PHIL 008 Lecture Notes - Lecture 21: Moe Williams, Materialism, Physicalism
29 Oct 2020
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Arguments for reductive materialism: ontogenetic and evolutionary considerations (43, neural-dependence (44, progress of neuroscience (44, note: these all support the idea that the mind is physical in nature but they don"t establish that intertheoretic reductions can be attained. Arguments against reductive materialism: argument from introspection, churchland"s response, sense-less argument, churchland"s response (47-48), copernicus, argument from leibniz"s law (46, churchland"s response. Consider now a similar argument, again based on the introspectible qualities of our sensations. Here the sensations are visual sensations, and their possessor is a human rather than a bat. Let us imagine a future neuroscientist named mary. Mary has been raised in a room that has been scrupulously constructed to display no colors at all save those that range from white, through the various shades of gray, to black. Here entire world looks to her as it would in an old-fashioned black-and-white movie.
