• Corpus ID: 92981888

The Compleat Autocerebroscopist : A Thought-Experiment on Professor Feigl ’ s Mind-Body Identity Thesis

@inproceedings{Meehl2015TheCA,
  title={The Compleat Autocerebroscopist : A Thought-Experiment on Professor Feigl ’ s Mind-Body Identity Thesis},
  author={Paul E. Meehl},
  year={2015}
}

• P. Meehl
• Published 2015
• Philosophy

Professor Feigl’s mind-body identity thesis, which may be characterized as a daring hypothesis of “empirical metaphysics,” asserts that human raw-feel events are literally and numerically identical with certain physical brain-events. By physical2 events he means, adopting the terminology of Meehl and Sellars (1956), events which can be exhaustively described in a language sufficient to describe everything that exists and happens in a universe devoid of organic life. Given the set of descriptive terms (predicates and functors) which would be capable of describing without residue all continuants and occurrents in an inorganic world (say, perhaps, our world in the pre-Cambrian period), we need not supplement this conceptual equipment in order to describe everything that exists and happens when a human being experiences a red sensation (“has a red raw feel,” is the locus of a red-qualitied phenomenal event). It is not my purpose here to attack or defend this identity thesis, concerning which I have, in fact, no settled opinion. Rather I hope to clarify its meaning by examining some implications and alternatives presented when we apply it to a plausible thought-experiment involving Professor Feigl’s “autocerebroscope” (1958, p. 456).