Some influential intuitions in contemporary debates over the nature of the mind include:Descartes's Zombie: Bodies physically identical to ours could lack consciousness.Huxley's Explanatory Gap: There can be no explanation of how states of consciousness arise from interaction among a collection of physical things.Putnam's Swarm of Bees: A swarm of bees could not itself be conscious.Block's Miniature Men in the Head: A collection of tiny men realizing the same functional states as an ordinary brain could not itself be conscious.Block's Nation of China: A collection of ordinary people realizing the same functional states as an ordinary brain could not itself be conscious.Searle's Chinese Room: A system comprising a person who does not understand Chinese and a written set of rules could not itself understand Chinese. 1
This chapter argues that unlike your brain, you are not composed of other things: you are simple. The argument centers on what he takes to be an uncontroversial datum: for any pair of conscious beings, it is impossible for the pair itself to be conscious. Consider for instance the pair comprising you and me. You might pinch your arm and feel a pain. I might simultaneously pinch my arm and feel a qualitatively identical pain. But the pair we form would not feel a thing. For pairs of people are themselves incapable of experience. What explains this datum? The following exhaust the reasonable options: (1) Pairs of people lack a sufficient number of immediate parts. (2) Pairs of people lack immediate parts of the right nature. (3) Pairs of people lack immediate parts capable of standing in the right sorts of relations to each other and their environment. (4) Pairs of people have no essential structure (they are mere collections of their two immediate parts). Finally, (5) pairs of people have proper parts. The chapter defends (5). The defense rests in part on an argument that no combination of (1)-(4) can explain the datum.
It is surprising to find how little has been written by scholars on the prolific dramatist Howard Barker, and this situation may reflect the theatre's general failure to engage practically with his work. In many ways, Barker is a lone voice on the British scene — his theatre makes demands on both actor and audience because of its anti-psychological, non-linear, and morally unstable dramaturgies. A main point of contact for those interested in Barker but unable to see a performance live can, of course, be found in print. In addition to the many plays that have been published, a volume of essays and dialogues first appeared in 1989; Arguments for a Theatre is now in its third edition, and some of its essays are included in recent anthologies of dramatic theory.
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