Pessoa Jr., O. (2021). The colored-brain thesis. Unisinos Journal of Philosophy, 22(1), 84-93. doi: 10.4013/fsu.2021.221.10
[Abstract]The “colored-brain thesis”, or strong qualitative physicalism, is discussed from historical and philosophical perspectives. This thesis was proposed by Thomas Case (1888), in a non-materialistic context, and is close to views explored by H. H. Price (1932) and E. Boring (1933). Using Mary’s room thought experiment, one can argue that physicalism implies qualitative physicalism. Qualitative physicalism involves three basic statements: (i) perceptual internalism, and realism of qualia; (ii) ontic physicalism, charaterized as a description in space, time, and scale; and (iii) mind-brain identity thesis. In addition, (iv) structuralism in physics, and distinguishing the present version from that suggested by H. Feigl and S. Pepper, (v) realism of the physical description. The “neurosurgeon argument” is presented, as to why the greenness of a visually perceived avocado, which (according to this view) is present in the brain as a physical-chemical attribute, would not be seen as green by a neurosurgeon who opens the observer’s skull. This conception is compared with two close views, Russellian (and Schlickian) monisms and panprotopsychism (including panqualityism). According to the strong qualitative physicalism presented here, the phenomenal experience of a quale q is identical to a physico-chemical quality q, which arises from a combination of (1) the materiality ω associated with the brain, and (2) the causal organization or structure of the relevant elements of the brain Σ, including in this organization the structure of the self: (Σω)_q. The “explanatory gap” between mental and physical states is shifted to a gap between the physico-chemical qualities q and the organized materiality of a specific brain region (Σω)_q, and is seen as being bridged only by a set of non-explanatory postulates.
[Citing Place (1956)]  [Citing Place (2000f)]  
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
Section 1. History of the view
* The colored-brain thesis is the name given by Leopold Stubenberg (1998, p. 169) to the view that subjective phenomenal qualities, or qualia, are “properties of the brain”.
[...] the Oxford philosopher Thomas Case (1888), who characterized sense perception as the “the immediate apprehension of an internal physical object inside the nervous system of a sentient being” (Case, 1888, p. 33).
* It seems that the colored-brain thesis was not explicitly advocated by anyone else, although Price (1932) wrote that “philosophers have been accustomed to discuss the question whether sense-data are physical or mental” (Price, 1932, p. 127). In fact, in the interwar period, when sense-data theories and materialism coexisted in English speaking philosophy, the American psychologist and historian of psychology Edwin Boring came close to the colored-brain thesis, in his book The physical dimensions of consciousness (1933). It was this work that influenced U.T. Place (1956) to develop his version of the mind-brain identity thesis (Place, 2000). The mind-brain identity thesis has a history that is intertwined with materialism, and was put forward by Boring in the following statement, quoted by Place: “To the author a perfect correlation is identity. Two events that always occur together at the same time in the same place, without any temporal or spatial differentiation at all, are not two events but the same event” (Boring, 1933, p. 16).
Place next ponders on why Boring was ignored by philosophers:
Boring moreover, was himself apparently committed to combining the identity theory with a phenomenalist account of sensory qualities which on Leibniz’s principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles would commit him to the view that certain brain events are literally green, high pitched, warm, sour or putrid, which for a philosopher would constitute an immediate knockdown reductio ad absurdum of his position (Place, 2000, p. 1).
We see therefore that Boring got close to the colored-brain thesis, in spite of not having mentioned it explicitly. Place had criticized this thesis in his seminal paper of 1956, in which he supported a reductionist materialism. In this work, there is not properly speaking a mind-brain identity thesis, but the thesis that the mind is “composed” of brain parts, and nothing else, which is a form of reductionism which comes close to eliminativism. The colored-brain thesis is mentioned and criticized in the following excerpt:
This logical mistake, which I shall refer to as the ‘phenomenological fallacy’, is the mistake of supposing that when the subject describes his experience, when he describes how things look, sound, smell, taste or feel to him, he is describing the literal properties of objects and events on a peculiar sort of internal cinema or television screen, usually referred to in the modern psychological literature as the ‘phenomenal field’. If we assume, for example, that when a subject reports a green after-image he is asserting the occurrence inside himself of an object which is literally green, it is clear that we have on our hands an entity for which there is no place in the world of physics. In the case of the green after-image there is no green object in the subject’s environment corresponding to the description that he gives. Nor is there anything green in his brain; certainly there is nothing which could have emerged when he reported the appearance of the green after-image. Brain processes are not the sort of things to which colour concepts can be properly applied (Place, 1956, p. 49).
Section 3. Other criticisms
* According to some of its critics, the colored-brain thesis is subject to the so-called “sense-data fallacy” of Harold Prichard and John Austin: “(…) the inference from the fact that one perceives a tomato that appears red to the fact that one perceives a red appearance” (Den Otter, 2005, p. 160). Considering that perception involves a causal chain that starts from things in the external world, passes through the sense organs, and enters the brain, one may consider (as is done in the causal-pluralist theory of observation, in Pessoa, 2019b) that one is observing either the external tomato, or a pattern on the retina, or the most proximal cause to perception in the sensorium (which would be the material part identical to the subjective perception of the tomato – what could be called the “red appearance”). Thus, there would be no fallacy. Another version of this same point (with which we also disagree) is the “phenomenological fallacy”, mentioned above in the quote by Place (1956), which denies the reality of the green appearance experienced in an after-image (due to looking, for example, at a white wall after looking at a red tomato).
Section 5. Assumptions of the view
* In defending the colored-brain thesis, the following assumptions were implicitly assumed: (i) Perceptive internalism and reality of qualia. Internalism in the philosophy of perception is the doctrine of the primary and secondary properties of Galileo, Descartes, Locke, etc., according to which the phenomenal qualities (qualia) exist only in the mind, not in the external world. [...]
(ii) Ontic physicalism. According to this thesis, everything is material ...
(iii) Mind-brain identity thesis. The most direct way of connecting theses (i) and (ii) is through the thesis that qualia are identical to brain processes. With Place (1956), the identity thesis started being associated with the version that privileges the material ontological status of brain processes, a status conceived in linguistic-quantitative terms. But Boring’s (1933, p. 16) approach, mentioned in section 1, placed qualititative states on equal terms as brain states. Qualitative physicalism’s use of the identity thesis should amount to considering qualitative mental states as identical to qualitative physico-chemical states (see more in section 9). One may also consider Spinoza’s attribute dualism as a version of the identity thesis, a form of monism that also appears in Gustav Fechner (1966, p. 3) and in Thomas Nagel (1987, chap. 4), views which privilege neither matter or mind, but a more fundamental substance.
Section 8. Herbert Feigl and Stephen Pepper
* In a paper published in 1963, Feigl discussed a “familiar objection” to the mind-body identity theory, which addresses a version of the “explanatory gap” (Levine, 1983), to be further examined in sections 9 and 10: “how could directly experienced qualities such as colors, sounds, smells, pains, emotions, or the like, be identical with neural processes whose properties are so fundamentally different?” (Feigl, 1963, p. 257). In presenting his view, Feigl appears to accept the three assumptions of qualitative physicalism (section 5), contrary to the materialists Place and Smart, who tend to reject the thesis that qualia are real. Still, Feigl does not derive the colored-brain thesis, probably due to its counterintuitive character, so his view may be characterized as a weak form of qualitative physicalism (and ours a strong form).
Citing Place (2000f) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):