The Mind/Body Identity Theory

    Hi, in this post we will talk about the Mind/Body Identity Theory.

• The identity theory of mind holds that states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain. Strictly speaking, it need not hold that the mind is identical to the brain. Idiomatically we do use "she has a good mind" and "She has a good brain" interchangeably but we would hardly say "Her mind weighs fifty kilograms". Here I take identifying mind and brain as being a matter of identifying processes and perhaps states of the mind and brain. Consider an experience of pain, or of seeing something, or of having a mental image. The identity theory of mind is to the effect that these experiences just are brain processes, not merely correlated with brain processes.

Some philosophers hold that though experiences are brain processes they nevertheless have fundamentally non-physical, psychical, properties, sometimes called "qualia".

Here I shall take the identity theory as denying the existence of such irreducible non-physical properties. Some identity theorists give a behaviouristic analysis of mental states, such as beliefs and desires, but other, sometimes called "central state materialists", say that mental states are actual brain states. Identity theorists often describe themselves as "materialists" but "physicalists" may be a better word. That is, referred to in physics that are not happily described as "material".

Many writers over the centuries have simply identified the mind with the brain, noticing the empirical fact that when the brain is damaged, mental properties are also impaired. But other, following Rene Descartes, have assumed that mind is an immaterial, non-physical substance. Descarted and other simply assumed that the mental world could influence the physical world and vice versa, but the mystery of exactly how this might be possible let to the "mind-body problem" the question how two unlike substances, one material, the other one immaterial, can interact. Identity theory is one solution to that problem.

The other solution is dualism and a theory of interactionism. •

• Information Philosophy rejects the Identity Thesis. The mind is an immaterial and non-physical process going on in the physical and material brain.

The human mind is the most highly evolved form of the biological information processing that goes on in all organisms. Information philosophy sees the mind as a biological information processing system.

Our mind/brain model emphasizes the abstract information content of the mind. Abstract information is neither matter nor energy, yet it needs matter for its concrete embodiment and energy for its communication. Information fits well with the common-sense notion of spirit.

When we are conceived, it is information in our parental DNA (plus the vastly greater information in the human cell) that starts our life. When we die, mere matter remains. What is lost is our developmental and experiential information - our life history, excepting that which may have been stored externally in other minds or in the sum of human knowledge.

Because it is embodied in the brain, the mind can control the actions of a body. The mind is normally unaffected by its own quantum level uncertainty (excepting when we want to be creative and unpredictable).

Thus our mind/body model explains how a relatively immaterial, "free", unpredictable and creative mind can exert downward causal control over the adequately determined material body through the self-determinate and responsible actions selected by the will from an agenda of alternative possibilities. •

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