“That which sees all is not to be seen; that which hears all is not to be heard; that which knows all is not to be known; that which discerns all is not to be discerned.” (Oupnek’hat, Vol. I, 202)
“He sees, but he can’t be seen, he hears, but he can’t be heard; he thinks, but he can’t be thought of; he perceives, but he can’t be perceived.” (The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad, 3.7.23)
“Just as one’s eyes are not a part of one’s visual field (Wittgenstein, Tractatus), so is one’s brain (without the aid of an autocerebroscope) not part of the world perceived” (Feigl, Some Crucial Issues of Mind-Body Monism, 306) [The italics are mine]
“The doctrine which I defend, then, may be encapsulated in the slogan: mental processes are nothing but a certain sort of physical process in the brain.” (Armstrong, Epistemological Foundations for a Materialist Theory of the Mind, 180)
“Direct Realism answers that the immediate object of awareness is never anything but a physical existent, which exists independently of the awareness of it.” (Armstrong, Perception and the Physical World, xi)
“Objects have an indefinite number of characteristics….It is a logically necessary truth that if a physical object exists it is determinate in all its characteristics….The objects and properties of objects that are immediately perceived have an existence logically independent of their being perceived. There are objects and properties of objects that are never perceived, although it would always be logically possible for such unperceived things to be perceived.” (Armstrong, Perception and the Physical World, 25, 60, 192)
“Perception is a causal affair. If somebody perceives something, then it is involved in the perception; it is even involved in the concept of perception: that the thing perceived acts upon the perceiver, causing the perception of the object.” (Armstrong, The Nature of Mind, and Other Essays, 62)
“‘Objection-perception’ statements are statements like, “Jones saw a (the) fox.” Their general form is “A perceives O.” But the object perceived need not be an object in any narrow sense of the word. “The child saw the march-past” counts as an object-perception statement, although the march-past would be normally classed as an event or happening, not as an object. It is an essential feature of object-perception statements that they entail that the object perceived has existence. If Jones saw a fox, then, of necessity, there was a fox there to see. “A perceived O” entails “O existed”….But although object-perception statements entail that the thing perceived exists, they do not entail that the perceiver knows, or truly believes or even has the thought that the object perceived exists. Nor need the object perceptually appear to him to be the object that it in fact is….The fact is that object-perception statements are hardly cognitive idioms at all. This is connected with the fact that the argument-form: (1) A perceives O, (2) O = P, ∴ (3) A perceives P is a valid form. If A sees a table, and the table is a cloud of fundamental particles, then A sees a cloud of fundamental particles, although A be the most ignorant peasant in the world.” (Armstrong, The Nature of Mind, and Other Essays, 62)
“It is necessary first to consider more deeply the nature of object-perception statements. It is widely, and I believe correctly, accepted among contemporary philosophers that such statements entail that O is the cause of those perceptions of A that constitute his perceiving of O.” (Armstrong, The Nature of Mind, and Other Essays, 126)
“The Functionalist agrees with the Identity Theorist that every individual mental state/event (every mental “token,” as we say) is identical with some physiological state/event token; but she/he denies the Identity Theorist’s implication that for every type of mental state/event, there is a corresponding physiological type of state/event.” (Lycan, The Identity Theory and Functionalism, 3)
“There is no scientific evidence for the existence of an immortal soul, in either our own species or any other species. There is, on the other hand, a growing body of scientific data which indicates that all animals, including ourselves, can for most, and perhaps even all, purposes be regarded as organic machines, devoid of anything mystical.” (Cotterill, No Ghost in the Machine, 7)
“There is no field of experience which cannot, in principle, be brought under some form of scientific law, and no type of speculative knowledge about the world which it is, in principle, beyond the power of science to give. We have already gone some way to substantiate this proposition by demolishing metaphysics; and we shall justify it to the full in the course of this book. With this we complete the overthrow of speculative philosophy. We are now in a position to see that the function of philosophy is wholly critical.” (Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 47)
“We have a least a partial experience of our own bodies, but we do not generally perceive our brains at all. It is clear, however, that that is not impossible. It is merely contingent that we do not do so. The following science-fiction thought-experiment makes this plain enough. Suppose that in the future we found it advantageous (perhaps for security reasons) to take our brains out of our bodies, and keep them in a vat of nutrient fluid, connecting them to our body’s nervous system by wi-fi. In such a case it would be possible for me to examine my own brain as it lay sitting before me on the desk. My own brain would become one more among the many other objects within my experience. I could see it, touch it, or smell it, as well as apply to it more sophisticated modes of perceptual extension, such as monitoring its blood flow levels or recording its electro-chemical activity.” (Mander, Idealism, Narrative and the Mind-Brain Relation, 2)
“Now, seeing the general resemblance between the conception of life and the conception of consciousness, are we not to infer an essential similarity in their origin? Can we associate consciousness with the reactions of any specific material substance, as we associate life with the reactions of protoplasm? We most certainly can. Every modern psychologist agrees that consciousness stands in special relation to the functions of the nervous system. What we call consciousness appears on the objective side as the activity of certain portions of the brain. Specific physico-chemical reactions of nerve-tissue are an invariable aspect of all forms of consciousness. I propose, indeed, to show later that these specific reactions actually are consciousness, in precisely the same way that the specific reactions of protoplasm actually are life.” (Elliot, Modern Science and Materialism, 101-102)
“What is a state of consciousness? The untrained mind will, of course, immediately hypostatize it, and call it a thing. Let us, however, call it a process, and instead of regarding it as a thin and shadowy accompaniment of certain cerebral processes, let us boldly identify it with those processes, and say that it is one and the same. Immediately all difficulties vanish. You affirm that you move your arm by an act of will; I affirm that you move it by a cerebral process. We are both right; for the act of will is the cerebral process itself.” (Elliot, Modern Science and Materialism, 122)
“It seems to the ordinary observer that nothing can be more remotely and widely separated than some so-called “act of consciousness” and a material object. An act of consciousness or mental process is a thing of which we are immediately and indubitably aware: so much I admit. But that it differs in any sort of way from a material process, that is to say, from the ordinary transformations of matter and energy, is a belief which I very strenuously deny, and which I propose to discuss and elucidate at length in my final chapter.” (Elliot, Modern Science and Materialism, 143)
“In passing, I may point out the difference here disclosed between modern scientific materialism and the crude materialism of the ancients. They agree in declaring the uniformity of law; they agree in denying the doctrine of teleology; they agree that all existences are of a material character. But they disagree in their treatment of the alleged spiritual and unseen world. The ancient materialists believed to a certain extent in an unseen world; they believed even in the existence of souls. They asserted their materialism only by the theory that these entities were material in character. Democritus conceived the soul as consisting of smooth, round, material particles. The scientific materialist of to-day does not believe in any separate existence of this kind whatever. He regards what is called soul or mind as identical with certain physical processes passing in a material brain, processes of which the ancient Greeks knew nothing, and, indeed, which are still entirely unknown to all who have not acquired some smattering of physiology.” (Elliot, Modern Science and Materialism, 144-145)
“Mind is neural activity; matter is associated sensation.” (Elliot, Modern Science and Materialism, 210)
“Motion is an effect by which a body either changes, or has a tendency to change, its position: that is to say, by which it successively corresponds with different parts of space, or changes its relative distance to other bodies. It is motion alone that establishes the relation between our senses and exterior or interior beings: it is only by motion that these beings are impressed upon us—that we know their existence—that we judge of their properties—that we distinguish the one from the other—that we distribute them into classes. The beings, the substances, or the various bodies of which Nature is the assemblage, are themselves effects of certain combinations or causes which become causes in their turn. A cause is a being which puts another in motion, or which produces some change in it. The effect is the change produced in one body, by the motion or presence of another. Each being, by its essence, by its peculiar nature, has the faculty of producing, is capable of receiving, has the power of communicating, a variety of motion Thus some beings are proper to strike our organs; these organs are competent to receiving the impression, are adequate to undergoing changes by their presence. Those which cannot act on any of our organs, either immediately and by themselves, or mediately by the intervention of other bodies, exist not for us; since they can neither move us, nor consequently furnish us with ideas: they can neither be known to us, nor of course be judged by us. To know an object, is to have felt it; to feel it, it is requisite to have been moved by it. To see, is to have been moved, by something acting on the visual organs; to hear, is to have been struck, by something on our auditory nerves. In short, in whatever mode a body may act upon us, whatever impulse we may receive from it, we can have no other knowledge of it than by the change it produces in us.” (Holbach, The System of Nature: Or, The Laws of the Moral and Physical World, 15-16)
“McTaggart was one of the least linguistic of philosophers: he adverts to the use of words very little. I am far from thinking that what has been called “the linguistic turn” is always good for the solution of philosophical problems: all too often, the problem supposedly dissolved by an appeal to language replicates itself on the level of language—not surprisingly, because language is part of the world, not something contrasting with the world. For example, we cannot dismiss the problem of universals by saying it is an illusion due to our applying one word to many things; for the relation between the word “sheep” (as we say) and its many utterances is another case of that relation between the Sheep and the many sheep which we were trying to avoid discussing. Again, as we saw, the problem of synthetic incompatibilities cannot be disposed of by the linguistic turn: the same problem arises about incompatible sound-qualities in our utterances. So, upon the whole I think McTaggart’s not going in for language about language did him little harm.” (Geach, Truth, Love, and Immortality, 62)
“Characteristics enter into perceptions in quite another way. Perception of an individual substance is obviously perception of a substance as having qualities, and as having relations to other substances. And this does not mean merely perception of a substance that has qualities, or that has relations to other substances; it is perception of a substance as having qualitative and relational characteristics. It is fairly clear that you need not perceive all of the characteristics that an individual thing you perceive in fact has….If we see a thing as ABC, that does not mean that all that it is is ABC, and it does not mean that it even has to be ABC at all: we may be misperceiving. To sum up: we perceive a thing, not just naked, but as having characteristics; to affirm that a thing is so perceived neither is entailed by nor entails the proposition that the thing in question actually has those characteristics.” (Geach, Truth, Love, and Immortality, 115-116)
“To repeat: the supposed relation between consecutive terms in the series, say A and B, is that A is individuated by some relation to B, and this individuating characteristic will itself be a definite characteristic only if the individuation of B is already given. If this relation is supposed to generate an infinite series, A’s individuating characteristics depend for their identity on the individuation of B, and B’s individuating characteristics on the individuation of C, and so on without end: the individuating characteristics for any term in the series thus have a fixed identity only if the series has an end, but ex hypothesi it has none….[Furthermore,] if A’s individuation depended on the characteristic, [being a “perception of A”], but the identity of this characteristic depended on the individuation of A, we should run in a vicious circle.” (Geach, Truth, Love, and Immortality, 52-53)
“I conclude that we ought to accept McTaggart’s principle of Sufficient Description as a correct inference from the Dissimilarity of the Diverse, and therefore as necessarily true.” (Geach, Truth, Love, and Immortality, 54)
“I shall instead speak of the Principle of Ontological Determinacy: the adjective is meant to distinguish, but bring together, this principle and another principle we shall come to later, the principle of Perceptual Determinacy. The principle is: Nothing can have a determinable characteristic without having it in a perfectly determinate form. For example, nothing can have shape without having a perfectly determinate shape, or size without having a perfectly determinate size, or colour, without having a perfectly determinate colour. Vagueness and fuzziness can infect only our descriptions, not the actual things we describe.” (Geach, Truth, Love, and Immortality, 54)
“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)
“For in order that something may appear, a being is necessary to whole it appears. This “appearing,” however, has no significance except that of “being experienced.” Now, in order that the cognitive being may experience, sometimes A and sometimes B, it must manifestly pass over from one state, in which it previously was, into another, which previously was not. And we certainly cannot assume that this passing-over is only a variation in the external relations of this being to other beings, but that the being itself would be in no wise affected by such variation. For, in such a case, this being would not really experience anything, but would only appear to a third observer to be experiencing something. This, however, is contrary to the assumption; for we wanted to know, how it is that anything appears to such a being itself, and not how it can seem to a second being as though something were appearing to the first one. From what is said above it follows, therefore, that at least the percipient being must be conceived of as one that undergoes genuine interior changes, in order that the mere appearance of change may originate at all from the changeable relations of other unchangeable beings.” (Lotze, Outlines of Metaphysic, 47-48)
“The prime motivation behind the identity theory is of course physicalism: one can be driven into some sort of identity theory either because the alternatives are incompatible with thinking in a full blooded way of men and animals as no more than very complex physical mechanisms, or else because (like behaviourism) they are objectionable on other grounds. However it is dangerous to advocate a theory mainly on the grounds of the difficulties in its alternatives. There may well be congenial alternatives which have not been considered.” (Smart, Review of Dennett’s “Content and Consciousness”, 616)
“In Quine-like fashion Dennett points out that we do not assert the existence of sakes and dints: “for the sake of” and “by dint of” must be taken as unitary expressions which do not therefore imply “there is a dint” or “there is a sake”….As Dennett puts it, we view “sakes” and “voices” as being non-referential: for example we “fuse” the word “sake” in its context “for the sake of” and we fuse “voice” in its various contexts, such as “he has a good tenor voice”. Now this technique will not come as any news to the identity theorist, because he himself employs the technique of fusion. For example, the identity theorist fuses “image” and “sense-datum” in the contexts, “has an image” and “has a sense-datum”, thus avoiding the objection that when we have an after-image which is yellow with greenish and purple spots we do not have anything in our brains which is yellow with greenish and purple spots. Moreover, in denying that sense-data or images, as opposed to the having of them, exist, he makes use of such arguments as those marshalled by Ryle and other contemporary analytic philosophers, who have argued convincingly that sense-data and images are not like ghostly picture postcards.” (Smart, Review of Dennett’s “Content and Consciousness”, 617-618)
“The so-called “identity theory” may be characterized roughly as the theory that the mind is the brain, or more concretely that mental events, states and processes are brain events, states and processes. This is put forward as a contingent identification: it is not held to be part of (or at least the main part of) the meaning of “mental entity” that it entails “brain entity”. Otherwise the theory would have little plausibility, because quite clearly a materialist can talk quite happily about his aches, pains, itches, desires, emotions, perceptions, images, thoughts, and so on, with someone who does not know anything at all about brains, or who perhaps, like Aristotle, thinks that it is an organ for cooling the blood.” (Smart, Further Thoughts on the Identity Theory, 150)
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