Place and Smart on Whether Consciousness Is a Brain Process

The real question these papers answer is not how the mind could be the brain, but whether any a priori argument rules that out. Place and Smart are read as clearing conceptual obstacles rather than establishing the identity itself, leaving actual proof to future scientific research.

One host argues that an identity claim, like the morning star and evening star both referring to Venus, does not eliminate the distinctness of the two descriptions involved. Smart is read as going further by treating qualia-talk as reducible to dispositional, behavioristic language, a stronger and more skeptical move than simply asserting that two terms refer to the same thing.

The hosts lay out Place's distinction between the definitional "is," which is a priori like 7 being the smallest prime greater than 5, and the compositional "is," which is contingent, like a table being an old packing case or a cloud being water droplets. Place classifies "consciousness is a brain process" as compositional, so it is neither necessarily true nor necessarily false, and could be settled empirically.

The group discusses Place's central move: normally, when two terms differ in meaning, we assume they name different things. Place argues this inference fails for cases like clouds and water droplets, where the terms are logically independent, you could not derive one from the other a priori, yet ontologically identical.

Place offers the cloud, a mass of water droplets, and lightning, a motion of electric charges, as analogies for how consciousness could be identical to a brain process despite being known through completely different means. Lightning is treated as the better analogy because, unlike a cloud, you cannot get closer to it to directly observe the charge, mirroring the gap between introspecting a sensation and observing brain activity.

Place is read as treating identity as the limiting case of an extremely tight correlation between two sets of observations. One host pushes back that what actually licenses calling two things identical is that the scientific account causally explains the everyday observations, not just that the two reliably co-occur.

One host objects that treating the scientific account of lightning as electric charges as the real or essential truth implicitly dismisses the first-person description of lightning as terrifying as inessential or false, even though the scientific account offers nothing usable in lived experience of the phenomenon.

Two hosts describe Smart's writing as cold, arrogant, and frustrating, contrasting it unfavorably with Dennett's more engaging prose. The other host and the guest argue Smart is simply being cautious and exploratory in the manner typical of 1950s analytic philosophy, not smug.

The guest suggests clouds are probably ontologically reducible to water droplets with nothing left over. One host counters that standard accounts of emergence hold that macro-level phenomena like water or living things do not simply reduce to their microstructure, leaving a real ontological distinction open rather than a merely epistemic one.

One host strongly objects that treating the scientific definition of lightning as essential implicitly invalidates his experiential description of it as terrifying. Another host maintains that essence statements like water is H2O do not have to be reductions that eliminate the macro-level, phenomenal description.