Topics Mind

Question Does it follow from materialism that we should be able to infer literally anything there is to know about a person's consciousness (feelings, memories, etc.) from publicly observable facts about their brain and body? If we had perfect neurological knowledge, is there anything that might yet elude our observation?

Accepted:
May 19, 2008

Comments

Since you said "literally anything", almost all philosophers would agree that the answer is "no, it doesn't follow from materialism". For one thing, there are facts about consciousness, memory, etc., that depend upon facts external to the body. So, for instance, whether I really remember an event is determined in part by whether or not it really occurred. But, if we leave aside these sorts of external facts - which is probably what you had in mind anyway - then there is a hot dispute in philosophy of mind over this very question. Some philosophers, like David Chalmers and Frank Jackson, have argued that if materialism is true then all the facts about consciousness, such as what it's like to have sensory experiences, should be in principle derivable from a complete physical description of the relevant person's body (or brain). Other philosophers, myself included, have argued that materialism, as a metaphysical thesis, is not committed to this consequence. The idea is that though mental states are identical to (or, better, implemented in) neural states, there is no reason to think that there need be any conceptual connection between physical descriptions and mental descriptions. Some relevant literature on this - and there is a lot - is Chalmers's book, The Conscious Mind, my book, Purple Haze, and two articles in the Philosophical Review, one by Ned Block and Robert Stalnaker, who argue against the claim that materialism has this consequence, and the other by Chalmers and Jackson, who reply to the Block and Stalnaker article.