JJ Smart

Sensations and Brain Processes

Roundish, blurry-edged after-image?What am I reporting?

If I report I am in pain, what am I reporting?

Am I describing an event or a behavior?

• Smart asserts that everything has to be physicalist in nature and so must be able to be defined in physical terms.

• As sensations and consciousness are left out of the physicalist picture, Smart says, “I just can’t believe that is so.”

Nomological Dangler

• Something that cannot be explained by laws of nature, and is not logically necessary, but must be accepted as true is a nomological dangler (nomo-law).

• This is unacceptable to Smart, and for the sake of simplicity, we have to find some way to make these mysteries explainable.

Explicable in Mechanistic Terms

• Smart says it seems to him that even human behavior, some day, will be explicable in mechanistic terms.

Sensations are Brain Processes

• By this, Smart does not mean:• Ache = Brain Process of Sort X• He also does not mean:• Sensation statements can be translated into

statements about brain processes.

Identity in the Strict Sense

• The general I see before me now is the small boy who used to steal apples before. The general is the time-slice now of the small boy who was before.

Lightning and Brain State?

• When he says the lightning is the same as electromagnetic discharge, he means that when we see the lightning what we are reporting is a brain event.

• “It is a brain state caused by lightning.” (58)• “We should no more confuse sensations of

lightning with lightning than we should confuse sensations of a table with a table.” (ibid)

Do we confuse the sensation of lightning with lightning?

Contingent Meaning

• What if we don’t understand brain processes at all? It may be contingent on knowing, like the Evening Star and the Morning Star are the same.

• We have identified each one as one in the same. This is not contingent (even if the physiological knowledge shifts).

Psychic Properties and Psychic Processes

• This is another objection that Smart proposes about his own theory. Psychic properties and psychic processes are not identical just like the Morning Star and Evening Star are not completely identical because of how and when we use them. There are differences.

• It is a very round about answer which winds up with discriminating between two similar things is not that important in physics.

Objection 4: After-image and Brain Process are not in the same space

• The after-image orange and the brain space are not in the same place – therefore the after image is not a brain process.

• Smart replies, I am NOT saying the after-image is a brain process – the after image is an experience and the experience of the after-image is a brain process.

Shape, speed, movement do not apply to seeing the color yellow

• If experience and brain process are the same thing, we simply do not have enough vocabulary appropriately available to make sense of the experience in physical terms.

Objection 6: Sensations are Private and Brain Processes are not

• Two or more people are not reporting the same sensation but two or more people could conduct neurosurgery and see a brain or reflect on a brain process.

• Smart replies that this just shows, “…the language of introspective reports have a different logic from the language of material processes.” (63)

Brain States vs. Sensations

Objection 7: I can imagine myself turned into stone but having aches and pains even then!

• Smart affirms, it is logically possible that in those instances there would be no corresponding physiological process with which to identify it.

• In other words, imagination outstrips physiology, but Smart says ‘experiences are not to be identified with ‘ghost stuff.’ (64)

Objection 8: The Beetle in the Box

• “Any rule in language must have public criteria for it to get its foothold in language.”

• Smart says there is no private language, and that is why our introspective language is just spoken in such generalities, and we say things like it ‘seemed like’ or ‘felt like’ these are just general, open terms.