The Simplicity Intuition and Its Hidden Influence on Philosophy of Mind

Abstract

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

The Naive Topology of the Conscious Subject

“…I shall now rehearse Barnett's argument for Simplicity. It is an abductive argument whose explanandum is this: ‘we have the intuition that a pair of people cannot itself be conscious’ (: 312). Barnett's strategy is to argue that none of a range of competing hypotheses can explain why we have this intuition.…”

“…The explanation is that this is exactly how things appear to us in our ordinary experience of one another. 13 Notes 1 Barnett 2008, Barnett 2010 The requirement of simplicity does leave in play the exotic form of materialism according to which a conscious subject is identical to an indivisible material atom. For a view of this kind see Chisholm 1998: 291-6.…”

Medicine and mind-body dualism: a reply to mehta′s critique

“…Thus, and second, in contrast to Descartes, the mind is not identified with the soul; the mind is a faculty within the soul which causally interacts with the body and brain and, although dependent on a functioning brain, is not reducible to it. Lastly, the person (soul) that is self-conscious or self-aware is a simple, although complex entity, in the sense that it has no separate parts like a computer, body or brain, which has separable or divisible parts (Barnett, 2008[ 1 ]). That this view is not an aberration is recognized by several non-dualist philosophers of mind (cf.…”

“…If a soul (person) is a body, as opposed to having a body, then a person who lost two legs, one eye, and one part of his brain has lost four parts of himself. However, the soul is a simple although a complex entity, in the sense that it has no parts (Barnett, 2008[ 1 ]). And third, my concept of a human being as an ensouled body suggests that the soul (person) as an immaterial mental and moral substance is diffuse throughout its body and therefore present in almost all of its parts (Moreland, 1998[ 43 ], p. 35).…”

You Needn't be Simple

“…3 SeeZimmerman (2003) for discussion of various materialism-friendly candidates; I shall ignore the view that we are material simples. 4Barnett (2008) and especiallyBarnett (2010). 5Barnett (2010): 161, original emphasis.Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 05:21 05 January 2015You Needn't be Simple…”