No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2010
1 “How Brains Think”, by Coder, David, Dialogue, Vol. XII (1973), No. 1.Google Scholar
2 See also MacKay, D. M.: “I don't think it makes senseto attribute consciousness to cerebral hemispheres. What I am saying is thatthe person is conscious…”, in Brain and Conscious Experience, ed. by Eccles, J. C. (Springer-Verlag New York Inc., 1966), p. 313Google Scholar. Norman Malcolm, too, scoffs at the suggestion that brains could have thoughts, since “… a brain does not sufficiently resemble a human being” (“Scientific Materialism and the Identity Theory”, Dialogue, III, 1964.)
3 Unless the lesions occur at an early age when the brain is plastic enough to allow speech centres to develop elsewhere; only about 30% of adult aphasics recover speech.
4 See Gazzaniga, M. S., Velletri, A. S. and Premack, D., “Language Training in Brain-Damaged Human”, Fed. Proc. 30:265 (1971).Google Scholar
5 See Premack, D., “Language in Chimpanzee ?”, Science 172: 808–22 (1971).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
6 “Can a Brain have a Pain ?”, by Gert, Bernard, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XXVII (1967), pp. 432–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Except in the very different sense that in the two cerebral hemispheres of a normal human we have the basis for two persons. I argue this in “Multiple Identity”, The Personalist (Vol. 54, No. 3, Summer 1973)Google Scholar; and in “Brain Bisection and Personal Identity,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (March, 1974).
8 I have tried to use sufficiently vague language here to avoid favouring any particular mind-body theory; similarly with the sequence of neural and mental events that follows. Any theory which grants the brain-dependence of our mental lives is compatible with the point I am making. Of coursethe exact timing of events would determine whether Epiphenomenalism or Interactionism or Mind-Brain Identity is the truer description of those events; the difficulty here is to be sure of that timing, since only the brainin vitro feels the cramp, etc.
9 The above paradox is not unlike Bertrand Russell's paradox of our having complete memories of a past when in fact the world sprang into being five minutes ago (The Analysis of Mind, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1922, pp. 159–60)Google Scholar. As Russell correctly remarks, such paradoxes are uninteresting because logically indefeasible.