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Single Idea 2584

[filed under theme 15. Nature of Minds / B. Features of Minds / 5. Qualia / a. Nature of qualia ]

Full Idea

After frontal lobotomies, patients typically report that they still have pains, though the pains no longer bother them.

Gist of Idea

Lobotomised patients can cease to care about a pain

Source

Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 83)

Book Ref

'The Philosophy of Mind', ed/tr. Beakley,B /Ludlow P [MIT 1992], p.83

A Reaction

I take this to be an endorsement of reductive physicalism, because what matters about pains is that they bother us, not how they feel, so frog pain could do the job, if it felt different from ours, but was disliked by the frog.

Related Idea

Idea 3360 Are pains pure qualia, or do they motivate? [Kim]

The 16 ideas from Ned Block

6172 The Inverted Earth example shows that phenomenal properties are not representational [Block, by Rowlands]
18033 The meaning of a representation is its role in thought, perception or decisions [Block]
2574 Behaviour requires knowledge as well as dispositions [Block]
2576 In functionalism, desires are internal states with causal relations [Block]
2575 Functionalism is behaviourism, but with mental states as intermediaries [Block]
2578 Could a creature without a brain be in the right functional state for pain? [Block]
2577 Simple machine-functionalism says mind just is a Turing machine [Block]
2580 A Turing machine, given a state and input, specifies an output and the next state [Block]
2579 Physicalism is prejudiced in favour of our neurology, when other systems might have minds [Block]
2581 Intuition may say that a complex sentence is ungrammatical, but linguistics can show that it is not [Block]
2582 A brain looks no more likely than anything else to cause qualia [Block]
2583 You might invert colours, but you can't invert beliefs [Block]
2584 Lobotomised patients can cease to care about a pain [Block]
2585 Not just any old functional network will have mental states [Block]
2586 In functionalism, what are the special inputs and outputs of conscious creatures? [Block]
3178 A fast machine could pass all behavioural tests with a vast lookup table [Block, by Rey]