“…why should we be troubled by Leibniz’s point that if the brain were blown up to the size of a factory, so that we could stroll through it, we should not see thoughts? If we know enough neural correlations, we shall indeed see thoughts-in the sense that our vision will reveal to us what thoughts the possessor of the brain is having. If we do not, we shall not, but then if we stroll through any factory without having first learned about its parts and their relations to one another, we shall not see what is going on. Further, even if we could find no such neural correlations, even if cerebral localization of thoughts was a complete failure, why would we want to say that a person’s thoughts or mental images were nonphysical simply because we cannot give an account of them in terms of his parts?” Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Thirteenth-Anniversary Edition 2009) 26.
Indeed,
why should we be troubled by Leibniz’s point? It is only troubling if we want
very badly to conflate or reduce the mental to specific neural correlations.
And in doing so, discard the ontological reality of our mental experience.
