Responses to the Doctrine of Mind-Brain Identity

Responses to the Doctrine of Mind-Brain Identity

To be in pain is, for example, is to have one's c-fibres, or more likely a-fibres, firing in the central nervous system; to believe that broccoli will kill you is to have one's B(bk)-fibres firing, and so on.

The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy:Chapter 5 'Philosophy of Mind' by William G. Lycan

The theory or doctrine of mind-brain identity, as its name implies, denies the claim of dualists that mind and brain (or consciousness and matter) are distinct substances. The tradition of dualism, whose clear-cut foundations laid by Rene Descartes (1596-1650) were built upon during succeeding centuries, sharply distinguishes between the stuff of consciousness and the stuff of matter. An outline of the position of the dualist will give a context for the identity theory.

To the dualist, mind is immaterial and, furthermore, cannot in any conceivable circumstance be reduced to matter. This irreducibility, to make the point more explicit, is not contingent on the level of progress of scientific investigation; the thoroughgoing dualist denies the possibility, however remote, that neuroscience, however sophisticated in future millennia, might ever discover that states of mind are the same entities as states of the brain. Why is the dualist so confident in his assertion? He argues that the very nature of consciousness is alien to that of matter of which the brain is composed. Material objects can be broken down into their constituents, to molecules, to atoms, to sub-atomic particles; they have mass and volume; they have dimensions (what Descartes called extension) and location. In contrast, mental states have none of these properties: sensations, feelings, thoughts (or any instanc...

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...ted through a first principle, consciousness. Furthermore, what is true of the sense-datum of seeing my brain is true of seeing or sensing any material object, namely that the material object appears to us as the content of the sense-datum. Here is the crux of my third objection to the materialists who propound the doctrine of mind-brain identity, that they make a fundamental mistake at the beginning of their investigation. They take the material as their Archimedian point and so build a philosophy of consciousness on a dangerously fragile basis. They try to explain what is thoroughly grounded and certain in terms of what is assumed, and subject to doubt. It is surely closer to reality to commence with mental events as foundational and to worry next whether they coexist with a physical world for it is within mental events that material bodies make their appearance.