PHIL 346 Lecture Notes - Lecture 25: Afterimage, Neurophysiology, Lightning

• School: University of Arizona
• Department: Philosophy Main
• Course: PHIL 346
• Professor: All

Document Summary

But i just cannot believe that everything should be explicable in terms of physics except the occurrence of sensations seems to me to be frankly unbelievable. It is the object of this paper to show that there are no philosophical arguments which compel us to be dualists. Thesis: that reports of sensations are reports of brain-processes. The brain-process doctrine asserts identity in the strict sense. Reply to obj 1: that there can be contingent statements of the form "a is identical with b," and a person may well know that something is an a without knowing that it is a b. An illiterate peasant might well be able to talk about his sensations without knowing about his brain processes. Reply to obj 2: but this does not show that what we report (having an after-image) is not infant a brain process. "i see lightning" does not mean "i see an electric discharge.