Smart and Materialism

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Smart's "Sensations and Brain Processes"

• Smart's concern and target is consciousness.
• Important point!: in 20th century philosophy of mind, there is no longer any clear one thing that is being explained or reduced. For some it is consciousness, for others representation, etc. So always ask yourself, what mental phenomenon is at issue here?
• Smart sees materialism as an application of Ockham's razor: it is more simple to suppose that physico-chemical explanations will succeed.
• Still, consciousness has been one area that seems resistant to physical reduction.
• Reduction is NOT about meaning. Clearly, "x is a pain" does not mean "x is a brain state of such and such a kind". But, it could be a contingent scientific fact that x was such a brain state.
• Smart considers 8 objections (our book lists only 7 of them)
  1. Ignorant people can talk of experiences. So how can they be brain states of which such people know nothing? Reply: we can refer to a thing without knowing its true nature. Consider lightening.
  2. Brain-experience identity must be contingent, but then if an experience could be something else an experience is not essentially a brain process. Reply: meaning need not match facts. Whether the terms could be used differently does not change what is the case.
  3. Consciousness has irreducible properties. I see an apple, but I also see red. Reply: When one says "I see red," they are saying something equivalent to "I see what I see when I am looking at a red thing." There are not two things here: red property and apple-appearance.
  4. An afterimage is not in physical space, but the brain process is. Reply: I am not claiming an after-image is a brain process, but that the experience of having an after-image is a brain process.
  5. Brain properties are not the properties of conscious experiences. Reply: his theory has it that the experience and some brain state are the same thing, but not that the experience has all the properties of the brain.
  6. Sensations are private, brain states are public. Reply: The logic of the discourses differs, but with brain science advancement maybe they won't.
  7. I can imagine myself as a stone with consciousness. Reply: I can imagine that lightening is not electricity. But it is.
  8. How could material sensation language get off the ground, since they are (for us) private? Reply: Again: to describe a pain is like saying, "this feels like when I'm burned." To describe a color is like saying, "this looks like a ripe macintosh apple." So, the naming for these things typically is for external behavior or phenomena.
• One noteworthy thing about the kind of arguments that Smart is worried about is that they are very much based upon how we understand our experience. This is perhaps the heritage of Descartes: my experience is somehow special in its immediacy and primacy.