Why is this view so pervasive? Why do people nod approvingly rather than question the view of Morpheus in the film? The rea-son is quite simple: There seems to be an undeniable causal relationship between the mind and the body. We believe that if our brains cease to work, we won’t be seeing or hearing any more (at least not by using our eyes or ears). Our everyday experience seems to confirm this (we don’t experience anything while unconscious, for example), and science constantly offers new research that supports the idea of a causal connection between the mind and body. An example is the intralaminar
nucleus of the thalamus, which seems to play some special role in consciousness. A person can lose large amounts of cortical structure and have awareness, and yet even tiny lesions to the intralaminar nucleus of the thalamus result in a vegetative state.
If this view seems sensible and is widely accepted, what is the problem? There is indeed a problem, and it is not an acci-dent that philosophy has now largely rejected this view. The reasons for the rejection cast doubt on the metaphysical under-pinnings of The Matrix, and go well beyond the practical criti-cisms usually leveled at science fiction. First read the following story related by Michael Tye:
Consider a brilliant scientist of the future, Mary, who has lived in a black-and-white room since birth and who acquires information about the world via banks of computers and black-and-white tele-vision screens depicting the outside world. Suppose Mary has at her disposal in the room all the objective, physical information there is about what goes on when humans see roses, trees, sunsets, rainbows, and other phenomena. She knows everything there is to know about the surfaces of the objects, the ways in which they reflect light, the changes on the retina and in the optic nerve, the firing patterns in the visual cortex, and so on. Still there is some-thing she does not know.1
What Mary does not know, Tye correctly points out, is what it is like to see green or red or the other colors. How can we be sure of this? Because when Mary looks at her first rose, she will learn something. What she will learn is what it is like to have a particular kind of experience, something which no physical the-ory addresses. Understanding what something is is not the same as knowing what it is like to experience that thing. This is because a thing is experienced from a particular perspective (I may see blue as soothing, and I always see the moon as a flat disk), and that perspective is not a part of an objective descrip-tion of an object.
But the reductive materialist faces a second, more serious problem. The reductive materialist claims that after an adequate
1 Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 14.
explanation of the reduction, the dualist will see that there is a sense in which the mental state is the material state; that the mental state or some feature of it is identical with the material state. It is this use of the concept of identity that renders the reductive materialist’s claim most suspect. This is because the reductive materialist is not truly using the concept of identity (“being-the-same-as”). What is meant by claiming that the men-tal state is the same as the brain state? Nothing, for the claim is meaningless. The mental state is not identical to the brain state.
If it were, the subject matter of the claim “I see a tree” would literally be the same as the subject matter of the scientific expla-nation of “seeing” a tree. But it is simply not the case that the subject matter is the same. Even the biologist doesn’t mean the same thing when she’s just reporting her experience! But the reason it is not the case is not, as Paul Churchland claims,2 because up to this point we have lacked the concepts necessary to make penetrating judgments, but rather because the notion of a mental state is a paradigm of something immaterial. It is a radically different type of thing from the brain state. Notice that even with the concepts necessary to make the illegitimate iden-tity connection between the mental state and the brain state, it remains a simple fact that we do not make a reference to, or even give any thought to, the brain state when we mention a mental state. Laird Addis writes:
[Although] the reductive materialist proceeds by attempting to define mentalistic notions in physicalistic terms . . . it seems that there always are, and must always be, obvious exceptions to the proposed reduction. For some of us, these attempts, whether of the definitional or empirical sort, seem as torturous as must be any attempt to show that two things are really one—like trying to show that . . . the tides just are the relative positions of the earth and the sun and the moon.3
It may be objected here that I am begging the question against the materialist, that I am assuming the very point at
2Paul M. Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
3 Laird Addis, Natural Signs (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), pp.
24–25.
issue. Of course if I claim that mental states and brain states are radically different types of things then it follows that the concept of identity cannot be applied between them. But this is in fact the opposite of what I am claiming. The reason we become aware that phenomenal events and brain events are radically different types of things is because the concept of identity can-not be applied between them, and there can be no other more fundamental basis for this distinction, given the primacy of the concept of identity. An apple is not an orange and a bowl of snot is not a bowl of Tasty Wheat. They are not the same; they are not identical; and neither is a brain state identical to a men-tal state. Of course, although the concept of identity is our access to the difference between phenomenal events and brain events, they are not two different things because the concept of identity cannot be applied to them. Rather, they are already two different things, and it is the inapplicability of the concept of identity that is a result of this difference.