LECTURE THREE

THE MIND/BRAIN IDENTITY THEORY

心脑同一论
(ANOTHER SPECIES IN THE MATERIALIST FAMILY)
HOW TO UPDATE BEHAVIORISM, WHICH
SHOULD BE UPDATED SOMEHOW?
 We need to look into the brain! Neuroscience
should help!
 Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging(NMRI,核磁共振
成像) is a medical imaging technique（医学成像技术）
used in radiology (放射学)to visualize detailed internal
structures.
HOW DO WE KNOW THAT MASAYUKI SAEKI IS
REALLY A VICTIM OF ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE?

 His behaviors cannot be viewed as the most

important evidence for making such a judgment!
 Alzheimer‘s disease is characterised by loss
of neurons(神经元) and synapses（突触） in the
cerebral cortex （脑皮层）and certain subcortical
regions（皮层下区域）. This loss results in gross
atrophy （萎缩）of the affected regions, including
degeneration in the temporal lobe （颞叶）and
parietal lobe （顶骨叶）, and parts of the frontal
cortex (额叶) and cingulate gyrus (扣带回).
COMPARISON OF A NORMAL AGED BRAIN (LEFT) AND THE
BRAIN OF A PERSON WITH ALZHEIMER'S (RIGHT).

NOW WE NEED TO WATCH THE MOVIE AGAIN！

THE CORE IDEA OF THE INDETITY THEORY

 The identity theory of mind holds that states

and processes of the mind are identical to
states and processes of the brain.
 In taking the identity theory (in its various forms)
as a species of physicalism(物理主义), we
should say that this is an ontological, not a
translational physicalism. （是本体论的物理主
义，而非翻译性质的物理主义）
HISTORICAL ANTECEDENT OF THIS POSITION
 Julien Offray de La
Mettrie (拉·美特利
 November 23, 1709 [1] –
November 11, 1751) was
a French physician and philos
opher, and one of the earliest
of the French materialists of
the Enlightenment. He is best
known for his work L'homme
machine ("Machine man"[2]),
wherein he rejected
the Cartesian dualism of
mind and body, and proposed
the metaphor of the human
being as machine.
 MOST FAMOUS IDENTITY THEORIST IN OUR TIME

 John Jamieson Carswell "Jack" Smart AC (born 16 September 1920) is an Australian

philosopher and academic who is currently Emeritus Professor
ofPhilosophy at Monash University, Australia. He works in the fields
ofmetaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion,
and political philosophy.

 Ullin Place (1924–2000) was a British philosopher and psychologist. Along with J. J.
C. Smart, he developed the identity theory of mind.

 Herbert Feigl (December 14, 1902 – June 1, 1988) was an Austrian philosopher and
a member of the Vienna Circle.
WHAT PROF. PLACE SAID IS:

 The logical objections which might be raised to the

statement ‘consciousness is a process in the brain’
are no greater than the logical objections which
might be raised to the statement ‘lightning is a
motion of electric charges’.
 Or in other words, the identity relationship
between consciousness and the brain is parallel to
the relationship between lightning and the motion
of electric charges!
SOME PHILOSOPHICAL CLARIFICATION:

 The identity relationship between

mental events and brain events
should be represented as a posteriori
necessary truth!
 心灵事件以及脑事件之间的关系，必
须被表达为后天必然真理！！
A PRIORI VS. POSTERIOR

 先天 VS. 后天
 This is an epistemological distinction

 这是一个认识论的区分

 This pair is concerned with how do you know

something.
 If you know something without appealing to any
empirical inquiries, you know it as an a priori
truth. Conversely, you know it as a posterior
truth.
CONTINGENT VS. NECESSARY

 偶然性 VS. 必然性

 This pair is concerned with a metaphysical
distinction. 形而上学区分
 Something is necessarily true insofar as it is
true in every possible world;
 Something is contingently true insofar as it is
true only in some of the possible worlds.
POSTERIORI NECESSARY TRUTH
后天必然真理
 A sentence whose truth metaphysically hold in
every possible world on the one hand, but
cannot be epistemologically acquired without
appealing to empirical inquiries on the other
can be categorized “posteriori necessary true”.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF POSTERIORI NECESSARY
TRUE SENTENCES:
 1. Water is nothing but H2O.

 2. Some mental states are nothing but some

brain states.
 TOPIC-NEUTRAL ANALYSES
 Smart adapted the words ‘topic-neutral’ from Ryle,
who used them to characterise words such as ‘if, ‘or’,
‘and’, ‘not’, ‘because’. If you overheard only these
words in a conversation you would not be able to tell
whether the conversation was one of mathematics,
physics, geology, history, theology, or any other
subject. Smart used the words ‘topic neutral’ in the
narrower sense of being neutral between
physicalism and dualism. For example ‘going on’,
‘occurring’, ‘intermittent’, ‘waxing’, ‘waning’ are topic
neutral.
 Thereby, we can eliminate the difference between
mental property and physical property.
 AN EXAMPLE
Suppose that I have a yellow, green and purple striped
mental image. We may also introduce the philosophical term
‘sense datum’ to cover the case of seeing or seeming to see
something yellow, green and purple: we say that we have a
yellow, green and purple sense datum. That is I would see or
seem to see, for example, a flag or an array of lamps which
is green, yellow and purple striped. Suppose also, as seems
plausible, that there is nothing yellow, green and purple
striped in the brain. Thus it is important for identity theorists
to say (as indeed they have done) that sense data and
images are not part of the furniture of the world. ‘I have a
green sense datum’ is really just a way of saying that I see
or seem to see something that really is green. This move
should not be seen as merely an ad hoc device, since Ryle
and J.L. Austin, in effect Wittgenstein, and others had
provided arguments, as when Ryle argued that mental
images were not a sort of ghostly picture postcard.
AND SMART (1959) SAYS:

 Then a person says ‘I see a yellowish-orange

after-image’ he is saying something like this:
"There is something going on which is like what
is going on when I have my eyes open, am
awake, and there is an orange illuminated in
good light in front of me".
 DISPUTES BETWEEN CHALMERS AND
SMART
Quoting these passages, David Chalmers (1996, p. 360)
objects that if ‘something is going on’ is construed broadly
enough it is inadequate, and if it is construed narrowly enough
to cover only experiential states (or processes) it is not
sufficient for the conclusion. Smart would counter this by
stressing the word ‘typically’. Of course a lot of things go on in
me when I have a yellow after image (for example my heart is
pumping blood through my brain). However they do
not typically go on then: they go on at other times too. Against
Place Chalmers says that the word ‘experience’ is unanalysed
and so Place's analysis is insufficient towards establishing an
identity between sensations and brain processes. As against
Smart he says that leaving the word ‘experience’ out of the
analysis renders it inadequate. That is, he does not accept the
‘topic-neutral’ analysis. Smart hopes, and Chalmers denies,
that the account in terms of ‘typically of’ saves the topic-
neutral analysis.
TYPE AND TOKEN IDENTITY THEORIES
类型同一论，以及殊型同一论

 The notion ‘type’ and ‘token’ here comes by

analogy from ‘type’ and ‘token’ as applied to
words. A telegram ‘love and love and love’
contains only two type words but in another
sense, as the telegraph clerk would insist, it
contains five words (‘token words’).
ANOMALOUS MONISM （不合则一元论）

 Donald Herbert
Davidson (戴维森March
6, 1917 – August 30,
2003).
 MENTAL EVENTS
 In "Mental Events" (1970) Davidson advanced a form of
token identity theory about the mind: token mental events are
identical to token physical events. One previous difficulty with
such a view was that it did not seem feasible to provide laws
relating mental states—for example, believing that the sky is blue,
or wanting a hamburger—to physical states, such as patterns of
neural activity in the brain. Davidson argued that such a
reduction would not be necessary to a token identity thesis: it is
possible that each individual mental event just is the
corresponding physical event, without there being laws
relating types (as opposed to tokens) of mental events to types of
physical events. But, Davidson argued, the fact that we could not
have such a reduction does not entail that the mind is
anything more than the brain. Hence, Davidson called his
position anomalous monism: monism, because it claims that only
one thing is at issue in questions of mental and physical events;
anomalous (from a-, "not," and omalos, "regular") because
mental and physical event types could not be connected by strict
laws (laws without exceptions).
FURTHER READING:

 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-
identity/