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The Refutation of Materialism1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Roland Puccetti
Roland Puccetti*
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
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Extract

Supposons qu'il soit possible de transplanter les centres de Ia douleur de Jones dans le cerveau de Smith. A mi-chemin pendant !'operation, on teste ces centres de Ia douleur en les stimulant électriquement in vitro. Y aurait-il de Ia douleur? L'argument de cet article est qu'il n'y en aurait pas, parce que Ia douleur doit avoir un possesseur. Sinon, il ne peut arriver que les centres de Ia douleur se déchargeant dans un cerveau soient en eux-mêmes Ia douleur. On peut logiquement transférer le mécanisms de Ia douleur, mais non Ia douleur elle-mêmes. Ainsi le materialisme est faux.

Suppose we live in a very advanced age of neurosurgical skills. We have a patient, Jones, with intractable pain. We have a second patient, Smith, with a long history of unintentional self-injury due to congenital absence of pain centres. So we decide to do double service by transplanting Jones's pain centres into Smith's brain.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , March 1978 , pp. 157 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1978

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Footnotes

1

This paper takes its inspiration from an apocryphal story told by the neuroscientist Jerome Lettvin in a public lecture at Dalhousie University on April 4, 1974, entitled ‘Caliban an Ariel's Cowslip.’

In Lettvin's story a miserable stray cat finds its way into his laboratory. Feeling sorry for the animal, Lettvin anaesthetizes it and removes the pain centres from its brain. Now it cannot suffer any more. But then Lettvin looks at the excised tissue lying in a petri dish. Perhaps it is feeling pain? So he takes out a loaded revolver and blows the dish to smithereens. Lettvin's comment on this story: ‘Ridiculous!’ But he did not bring out why.

References

2 Strawson, P. F. Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959) pp. 95–100Google Scholar.

3 Armstrong, D. M. A Materialist Theory of Mind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul: 1968Google Scholar; New York: Humanities Press, 1968), p. 82.

4 This point was made to me by R.M. Campbell and C. Talbot. I am also grateful to T. Tomkow for his spirited defence of the view that there can be ownerless pains, though obviously he did not convince me of this.

5 Cf. Smart, J.J.C. ‘Sensations and Brain Processes,’ Philosophical Review, 68 (1959), 141-56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 The same argument, if sound, will also be fatal to epiphenomenalism, parallelism, and the double-aspect theory. I have not bothered to bring this out because there is little interest in such views today.