Materialism › Mind-Brain
Sellars’s Sensa Beyond the Given
Sensations as Qualitative Physical Processes Awaiting Future Physics
Sellars treats thought and sensation separately. Thoughts are inner episodes modeled on public speech and defined by their role in reasoning, and a completed science will identify them with neurophysiological processes. Sensations are nonconceptual, intrinsically qualitative states he calls sensa, and because a uniform pink expanse cannot be matched to the particulate structure of neurons, he argues that future physics must expand to include qualitative processes.
Wilfrid Sellars
What consciousness is
Conceptual thought is identified with functionally classified neurophysiological episodes. Sensory consciousness is identified with sensa, intrinsically qualitative physical processes that present-day physics does not yet describe.
Mind and body
Two identity theories. Thoughts are identical with neural states as neuroscience describes them, in line with Place and Smart. Sensations are identical with brain states only once physics recognizes continuous qualitative ‘absolute processes.’
Mechanism
The grain argument. Phenomenal qualities appear homogeneous all the way through while neural structures are particulate, so correlations do not yield an intelligible identity until physics includes qualitative processes.
Core claims
- The Myth of the Given is false: bare sensations cannot justify empirical beliefs independently of concepts, language, and inference.
- In the Myth of Jones, thoughts are theoretical posits modeled on speech, an early functionalism about intentional states.
- A uniform pink expanse and a heterogeneous neural process differ in grain, so present neuroscience cannot supply the identity.
- Sensa are ‘physical-1’ (part of the natural spatiotemporal world) but not ‘physical-2’ (admitted by present physics).
Criticisms
Calling sensa primitive physical processes revises physics and relocates the explanatory burden without deriving phenomenality from independently understood principles. Sellars’s place among identity theorists is unorthodox, since the physical side of his phenomenal identity has not yet been discovered.
Implications
- AI consciousness: Uncertain
- Thought is functional and could in principle be realized elsewhere, but sensory consciousness requires qualitative sensa, and Sellars does not say which physical organizations instantiate them.
- Survival beyond death: No
- Since sensa and thoughts are physical processes in nervous systems, it follows from the view that they end with the organism.
- Meaning and purpose: Humanistic only
- Sellars keeps persons, reasons, and norms in a stereoscopic integration with the scientific image, with no appeal to cosmic purpose.
- Virtual immortality: Unlikely
- A digital copy could reproduce functional roles but not, on Sellars’s view, the intrinsically qualitative sensa that sensory experience requires.
Related theories
- Place’s Empirical Identity and the Phenomenological Fallacy (Overlap)
- Smart’s Topic-Neutral Identity (Overlap)
- Russellian Monism (Compatible)
- Strawson's Realistic Monism and Real Materialism (Compatible)
Sources
- Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Wilfrid Sellars (1956)
- Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, Wilfrid Sellars (1962)
- The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem, Wilfrid Sellars (1965)
- Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process: The Carus Lectures, Wilfrid Sellars (1981)
- Mental Events, Wilfrid Sellars (1981)
- Knowledge, Mind, and the Given, W. A. deVries and T. Triplett (2000)
- Real Materialism, G. Strawson (2003)
- Sellars’s Argument for an Ontology of Absolute Processes, D. Landy (2019)
- Demystifying the Myth of Sensation: Wilfrid Sellars’ Adverbialism Reconsidered, L. Corti (2022)
- Wilfrid Sellars (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), W. A. deVries (2024)