LECTURE THREE THE MINDBRAIN IDENTITY THEORY ANOTHER SPECIES

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 phil osopher, 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 of. Philosophy 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, an Austrian philosopher and a member of the Vienna Circle. 1988) was

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 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. 先天

CONTINGENT VS. NECESSARY 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. 偶然性

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 H 2 O. 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’ 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/