Did this Brain Contain the Consciousness of U. T. Place?

Physicalism is the belief that the entire universe – including consciousness – is physical. Physicalists do not believe, as Kant did, that ‘reality’ itself is unknowable; nor do they believe, as did Descartes, that the existence of consciousness is indicative of a different substance than that which comprises the physical world. Rather, they either believe that subjective and intangible experiences are, without exception, physical, or they deny that experience exists. Although the latter, more extreme position has become more common in recent years, the more moderate position that the mind is to be identified with the physical brain was responsible for the twentieth-century renaissance of physicalism.

Sometimes the term ‘physicalism’ (coined by Otto Neurath in the 1930s) is used synonymously with ‘materialism’, but ‘physicalism’ tends to be the more favoured term in British philosophy (Americans and Australians tend to prefer ‘materialism’). It connotes approval of the idea that natural scientists, and physicists in particular, deal with fundamental reality.

Physicalism, or, in its earlier guise, materialism, is not a new position. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), for example, was a materialist. What is new is its dominance and influence. With regard to the mind–body problem – the problem of explaining the relationship of consciousness to the rest of the universe, in particular the body and, more specifically, the brain – physicalism, of different varieties, is the dominant position in contemporary philosophy. However, although philosophy is notoriously slow moving there are signs of change: for instance, journals now publish more articles on panpsychism and new forms of dualism than they did, say, twenty years ago.

There are, unsurprisingly, disagreements on the course of the recent history of physicalism – physicalists, for example, tend to date the dominance of physicalism a little earlier than their opponents (tending, by comparison, to downplay the influence of philosophers such as G. E. M. Anscombe in the 1960s) – but, nonetheless, it is striking that there is widespread agreement that the present-day dominance of physicalism can be traced back to an article by U. T. Place published in the British Journal of Psychology in 1956 entitled ‘Is Consciousness a Brain Process?’.

Place (1924–2000) was proud of his pivotal role in this story. Knowing that his physicalism was what he would be remembered for, at his death in 2000, he left his brain to the University of Adelaide with instructions that it should be displayed with the inscription ‘Did this Brain contain the Consciousness of U. T. Place?’. There it is displayed to this day, a unique illustration of the mind–body problem.

In answer to the question, Place would have no hesitation in answering ‘yes’. He can be seen as having answered it, at least to his own satisfaction, in his 1956 article. But not everyone agrees.

In 1956 Place argued that, ‘[t]he thesis that consciousness is a process in the brain is put forward as a reasonable scientific hypothesis, not to be dismissed on logical grounds alone’ (p. 44). Even though we cannot in fact reduce statements about particular mental images to statements about particular brain processes, nonetheless what the individual talks about when she describes her conscious experiences are, in fact, and even though she may not know it, her brain processes.

(This is reminiscent of Edmund Burke's idealized description of his wife: ‘To describe her body is to describe her mind; one is the transcript of the other.’ Place would agree but he would say that this is true not just of Burke's wife but of everyone.)

Place argues that brain processes are explanatory of experiences in an analogous way to that by which the motion of electric charges explains the appearance of lightning in the sky:

However, on the last page of his article he admits that what remains to be worked out is ‘the mechanism whereby the individual describes what is going on in his environment’ (p. 50).

To which the most obvious objection is – is that all!? Little wonder then that although Place was influential, there are few who would claim that he actually solved the mind–body problem.

It should also be noted that although an idea cannot be dismissed on logical grounds it does not automatically follow that it is a reasonable scientific hypothesis. For example, solipsism (the view that nothing can be known except the contents of one's own consciousness) may not be dismissed on logical grounds – it is neither obviously self-contradictory nor self-evident – but it is not therefore a reasonable scientific thesis.

The Mystical Origin of Modern Physicalism

Place explained the motivation for his work on the mind–body problem in a memoir (‘From Mystical Experience to Biological Consciousness: A Pilgrim's Progress’) in his Selected Papers. His motivation may on first encounter seem surprising. He tells us that the work originated from his interest, as a teenager, in mysticism. Though he soon lost his religious beliefs he remained convinced that mystical experience involved a ‘personality-transforming psychological process’. He was convinced that science could tell us more about these experiences than mystics themselves, whom he saw as somewhat incoherent.

However, what the mystics had said was, after all, enough to convince him of the reality of their experiences. Place, who never had a mystical experience himself, tells us in his memoir that he assumed that such an experience was something like an orgasm.

Thus, in short, he proposed physicalism to account for mystical experience. But, perhaps, on reflection, that is not so surprising. As Bertrand Russell remarked, mysticism has always been associated with ‘the conception of a Reality behind the world of appearance and utterly different from it’ (Mysticism and Logic (1918), p. 7).