Mind/Brain Identity?
John H. Hick
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks 2010 DOI: 10.1057/9780230277601_7 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that the relationship between brain and consciousness remains unresolved, distinguishing the tractable "easy problem" of neural correlates from the "hard problem" of what consciousness is and how it is caused. Notes that most neurophysiologists ignore this issue as practically irrelevant, while discussing Steven Rose's position that the hard problem may be a "mirage" and that he has abandoned two common neuroscientific views of mind and brain. |
Abstract
Most neurophysiologists work on some highly specialised area of brain research and are not particularly interested in the philosophical issue, as they see it, of the relationship between brain and consciousness. For it does not make any practical difference to them whether consciousness is identical with, or caused by, or only correlated with brain activity. But those who do concern themselves with this fundamental question distinguish between the easy problem and the hard problem. The easy problem — easy in principle — is to trace precisely what is going on in the brain when someone is consciously perceiving, thinking, willing, experiencing some emotion, creating a work of art, etc. The hard problem is to find out what consciousness actually is and how it is caused — assuming, as they mostly do, that it is somehow caused — by cerebral activity. This, says Steven Rose, is ‘science’s last frontier’ (Rose 1999, 1). It is entirely appropriate for the physical sciences to explore every possible way of reducing consciousness to the material constituents and functions of the brain. But the possibility has to be faced that the attempt may be doomed to failure. In his most recent book Steven Rose seems to regard that ‘last frontier’ as a mirage. He says that his new position leads him to abandon both of the two simplest and commonest neuroscientific views about the mind/brain relationship, even though this will require me to recognise that some of my own earlier endorsements of these views [in e.g., Rose 1973] have been at best over-naïve and at worst simply mistaken. Neuroscientists by and large are not philosophers, ut the implicit assumptions of my discipline are rather coarse: either minds are ‘nothing but’ the products of brains, or ‘mind language’ is a primitive form of what is disparagingly called folk psychology and it is time to eliminate it from scientific discourse. (Rose 2005, 88) These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.