the nature of these logical criteria, it is still open to the philosopher to question the logical propriety of applying them in the case of sensations and brain processes.” (Place, Materialism as a Scientific Hypothesis, 83-85) 

“For it is a necessary condition for saying that something is identical with some particular physical object, state, or process that the thing be located in the place where the particular physical object, state, or process is. If it is not there, it cannot be identical with what is there.” (Schaffer, Could Mental States be Brain Processes?, 115-116) 

“If we take the word “mind” to mean “that in which mental processes occur” or “that which has mental states,” then we can put this view briefly and not too misleadingly as: the mind is nothing but the brain. If scientific progress sustains this view, it seems that man is nothing but a material object having none but physical properties….[This book’s] object is to show that there are no good philosophical reasons for denying that mental processes are purely physical processes in the central nervous system and so, by implication, that there are no good philosophical reasons for denying that man is nothing but a materialist object. It does not attempt to prove the physicalist thesis about the mind. The proof must come, if it does come, from science: from neurophysiology in particular. All it attempts to show is that there are no valid philosophical or logical reasons for rejecting the identification of mind and brain.” (Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind, 1-2) 

“If mental processes are states of the person apt for the bringing about of certain sorts of behaviour, and if these starts are in fact physical states of the brain, then introspection itself, which is a mental process, will have to be a physical process in the brain. It will have to be a self-scanning process in the brain. Now it is at once clear that this is always logically possible, at the very least, for such a self-scanning mechanism to yield the wrong result. For any mechanism can fail to operate properly. So if introspective knowledge is incorrigible, as is alleged, then Central-state Materialism is false. Nor is it possible to see how such a self-scanning process could yield a logically privileged access. Again, it is impossible to conceive of a mechanism which logically ensures that all states of the brain that are mental states are scanned.” (Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind, 102-103) 

“But now let us consider the mechanical analogue of awareness of our own mental states: the scanning by a mechanism of its own internal states. It is clear here the operation of scanning and the situation scanned must be “distinct existences.” A machine can scan itself only in the same sense that a man can eat himself. There must remain an absolute distinction between the eater and the eaten….Equally, there must be an absolute distinction between the scanner and the scanned….[It] seems clear that the natural view to take is that pain and awareness of pain are “distinct existences.” (Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind, 106-107) 

“Because our awareness cannot be an awareness of itself, there must always be ultimate awareness which is not itself an object of awareness. In Materialist terms, although the brain may contain self-scanners which scan the rest of the brain, and scanners which in turn scan the self-scanners, and so on as far as we please, we must come in the end to unscanned scanners….[An] awareness is distinct from the object of awareness…” (Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind, 112-113)