Ep. 401: Mind/Brain Identity Theory (U.T. Place, J.J.C. Smart) (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 401 is something like how can the mind be the brain? And we read two foundational articles in the mind brain identity theory. Ut places is consciousness a brain process from 1956? And JJC smarts, sensations and brain processes from 1959. More information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminelife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer and nothing else in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:43 Wes: This is Wes Alwan having an experience which is like what someone would be experiencing if they were podcasting from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:52 Christopher: And this is Christopher Heath running back and forth in North Hollywood, California.

0:59 Seth: This is Seth Paskin walking into a mass of tiny particles in suspension in Austin, Texas.

1:06 Wes: You didn't want to say you were seeing like a striped multicolor patch or something?

1:11 Seth: No, I genuinely could not have disliked the Smart paper more than I did. Wow.

1:19 Wes: Wow. I was surprised to enjoy them both, given my past prejudices.

1:26 Christopher: Yeah, I'm surprised to hear that, Wes.

1:27 Wes: But yeah, when you see the multicolor patch example, that's the kind of thing that made me want to quit grad school as soon as I read this kind of writing. But sure. And then just the, the tenor of it is so I don't want to say arrogant. No, I was going to say it's so cold and you know, hey, maybe we don't have any consciousness at all. No one's feeling anything, that kind of thing. But now I, now I understand, I think the kind of important point.

1:56 Christopher: Yeah. It's important to contextualize it too. Right. Like they're in the midst of behaviorism and dualism and they're where these, some of these to pretty outlandish things are being stated, both behaviorism and dualism. And so knowing that they're responding to and trying to make sense of a middle position between those is. Helps me with it coming across as kind of void of any passion. I don't know.

2:16 Mark: Yeah. Interestingly, we got to as optional additional things, both these writers who were both at Adelaide University in Australia at the time in the 50s, we got to hear later from them. So the Stanford Encyclopedia article on the Mind Brain Identity theory is actually by JJC Smart. And of course he's referring to himself in the third person. He could have written the whole thing as a diary.

2:35 Seth: So he's describing his own article.

2:38 Mark: But you get to see a little like what he sees the Landscape as of it was written in 2000, update in 2007. He passed away in 2012. And then there was also an article which I overall would not Recommend, but by U.T. Place called 35 years on is consciousness still a brain process? From 1989 where he actually responds to the Davidson paper that we read. So that was interesting. Even though I didn't really understand all of it.

3:02 Christopher: It wasn't super interesting. But.

3:03 Mark: No, but in both cases I feel like the intro where they just like, yeah, we're still here and these arguments are still relevant and. But one of them says, you know, at the time that these were written in the 50s, like dualism was the standard view. And now it seems like you can't even find somebody that thinks dualism is the preferred view. Although on this podcast I feel like we have following the sentiments of Wes when we have treated these in the past, we have run into folks like Chalmers and Ned Block and what is it like to be a bat? And all these people that Dennett was arguing against who seem to think yes, there is some irreducibly mental thing that even if in some sense it is the same as a, you know, we want to be monists and say mind and body or mind and brain are the same thing overall, still there are properties that are irreducibly mental or properties they're irreducibly physical.

And we'll look at these folks. I don't think they're entirely foreign to this. They admit that ment talk is different than physical talk and has a different logic to it. So it's not like for every mental term you can just translate. But I should have really changed my question for this episode. Not from how can the mind be the brain? Which is like Dennett's, you know, huge question that he takes up his giant book for. It's these are there any a priori arguments that the mind can't be the brain so they just go through them and rule them out, that's all.

4:28 Wes: That would be a long question. But you know, yeah, Chalmers would call himself a property dualist and he might have the dominant position or he's at least the preeminent. And I think he does. Yeah, he does call himself a property dualist, but and I think it's hard to get away from a dualism of some kind, as we saw in the smart paper, because even if you're doing identity, even if you're saying something is identical, there's the question of how it's identical and then it's not Clear the either, you know. Right. That one term on one side of the identity is going to reduce to the other.

He has to add some arguments for that. So for instance, if you know the standard example of an identity comes from Frege, the morning star is the evening star. This is the same planet, Venus, under two different descriptions. And one is not simply reducible to the other in some obvious sense. Right. Those descriptions don't just go away. Those descriptions are real, those different experiences of Venus. So it's not directly, it's not that the identity gets rid of one of those descriptions, although Smart is going to go a long way toward trying to do that by giving us a way of talking about qualia that does seem to be reductive and skeptical that qualia even exists.

And that's going to involve something that sounds behavioristic. Right. Talking about people's discriminatory behavior and then this very general sort of language where it's the kind of discriminatory behavior that someone would engage. Engage in under certain circumstances. So you try to get rid of subjective experience talk and then you can make an identity statement which is more deflationary. But I just wanted to say, because I think it's important that Mark brought this up, that talking about identity doesn't necessarily immediately get rid of dualism.

And because there's the dualism of the terms on either side of the identity.

6:23 Christopher: So that's a sort of dualism meaning.

6:25 Mark: For sure.

6:26 Seth: Yeah.

6:26 Christopher: Where we're not getting rid of the distinct meanings, we're just. Just because we say they point to the same reference.

6:32 Wes: Yeah. And for Frege. Right. Those had an ontological status. Those were like real things out in the world. Platonic.

6:38 Seth: Yeah.

6:39 Wes: He did think that meanings which these guys wouldn't like, but it actually wouldn't hurt their argument for them to be that.

6:44 Mark: Seth. Opening thoughts.

6:46 Wes: Well, give us the full brunt of it. Of the dissatisfaction.

6:49 Christopher: It's quite different from the Dennett response. Yeah. You were, you were so excited.

6:53 Seth: I was very excited about Dennett because he's a much better writer.

6:56 Christopher: Sure.

6:57 Seth: So I think the Place paper, which was nice in the sense that it's very concise, but he's very clear. He lays out kind of like here's what I'm trying to say. And basically it's a very modest thesis. Right. Which is I'm going to make an argument that tries to preserve the possibility that consciousness could be a brain process. Basically. I'm not going to argue for anything. I'm just going to say, if you believe this, it doesn't necessarily mean that you can't believe that. And then the smart paper was the one that really kind of frustrated me because the tone for sure is super annoying.

But it had the feeling to me of being like the worst example of the way analytic philosophy will just take something that potentially is not clear and misses the point and just hammer it over and over and over again. But also in his case, he bounces around, so there are whole paragraphs in there that could just be eliminated from the paper because they just. He seems to go off on a tangent, which, you know, we'll get to. But I think fundamentally I got put off just right at the very beginning of it because, you know, he's talking about. He kind of falls into this Wittgenstinian.

He references Wittgenstein and the. The idea that maybe consciousness is just a disposition to report or a reporting of things or something like that. And you know, anytime you cite Wittgenstein but don't actually pursue it like that's already. He's an inveterate name dropper. But I was asking myself, okay, what if I don't report it? So if the experience is not happening externally and it's happening internally, how do you account for that? Is it different? Is it not different? And of course, you know, it just kind of glosses that. So I just got frustrated with it.

But, you know, I. In my new life, as I'm trying to become fully conscious and connect with all living beings on the planet and be compassionate, I did attempt to extract what goodness and what insight I could out of it, which I'm sure we'll have an opportunity to get to at some point.

9:05 Wes: Yeah, it'd be very uncompassionate of you not to report. Sorry, I was laughing because I was imagining you one of these guys quizzing you. Are you imagining the roundish blurry edge after image with the yellow and you saying, I refuse to report. I'm just not going to report. So what are you going to do now?

9:23 Mark: We should say welcome back, Chris, for, you know, Dylan's our continued summer absences or Dylan and getting a new job absences and this train on philosophy of mind. So I think this is the last one. But who knows?

9:39 Christopher: I mean, I've been. I've enjoyed it. I've enjoyed talking with you guys and immersing myself in the stuff we've read and also sort of tangential things that I've become interested in and reading through all the physicalisms and all that stuff. So it's been a pleasure Although I do feel, I feel similarly frustrated like Seth does with especially the second paper. Maybe it's just because it's poorly written, but I appreciate the historical significance of these papers and sort of starting the program of identity theory and stuff. I do feel like in the Philosophy of Mind, I feel like an orphan.

Like I'm looking for my parents or something and I can't find them anywhere. And so I'm just this lost orphan in terms of figuring out what exactly I think and where my own beliefs sit relative to the other positions. And then sometimes I feel like I just want to like, put all of the concepts and the intellectual history from Philosophy of Mind in a building and just set it on fire. I just feel like there's. I mean, I guess Dennett's kite example is another great sort of metaphor for that kind of thing. It feels very cluttered and difficult to clarify and it can feel overwhelming.

10:40 Wes: I couldn't come on the Dennett episodes.

10:42 Christopher: I wish you had just.

10:43 Wes: I. You guys should be so happy I wasn't on this.

10:47 Christopher: Wait, but did you listen to them, Wes?

10:49 Mark: It's not. The second one's not out yet. I'm still holding out. I have one more article that I had read by Dennett, you know, the more recent one that I'm trying to get Wes to do on Close Reads, so.

10:58 Wes: So that we'll do that.

11:00 Mark: Bear the brunt of that.

11:01 Wes: I find consciousness explained to be so intellectually dishonest. That's all I'm going to say about it. That's what makes it unreadable to me. But these papers, I don't. I think these are honest. Their overall conclusion is uncongenial to me. And I think even Smart in the end admits that there's a very strong objection to him that is very, very hard to overcome. And if it could be overcome, he gives you one of the ways that it might be overcome. It's very useful to know to me to know about this line of thought. And it seems to terminate, you know, it doesn't seem to work, I think, but it's very useful for someone to have sketched out this direction and to see where it terminates and see, do you want to bite the bullet? And we'll get to that when we get to Smart.

11:45 Christopher: It does feel more cautious and exploratory than maybe someone like Dennett who feels more matter of fact, in some sense.

11:50 Mark: Yes. I'm surprised you guys are reacting to Smart's tone because I felt like he was not a smart ass. I felt like he was kind of following place. And just like we are careful, distinguished 1950s analytic philosophers and we are just laying out the premises and the.

12:05 Seth: And whereas Dennett, he's smarmy and trying to be too clever by that.

12:09 Christopher: I didn't think. I don't share Seth's sort of with. I do think it's dry and boring and I do think it's kind of disorganized. But I don't think that he's being like, you know, an asshole or something. Like sometimes Dennett can say, I didn't get that as much. I got a little bit that he's exploring the topic. I mean, it was early on in this sort of.

12:28 Wes: It was like, I can't believe I'm the one who might have had the most positive reaction to these fights.

12:31 Mark: Well, I like them and I felt like these were a great substitute for having Wes on Dennett because these were. Some of these arguments are in Dennett. Like Dennett was stealing these directly.

12:42 Christopher: The phenomenological fallacy is literally just Dennett. This is what it feels to me.

12:46 Mark: But. But maybe stated more clearly and definitely more concisely than Dennett does. So that's. This is something in ut place that we'll get to very shortly. I want to say one, we're just defending smart. The Wittgenstein behaviorism thing he throws out not as his view, but as a view that he finds attractive in some ways. But he is navigating around because he thinks that maybe when you have a pain, you are actually reporting on something. But he doesn't want to say that having a pain is exhausted by you saying ouch or anything like that. That is the environment, the behaviorist environment that he was in.

So the fact that he is, I guess it's like political. What do you consider to be like a radical leftist or a rad right winger? Well, it sort of depends on what the mainstream is of the day. So I think he was being. If you see behaviorism as weirdly conservative in some way, then I think he was being refreshingly liberal by comparison.

13:42 Wes: Yeah. And I don't think you have to be behaviorist to understand the attraction of saying, for instance, that beliefs are dispositional in nature. So that a belief is. Involves. If Wittgenstein is right, that meaning is use. It involves a disposition to behave in certain ways, including use the ways you use language.

14:07 Christopher: And involves. Sure. But is exhausted by.

14:11 Wes: Right.

14:11 Mark: And I think.

14:11 Wes: Yeah. Is it exhausted by. I don't think we think that. I think these guys seem to think it's settled that beliefs are exhausted by dispositions to certain types of behavior. But they don't think that they can't bite the bullet on that. Or at least Smart can when it comes to. I don't think either of them do when it comes to what we would call Qualia now.

14:31 Christopher: Mental imagery, sensation, stuff like that. Yeah.

14:34 Wes: So that goes too far for them and we'll see why once we get into these papers why they can't go that far.

14:39 Mark: And we are definitely justified in doing the UT place first. Smart was basing his account on places as well as this guy Herbert Feigl. He had an essay called the Mental and the Physical which It's like an 80 page thing. So I don't. It seems Smart feels like he's summed up enough of what. But at least the term nomological dangler is from Feigl. In other words, it wouldn't it be strange that we're doing science and the only thing we can't study in science is consciousness. Everything else is accessible to a third person perspective.

15:13 Christopher: You know.

15:13 Mark: So you got to just bite the bullet on that if you don't. You know.

15:18 Wes: Or that we would get these kind of brute laws.

15:21 Christopher: Yeah. That don't seem connected correlating.

15:23 Wes: And this is an old idea because we talked about this in Malebranche. But we would get these brute laws connecting the brain activity and experiences and we wouldn't be able to say anything more granular about why one sort of brain activity led to one sort of experience and not another. That sort of thing. We really want laws at a much more fundamental level. I think Smart reminds us.

15:47 Mark: Right.

15:47 Wes: We would want them at the particle level, ultimate laws governing their relationships. So again it's another way in which dualism can crop up no matter what one's best attempts are to flesh out the identity which even though most some of us would deny identity in this sense, we all understand that there's a very strong correlation and that that correlation. Right. Between brain activity and experience. And it's understandable to want to say one is identical to the other because the correlation. To call it just correlation or you know. And however you want to flesh that out. There are different ways of doing that. But it raises a lot of problems. So identity is an attractive way to try to get rid of some of those problems. Do you guys want to delve into the place?

16:41 Mark: Yeah, I want to hear more. More Seth Positivity. Do you want to start us. Since you like this one better than the other one. Do you want to start us on this one, Seth?

16:49 Seth: Sure. Let's see. Place starts out and he very conveniently and generously tells us what he is not trying to do, which he says on page 44 to 45. I am not trying to argue that when we describe our dreams, fantasies and sensations, we are talking about a process in our brains. That is, I'm not claiming that statements about sensations and mental images are reducible to or analyzable into statements about brain process in the way in which, for example, in Ryle and Wittgenstein, cognitive capacity statements are analyzable into statements about what the individual can say and do.

So I think this is important because in the last episode, Wes, you didn't need to hear this, but you'll. I mean, you know, this is like, you know, we were. Or maybe it wasn't the last episode, Mark. It might have been our follow up, Part three. But the idea that you could say, like, oh well, if we had all of the information from the outside to be able to say what was going on in Chris's brain at any one moment, and I said, oh, well, here's what's happening. This lobe is firing and this, this neurons, blah, blah, blah, that that would somehow explain the experience that Chris was having or describe, you know, like.

And I don't think anybody, even the most ardent materialist or physicalist, wants to say that the scientific description captures the subjective experience that the observer reports or that would report. So that the first thing Place wants to do is say, look, I'm not trying to say that you can translate a description of mental state into some kind of physical description, scientific description, and that those things would be equivalent. He says, what I do want to assert is that, you know, the statement consciousness is a process in the brain, although not necessarily true, is not necessarily false.

18:44 Wes: I think that point is neutral when it comes to whether or not we're going to be eliminativist about qualia, which I think smart seems to be the idea that all of our talk about mental states could become talk about brain processes. So these guys are going to rely on a distinction between sense and reference, really sense and reference, where the identity that they're concerned with really is an identity of reference, not sense or meaning. So if I talk about I'm in pain or I see I'm imagining a yellow spot for my eyes. To say that that experience is identical to a brain process is not to say that I myself know what the brain processes are behind that experience.

And that's what I'm talking about. That's What I'm mean when I talk about those things? Of course not. It's an obvious objection that has to be dealt with up front. That would be an absurd type of identity to assert. But that doesn't mean that I couldn't be referring to brain processes, whether I know it or not, with my language about qualia. So I think that's the very important point he's making up front.

19:52 Mark: In the Stanford article, Smart summarizes himself as having that sense and reference view that he was following Feigl in that he summarizes place the way Place presents himself as I want this to be a scientifically respectable possibility and ultimately it would have to be proven by science. Whereas all these other philosophers seem to feel like there's something a priori about either mind can't be body because they mean different things, because they have different logic, or we just read Davidson who said actually for logical reasons, there is a token, token identity between mind and body.

And you don't even need to do research to determine that. It's just built into the way that we think about causal law. So, you know, this is a point about place that Smart disagrees with. But we should take Smart as word that he's trying to be scientific here that I'm not. Again, that's where this neutrality comes in. He's trying to clear the board of all the a priori philosopher nonsense to just say, just do the research and then you'll see. And just, you know, think about Davidson. He ended up having a token token, which is to say, if I have a pain, it's not necessarily that.

It's always the same part of the brain that has the pain. And in fact, other kinds of creatures could have pains that are very instantiated physically very differently. But in each case there is something physical that that instance of pain maps to. Whereas the whole appeal of identity theory seems to be no, there are certain parts of the brain that do certain things. There's the pain part of the brain, C fibers. And that is always what pain is. And so place is at least leaving the way open for that stronger kind of identity, which to me is. I understand why Davidson went the other way and what the issues are, especially when you start thinking about, well, can robots feel pain?

They don't have brain fibers at all. You're just being a neural chauvinist. So you end up having, you know, these are papers that we read in the past, a disjunctivist to say, well, pain is either in humans, it's C fibers, but in robots, it's this other thing, right? Forget about robots.

22:01 Wes: Davidson. He understood there were general correlations between certain parts of the brain and certain types of experience, like C fibers. But he argues, and I think convincingly, that there's no law that relates those two domains. That's what makes him an anomalous monist. So he's a monist at the level of these token tokens, identities. But we can't, right? We don't get reducibility or we don't get this law, like general correlation between types of brain state and types of experience. And that leaves some room for freedom, right? Because there's something ineffable or something not completely captured by the. At a general level, by the physical. So it shows how you can be a monist without necessarily being a reductionist.

22:45 Seth: I think anomalous monist is a great name for a band.

22:48 Christopher: It is.

22:49 Wes: All right, so what's the next step?

22:51 Seth: So Place says that, you know, ultimately, I think Wes might have already touched on this, but he says that if you say consciousness is a process in the brain, it's an identity statement. And so he says, you know, we have to distinguish between identity statements that is is is statements, X is Y, where he calls the difference between is statements of definition and is statements of composition. And this gets into the idea that there's, for example, as Wes said, a reference. So if it's. If you're saying X is Y and X and Y are two different terms for the same thing, they refer to the same thing that could be, you know, evening star is morning star.

That could be contingent. So it's just a contingent fact that evening star and morning star refer to the same thing. So that when you say the evening star is the morning star, you're making an identity statement, but it's not true by definition. It's contingent on the facts of the world. Something where you say, what is the example he gives? 7 is the smallest prime number larger than 5, I think, is the example he gives that is true by definition. It's not a contingent fact. And the idea here is he says he's going to argue that consciousness is a brain process is not true by definition, but it could still very well be contingently true in the way that a.

The morning star, evening star is. And so there's the possibility that we are in fact talking about the same thing, and it just hasn't been. We don't have the data for it yet. And that's.

24:32 Wes: So we. We jumped over some things in the introduction. Do you mind if I Just catch us up on that real quick and then bring us back to this point.

24:39 Mark: Go ahead.

24:39 Wes: Because he makes that point about behaviorism, you know, handling cognitive concepts like knowing and believing well. But then there's this intractable residue where, quote, some sort of inner process story is unavoidable sensation. Things like that pages twinges. So he's willing to admit that those things do report and that they involve. Right. He says his working assumptions is that those things are. They refer to events that are private or internal to the subject. But the overall point is that that doesn't necessarily commit us to dualism. It's not crazy to think that there's some form of identity theory that could actually work.

He has a modest thesis here. So then he says right gives us this distinction that Seth just gave us between the different types of is. Right. One is just the is of predication. But then there's the two other main types for identity, where you might say something definitionally is something else, like a square is an equilateral rectangle, or red is a color, a priori truth. We're familiar with this type of distinction. And then the is of composition, like his table is an old packing case, is the example he gives. Or for a more scientific example, a cloud is a mass of water droplets.

The second form of identity is the one that he wants to focus on. For brain, mind identity, the is of composition, not of definition.

26:05 Mark: And in both cases, the definition and composition you can add and nothing else. You can't do that for predication. You can't say Wes is an eloquent speaker and nothing else. But you can say Wes is a human and nothing else. I mean, that's part of your definition. You're not a dog. I mean, there's more to say about you. But human is not merely a predicate.

26:28 Wes: Well, yeah, it's a natural kind. So I don't know what they would do. Right, because packing case is compositional. So you could say Wes is a body and nothing else, but then you'd have the problem of mind. Wes is a body, slash mind and nothing else at the very least. But yeah, go ahead, Seth.

26:46 Seth: Either that's a terrible example of this or that is a stupid condition and we should just not waste a lot of time talking about the and nothing else clause.

26:55 Christopher: True.

26:55 Mark: Okay, I just want to explain my intro.

26:59 Wes: Well, it distinguishes predication from these other types of is. Yeah, that's all.

27:04 Christopher: That's good enough.

27:04 Mark: In both cases, the grammatical subject and the grammatical predicate are expressions which provide an adequate characterization of the state of affairs to which they refer, both definition and composition.

27:15 Wes: Right. So the table, you know, the table is, of course, has other properties like being black or whatever, but so to say it's an old packing case and nothing else doesn't entail that. There's not all these properties. It's just that compositionally, it is made of that, not made of anything more than that. Or a cloud is a mass of water droplets, you know, it's made of that. And I think one of them talks at some point about a country being nothing over and above the citizens, which was weird to me. And the. Maybe the cloud, the mass of water droplets is weird to me because this is.

Yeah. Materially, they're composed this way, but there's also all these functions and activities and institutions. Right. A country isn't primarily just a bunch of people standing around. It's what they do. So I don't. This is one feature. And it'll come out, I think, maybe, as we go forward, but where. I'm a little bit confused about the idea that material composition is everything. Right. So I think the whole does. Right. The whole is more than its parts, and it's more than its parts because of energeia. Right. Activity. The body isn't just a bunch of cells.

It's what the cells do.

28:27 Seth: So I thought the example there about the nation, you know, would you say like a nation is the. Just the grouping of the people wasn't intended to be an example of the identity statement, but was instead. He's trying to say we can talk about a nation as a thing, but that doesn't mean that we believe that it's some kind of epiphenomena that is generated by the existence of a group of people, or in the case you mentioned, the activities of a group of people. He's trying to use that as just saying, like consciousness might be something like the concept of a nation in that it's an. Or, you know, this is the Dennett point. It's just. It's a descriptive organizing principle that we use to cluster. That's what I thought. The nation exists.

29:11 Wes: This is smart.

29:12 Mark: Right.

29:13 Seth: Because we're already into smart. Yeah, yeah.

29:15 Wes: And it's. Nations are nothing over and above citizens. The logics of translation. The logics differ. And the point is that they don't. That means they don't. It doesn't ontologically differ.

29:26 Seth: Well, that's. That statement is wrong, though. That's.

29:29 Wes: The logics differ.

29:30 Seth: Nations also are geographical entities. It's a bad example.

29:34 Mark: I don't think either of these folks are making this mistake. Right. Their favorite book, the most influential book that they're pivoting off of is Ryle, which. His very famous example that we gave in our episode where we talked about Ryle's The Concept of Mind is you take someone on a tour of the university and you say, hey, here's the science building, here's the administration building, here's the union. The person says, yeah, but when are we going to see the university? You're such an idiot. Like, so we don't think because of that, that the university is merely the assemblage of buildings. It's the assemblage of buildings and all the. The bylaws and the faculty and the things that.

30:10 Wes: But for Ryle, it's just a concept. So in the same way that for Smart, it's just going to be a way of talking, but at an ontological level, there's not the university. And then. Right. There's no. In the ontological level, there's not this on.

30:28 Mark: Right.

30:29 Wes: Being in our ontology. And then all the other. Right.

30:34 Christopher: Yeah. There's no new entity that's actually separate ontologically. Yes. There's no one. That's the point.

30:40 Wes: I wasn't trying to get us off track. I was just trying to put a pin in that idea as we go forward. But, yeah.

30:46 Mark: Chris, what did you think of number three here?

30:48 Christopher: Section three?

30:49 Mark: Yes.

30:49 Christopher: I mean, in section three, place is just trying to essentially talk about why people are tempted to sort of infer that there's this difference ontologically because they have different meanings. It's just. He talks about how it's just extremely common in our use of language that when we have this distinction with. Between meaning, we have a distinction ontologically. And he thinks that that just doesn't characterize every single instance of our use in language and the brain or consciousness as a brain process. He thinks this one of those situations where it's not right to infer from the conceptual difference and ontological difference. He just doesn't think that that's. That's warranted. He thinks the rule breaks down. And basically he says where it breaks down is where this is when he kind of uses the cloud and the mass of tiny water droplets stuff. I think in section three is where he.

31:35 Wes: Yeah, so the beginning disanalogy. Right. Is if. If you say a table is an old packing case, you haven't given a general equation. Not all tables are packing cases. But if you say consciousness is a brain process, that's meant to be this generalization. And it's that sort of generalization that might lead one to think that. Well, let's. Let me just put it in terms of the next section. Usually when we make those sort of sorts of generalizations. Right. So when it's generally accepted that every member of a class is identified by a certain characteristic, then one comes to entail the other.

So in a world where all tables were packing cases, when we said the word table, we would just think, okay, that's a species of packing case, just like we would think red is a color. So that, you know, it's a kind of rule that is not. It seems universal, but it's not quite universal. But it's why we tend to infer ontological independence from logical independence. So if there were this logical independence. Right. Table and packing case are logically independent, we're going to tend to think, well, they're ontologically independent as well. But he wants to say they're logically independent when it comes to brain and consciousness, but not ontologically independent.

So we get a interesting case here.

33:03 Mark: Now restate that using Peirce's term prescind.

33:08 Wes: So what are the inceptions? What's logically independent but not ontologically independent? Let's take a cloud, semi transparent, fleecy, blah, blah, blah. It's ultimately a mass of tiny particles in motion. It's that and nothing else. But that doesn't mean that they're logically one logically follows from another. We could conceive of the clouds as being composed of something else. And we didn't know that clouds were masses of tiny particles for most of history. It doesn't logically follow. But he wants to say in this case that logical independence doesn't mean that they're ontologically independent. They really are ontologically one and the same thing. The terms mean different things, cloud and massive particles in motion, but they are logically, compositionally the same.

34:04 Christopher: So let's. So Wes, you had expressed earlier that you weren't so sure that this was the case. And so in the cloud case, where he says the suspended water droplets, from the inside, we can see that from the outside we see this cloud. And obviously they have different meanings, but they are ontologically the same. Do you disagree with that? Do you think that there's something about a cloud as a whole as seen by particular observers and them not understanding that they're water droplets, that there's something ontologically separate from our understanding of its, like, composition or something like that? Do you think there's a difference?

34:36 Wes: Well, I think. I don't know, but I think, right. Our standard accounts of emergence would say there is, right? So that, yes, water is H2O. We get these essence statements, but the. I think most people think that these different layers, for instance, the macro level phenomena, don't simply reduce to the lower level. Now, what does that not reducing mean? Does it just mean we can't reduce all of our talk, Right. We can't reduce all water talk to particle talk. We can't reduce all zebra talk to particle talk. To get another famous example, right, biological entities require certain ways of talking about things that aren't reducible.

And perhaps, you know, we might want to say, well, ontologically they're still the same. Or we might want to say, well, ontologically there's these two different realms. One of them is the emergent realm. And we're not willing to say that's all secondary qualities. That's all just in our heads.

35:35 Seth: Because if we talk about the talk

35:37 Christopher: of them, that would be epistemic, right?

35:39 Wes: So philosophers call this ontological emergence, right? Yeah, as opposed to epistemological, which would be everything is a secondary quality. Everything that we think is not at that base. Microstructural layer is just. It's a product of the mind's interaction with that microstructural layer. Ontological emergence says no, and I think this is probably the more popular position, is that there is this other layer in the ontology that's real, that is emergent upon the microstructural layer. So I don't know. It's endlessly puzzling, but I don't know

36:07 Christopher: if clouds are considered. I feel like, at least in philosophy of science, they're typically understood as ontologically reducible to the water droplets. Maybe not epistemic systemically, but I don't know. I have to look more into that. Again, I was just curious about where we made this ontological distinction at and where we didn't, because there is, of course, real emergence possible. I just didn't know if cloud was a good case of.

36:24 Wes: It is water.

36:25 Christopher: Water is a great case. I don't know about clouds, but I

36:28 Wes: think the cloud example is supposed to be like a water example, right? It's this product of science where we get what we're getting really are essence statements of phenomena as to what is it really underneath.

36:38 Seth: Yeah, yes and no. So the cloud example differs in some respect from the essence or composition example. So if you said, like, look, the zebra is just Ultimately this collection of atoms. Right. That ultimately form chemical bonds that ultimately form whatever, all the various pieces. He says explicitly, the issue with the cloud example is you're looking at it from a. It's an observational. So there's the observation of the cloud from a distance and then there's the observation of the cloud when you're standing inside of it. And he says, from a distance, we don't know.

The cloud could be made up of cotton candy or fibrous things. But then we walk into it and we're standing and we realize we're standing in this mist of water particles. And science tells us, oh yeah, that's actually what a cloud is. Just from a distance, you can't tell. And I think that example is more to say about. Because he's trying to give examples, a corollary where he says, oh, we can observe brain processes theoretically, right. With MRIs or CAT scans or whatever they use and all this kind of stuff. But we can't, quote, unquote, observe mental states.

37:49 Mark: You just walk closer to the mri, then you can. Or farther away. I guess that would be the analogy.

37:57 Wes: The cloud example is his composition example. And I don't. To me, it's directly analogous to water. This is in essence, scientific essence, statement, mass of tiny particles in motion. But this idea of distance as he's trying to explain are certain intuitions we have about composition. So. But in any case, this is the composition example. And then he. In section four, he's going to get into the limitations of the cloud case. Yeah, go ahead.

38:22 Mark: Yes, he switches from the cloud example to lighting is electric charges, because that is one. Or just, you know, as you were. As Seth was just saying, the zebra is made up of atoms. Like there's no. Well, you just got to kind of move inside the zebra and look closely. Like there's no. It is as different as observe your pain from a first person point of view and get out the MRI and observe it from a third person point of view. Look at your brain when you are reporting pain. That. That is more comparable to a general physics example where you do not just have to look more closely. I mean, it seems like there is. Well, when you start using. What is looking more closely, is that just walking into it or when you pull out the scientific equipment, you pull out the microscope, you pull out the electron microscope. It seems like.

39:07 Wes: Yes, yes. Yeah.

39:09 Mark: At some point you're engaging in theory as opposed to merely observing closely.

39:14 Wes: Yeah, I think it is a tricky example. And because. Right. The point. He's going to bring up is there's this continuity. The observer can move towards it or away from it. And that continuity doesn't exist when it comes to relationship between consciousness and brain processes. So you want something that's more discontinuous like the lightning case. But Mark, you're pointing out that there is a sense and if strictly speaking what the cloud is composed of scientifically is also discontinuous because it involves all these scientific measurements. But lightning is much clearer. Yeah. So does someone want to give the lightning example? What is lightning? It's just charges.

39:49 Christopher: Yeah, it's like the ionization of water droplets.

39:52 Wes: There you go.

39:53 Christopher: And this guy, it's electrical discharge. He just wants to point out that this is more analogous to our brain consciousness situation like you guys were saying, because we can't observe no amount of interacting with the lightning and looking at the lightning is going to get you this electrical charge. You're not going to be able to see that.

40:07 Wes: We can, but it has to be done by a special scientific procedure. We need certain sorts of experiments and instruments and then we get the theory. But it's still observation, right? It's still empirical, but it's not direct observation though.

40:18 Christopher: We draw an inference from the instruments or stuff that we would use but

40:21 Wes: so established by special scientific procedures phrase here.

40:25 Christopher: Yeah, yeah. The idea is that we basically we end up. He wants to say we're going to treat these sets of observations as a single event. When our scientific account gives us the direct causal explanation of that everyday observation.

40:37 Wes: That's the next.

40:38 Christopher: That's going to.

40:38 Wes: But yeah, I don't know.

40:40 Mark: He hadn't read Bruno Latour so he doesn't have all the, the nuances of how the scientific. The not just the instruments, it's all

40:49 Wes: just social practice means.

40:50 Mark: Yes, the practice, how we use the instruments, how we interpret the instruments. So it is. I'm just adding to what Chris was saying that you could say that's what

40:59 Wes: lightning really is at bottom. Lightning is just a social practice. It's a social construct.

41:05 Seth: I'm going to have to rant a little bit for just please give me one minute.

41:10 Mark: This will almost finish off part one. You're rant.

41:13 Wes: How can you have any problem with any of this so far? What's the controversy?

41:16 Seth: Well, let's start with this. Look, here's what lightning really is. The true definition, the true explanation of lightning is that it's an electrical charge.

41:26 Wes: Blah, blah, blah.

41:28 Seth: There is this. Maybe this is time bound and cultural as Mark said, but it's the idea that like, oh, this scientific explanation of the phenomenon, this is the real thing. And whatever any other experience of it or any other characterization of it is false or not essential or something like that. So, you know, if you say like, well, here's what lightning is, it's electrical charges, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I say lightning is terrifying when you experience it up close. You've just basically. On my characterization of lightning in that way, because it's not true or it's not essential or it's not.

Whereas what we're comparing here are two different things. And this is why the cloud example I was talking about it being observational is my observation of lightning is this. That is not a scientific definition of lightning, but it is not invalidated by the scientific definition either. And the scientific definition gives me literally nothing. In my experience. It can help, like, oh, well, this means, you know, when we can harness that electrical charge by tapping, you know, putting a lightning rod up and then sending down a string to a key or whatever and converting it into something else.

But I just.

42:49 Wes: Your entire life runs on that. The computer that's plugged in, the light that's on. Right. It gives me nothing.

42:58 Seth: Absolutely.

42:59 Wes: But your entire existence is bathed in this lightning example.

43:04 Seth: Telling me that lightning is electrical charges may be scientifically true, but it does not tell me I cannot experience that. I can't consume that information and do anything with it. So how is that true? It just doesn't. There's just this sort of. Nobody is questioning the fact that we speak in this normative language about the way science describes the world versus the way we experience it. It's just annoying.

43:29 Christopher: It sounds like you're frustrated with the privileged position that science is going to give to reducible statements about whatever phenomena we're talking about. Yes, 100%. Yeah. And I get that.

43:37 Seth: Absolutely. 100%. Chris, well put.

43:39 Wes: But these don't have to be reductions. Right? You can make essence statements, water is H2O without saying the phenomenal macro level is gotten rid of. And I think that's probably the prevailing view.

43:52 Christopher: So, yeah, I just want to make. Because I'm curious about what the distinction is, because we both agree that they don't mean the same thing and they don't account for everything in terms of the way in which we use them in our language. Language.

44:02 Mark: Right.

44:02 Christopher: Lightning and then lightning understood scientifically. But you want to say that there's something important ontologically, that there's something wrong about saying lightning's identity. It is this electrical charge. You want to say that that's wrong because it doesn't account for the way in which we experience the phenomenon. So you do want to say that they're ontologically, that there's something missing from the sort of ontological picture of lightning described by the scientific community or something like that. Or are you just saying these are conceptually different and it frustrates like which side? Or does that make sense to you?

44:34 Seth: Yes, there's an emotional component which you accurately described, which is just that privileging of that perspective in a just offhand and completely. But more specifically to this point, this is from place. This is page 47. So he's just brought up that lightning is the motion of electronic charges. As in the case of consciousness, however closely we scrutinize the lightning, we shall never be able to observe the electrical charge. And just as the operations for determining the nature of one state of consciousness are radically different from those involved in determining the nature of one's brain processes, so the operations for determining the occurrence of lightning are radically different from those involved in determining the occurrence of a motion of electric charges.

So what is it, therefore, that leads us to say that the two sets of observations are of the same event? And he basically says the answer. Well, he doesn't basically, he does say the answer.

45:28 Wes: First he gets rid of correlation. It's not just correlation, just correlation.

45:31 Seth: More than that, he says we seem to treat these two sets of observations as an observation of the same event. In those cases where the technical scientific observations set in the context of the appropriate body of scientific theory provide an immediate explanation of the observations made by the man in the street identity ends

45:54 Mark: up being the logical asymptotal extreme of correlation. Right? That two things are so. So this is how you scientifically prove it is show correlation, correlation, correlation to such a tight degree that let's just refer to them as the same thing. Like, you would never do that in talking about the moon and the tides, although maybe you would have like the tidal system in which the moon causes the tides. And you could say from the point of view of the tides or the point of view of the moon, those are the same system. Like, in that sense, okay, but smart, you know, is going to say something can't be correlated with itself.

So he's not interested in correlation. We want the mind events to be the brain events, not merely correlated. Whereas seeing his view place as scientific, he's saying this is how science works, is you establish these identities through correlation, through extreme correlation.

46:49 Wes: But the identity of composition here that we want to Assert has to be predicated upon explanation, causality. Right. It's not just that water and H2O are hanging out in the same place or that lightning and electricity are hanging out in the same place. Electricity will explain the macro level phenomena in certain ways. Why do you see a flash? Why does it kill you or almost kill you? Right. Why do you get electrocuted when lightning hits you? There are all sorts of things at the experiential macro level that are going to be explained by the theory that includes just everyday experience, but also experimental experiences.

47:30 Seth: All right, don't let's not lose this for part two, because I want to pick this right up where we are.

47:34 Mark: All right. Yes. I think you are channeling Jean Paul Sartre. Seth will take us very well to the next section, which is finally about the phenomenological fact fallacy. So you'll hear about that in part two. Become a Partially Examined Life supporter. Partially examinedlife.com support. We're now in fact steering all the new people to our Patreon page. So that is where that page will point you. Please come back next time.

47:58 Wes: Thanks. Thank you.