Materialism › Relational
Manzotti’s Mind-Object Identity ("Spread Mind")
Experience Is the Object Itself
Riccardo Manzotti argues that your experience of an object is identical to the object itself, taken as a bundle of physical properties that exist relative to your body. The body and brain are causal conditions that bring that object into existence, the way a dam brings a lake into existence, but the experience is out in the world rather than in the head.
Riccardo Manzotti
What consciousness is
When a subject experiences an object O, the experience of O is O itself, the object as causally and physically available relative to a given body.
Mind and body
Manzotti splits classical mind-brain identity into two claims: consciousness is physical (which he keeps) and it lies inside the brain (which he drops). The brain is causally necessary for experience but does not constitute it.
Mechanism
Object-relativity: properties exist only relative to another physical system, so the body brings into being the objects that are its experiences.
Core claims
- Neural activity lacks the properties experience has: nothing in the brain is red, round, or shiny, while the apple is.
- Physicalism requires only that consciousness be physical, not that it be inside the brain.
- Dreams and hallucinations recombine previously met external properties rather than create new ones, as shown by the congenitally blind not dreaming in color.
- Illusions are veridical experiences of a proxy property; the error lies in a belief about which property is perceived.
Criticisms
Critics press on hallucinations that seem objectless or radically novel, on the idea that present experience can lie light-years from one’s body, and on moving agency from neural events to distal objects. Manzotti answers each by denying the assumption that generates it.
Implications
- AI consciousness: Possible
- Since the body is just another object acting as a causal reference frame, a robot body could in principle bring objects into existence relative to itself. Manzotti does not settle which systems qualify.
- Survival beyond death: No
- Since the body is the condition for objects to exist relative to a subject, nothing remains for that subject once the body is gone.
- Meaning and purpose: Humanistic only
- The view is physicalist and treats experience as the world relative to a body, with no cosmic purpose implied.
- Virtual immortality: Unlikely
- Since experience is the external objects themselves, copying brain patterns would not carry over a person’s experience without the same world of objects relative to a body.
Related theories
- Smart’s Topic-Neutral Identity (Influence)
- A. Clark's Extended Mind (Contrast)
- Noë's "Out of Our Heads" Theory (Overlap)
- Integrated Information Theory (Contrast)
Sources
- The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One, Riccardo Manzotti (2017)
- Consciousness and Object: A Mind-Object Identity Physicalist Theory, Riccardo Manzotti (2017)
- Mind-Object Identity: A Solution to the Hard Problem, Riccardo Manzotti (2019)
- Experiences Are Objects: Towards a Mind-Object Identity Theory, Riccardo Manzotti (2016)
- The Spread Mind: Is Consciousness Situated?, Riccardo Manzotti (2011)
- The Challenge of Consciousness, Riccardo Manzotti and T. Parks (2018)
- Sensations and Brain Processes, J. J. C. Smart (1959)
- A Materialist Theory of the Mind, D. M. Armstrong (1968)
- Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, A. Noë (2009)
- Manzotti’s Mind-Object Identity (‘Spread Mind’), Landscape of Consciousness, Robert Lawrence Kuhn