target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_2d1b8e77-fac1-5e88-8c35-66d1be7fb739">1 F. Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis (Touchstone, London, 1995), pp. 30, 32f., 57.2 2 G. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire – On the Matter of the Mind (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1994), pp. 109f., 130.
3 3 C. Blakemore, Mechanics of the Mind (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977), p. 91.
4 4 J. Z. Young, Programs of the Brain (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1978), p. 119.
5 5 A. Damasio, Descartes’ Error – Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (Papermac, London, 1996), p. 173.
6 6 B. Libet, ‘Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action’, Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 8 (1985), p. 536.
7 7 J. P. Frisby, Seeing: Illusion, Brain and Mind (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980), pp. 8f. It is striking here that the misleading philosophical idiom associated with the Cartesian and empiricist traditions, namely talk of the ‘outside’ world, has been transferred from the mind to the brain. It was misleading because it purported to contrast an inside ‘world of consciousness’ with an outside ‘world of matter’. But this is confused. The mind is not a kind of place, and what is idiomatically said to be in the mind is not thereby spatially located (cp. ‘in the story’). Hence too, the world (which is not ‘mere matter’, but also living beings) is not spatially ‘outside’ the mind. The contrast between what is in the brain and what is outside the brain is, of course, perfectly literal and unobjectionable. What is objectionable is the claim that there are ‘symbolic descriptions’ in the brain.
8 8 R. L. Gregory, ‘The confounded eye’, in R. L. Gregory and E. H. Gombrich (eds), Illusion in Nature and Art (Duckworth, London, 1973), p. 50.
9 9 D. Marr, Vision, a Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information (Freeman, San Francisco, 1980), p. 3, our italics.
10 10P. N. Johnson-Laird, ‘How could consciousness arise from the computations of the brain?’, in C. Blakemore and S. Greenfield (eds), Mindwaves (Blackwell, Oxford, 1987), p. 257.
11 11Susan Greenfield, explaining to her television audiences the achievements of positron emission tomography, announced with wonder that for the first time it is possible to see thoughts. Semir Zeki informed the Fellows of the Royal Society that the new millennium belongs to neurobiology, which will, among other things, solve the age-old problems of philosophy (see S. Zeki, ‘Splendours and miseries of the brain’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B 354 (1999), p. 2054). We shall discuss this view in §17.4.2.
12 12The relation between the concept of a person and the concept of a human being will be examined in the Preliminaries to Part II below.
13 13L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe (Blackwell, Oxford, 1953), §281 (see also §§282–4, 357–61). The thought fundamental to this remark was developed by A. J. P. Kenny, ‘The homunculus fallacy’ (1971), repr. in his The Legacy of Wittgenstein (Blackwell, Oxford, 1984), pp. 125–36. For the detailed interpretation of Wittgenstein’ s observation, see P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind, Volume 3 of an Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, 2nd, extensively revised, edn (Wiley Blackwell, Oxford, 2019), Exegesis §§281–4, 357–61, and the essay entitled ‘Men, minds and machines’, which explores some of the ramifications of Wittgenstein’s insight. As is evident from chapter 1, he was anticipated in this by Aristotle (DA 408b 2–15, quoted on p. 24 above). He was also anticipated by George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) in his book The Physical Basis of Mind (Trübner & Co., London, 1877): ‘It is the man, and not the brain that thinks; it is the organism as a whole, and not one organ, that feels and acts’ (p. 441).
14 14Of course, outside neuroscientific and psychological theorizing and philosophical reasoning it is harmless to say ‘My brain isn’ t working today’ or ‘My brain told me that something was fishy’. They just mean ‘I can’ t think clearly today’ and ‘I thought that something was suspicious’.
15 15Kenny (‘Homunculus fallacy’, p. 125) uses the term ‘homunculus fallacy’ to signify the conceptual mistake in question. Though picturesque, it may, as he admits, be misleading, since the mistake is not simply that of ascribing psychological predicates to an imaginary homunculus in the head. In our view, the term ‘mereological fallacy’ is more apt for our purposes. It should be noted, however, that the error in question is not merely the fallacy of ascribing to a part predicates that apply only to a whole, but is a special neuroscientific instance of this more general confusion. Furthermore, as Kenny points out, the misapplication of a predicate is, strictly speaking, not a fallacy, since it is not a form of invalid reasoning, but it leads to fallacies (ibid., pp. 135f.). To be sure, this mereological confusion is common among psychologists as well as neuroscientists.
16 16Comparable mereological principles apply to inanimate objects and some of their properties. From the fact that a car is fast, it does not follow that its carburettor is fast, and from the fact that an antique clock keeps time accurately, it does not follow that its great wheel keeps time accurately.
17 17But note that when my hand hurts, I am in pain, not my hand. And when you hurt my hand, you hurt me. Verbs of sensation (unlike verbs of perception) apply to parts of the body; i.e. our body is sensitive, and its parts may hurt, itch, throb, etc. But the corresponding verb phrases incorporating nominals, e.g. ‘have a pain (an itch, a throbbing sensation)’ are predicable only of human beings, not of their parts (in which the sensation is located).
18 18For more detailed discussion, see H. Smit and P. M. S. Hacker, ‘Seven misconceptions about the mereological fallacy: a compilation for the perplexed’, Erkenntnis, 79 (2014), pp. 1077–97. See also Appendix 3 below.
19 19See S. Ullman, ‘Tacit assumptions in the computational study of vision’, in A. Gorea (ed.), Representations of Vision, Trends and Tacit Assumptions in Vision Research (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991), pp. 314f., for this move. He limits his discussion to the use (or, in our view, misuse) of such terms as ‘representation’ and ‘symbolic representation’.
20 20The phrase is Richard Gregory’ s; see ‘The confounded eye’, p. 51.
