Brains, Persons, and Society *** ABSTRACTS    Cervelli, Persone e Società ***ABSTRACTS

Philip Goff

University of Reading

Appearance, reality and the reality of appearance

Empirical materialism
The following principle, which I call the principle of conceptual dualism, is intuitive to many:

 Principle of Conceptual Dualism: Nothing physics can tell us about an organism entails anything about what it is like to be that organism, i.e. there is no way of moving a priori from knowing the kind of things physics has to tell us about an organism, to knowing what it is like to be that organism, or vice-versa.

 Every dualist accepts this principle, but not every materialist denies it. There is a kind of materialist position, which I call empirical materialism, which accepts the principle of conceptual dualism, but denies its metaphysical significance. For the empirical materialist, conceiving of an organism in physical terms, and conceiving of an organism in terms of what it is like to be it, are conceptually distinct ways of thinking about the same things. Just as heat turns out, as a matter of empirical fact, to be molecular motion, and water turns out, as a matter of empirical fact, to be H₂O, so pain turns out, as a matter of empirical fact, to be c-fibre firing. 

 Kripke
Kripke argues against empirical identities between conscious states, such as pain, and brain states, such as c-fibre firing, by drawing attention to how such a psycho-physical identity would differ to standard scientific identities, such as that between heat and molecular motion. The crucial disanalogy is that we think about heat in terms of one of its accidental properties, the property of being the cause of heat sensations, whereas we think about pain in terms of the property of being pain itself, in terms of its immediate phenomenological quality.
 

 Papineau and Loar
Empirical materialists Papineau and Loar suggest that Kripke’s anti-materialist arguments are reliant on the following implicit premise, which they find dubious:

 The Transparency Thesis: There can be an empirical identity between x and y only if we think about either x or y in terms of their accidental properties.

Papineau suggests that the identity between Cicero and Tully is a counterexample to the transparency thesis. It is impossible to work out a priori that Cicero is Tully, and so the identity is empirical in the relevant sense. However, at least arguably, we do not think about Cicero (or Tully) in terms of any of his properties, essential or accidental. Rather the reference of proper names like ‘Cicero’ and ‘Tully’ is fixed wholly by causal/historical factors ‘outside the head’ (indeed Kripke argues for this thesis in the same book that he argues against psycho-physical identities). If the identity between Cicero and Tully is one exception to the transparency thesis, why not suppose the identity between pain and c-fibre firing is another?

 My claims
In my paper, I claim that, in attributing the transparency thesis to Kripke, Papineau and Loar are focussing only on Kripke’s negative point about out conception of pain, i.e. that we do not think about pain in terms of its accidental properties, but they ignore Kripke’s positive point, arguably the more important, that we do think about pain in virtue of the property of being pain itself. I propose the following, slightly more cautious, transparency thesis, which draws on Kripke’s positive as well as his negative point, and which seems more resistant to counterexample:

 Qualified Transparency Thesis: There can be an empirical identity between x and y only if we do not conceive of either x or y transparently: that is, we do not conceive of either x or y themselves—in cases where x and y are properties or states—or the defining properties or x or y—in cases where x and y are not properties or states—as they are in and of themselves. 

 I then go on to argue that, in attending to the properties of our conscious experience, we are conceiving of those properties as they are in and of themselves. It is implausible to suppose that the properties of our conscious experience could be any different in and of themselves to how they appear when we attend to them. In the special case of conscious experience appearance and reality cannot come apart. This is not because we intuit facts about our conscious experience through some queer Platonic faculty which puts us directly in contact with the reality behind appearances, but because our conscious experience just is a matter of how things appear to us. How things appear to us just is the reality we are attending to when we attend to our conscious experience. When it comes to the reality of appearance, there can be no gap between appearance and reality.

 Conclusion
By arguing for the qualified transparency thesis, and arguing that our conception of our conscious experience is transparent, I demonstrate that the principle of conceptual dualism is incompatible with materialism.