Abstract
Life Science Library now claims to examine ‘the most complex of all biological organs: the human mind’, and scientists quite commonly make no distinction between mind and brain — they delight in talking about the brain classifying, decoding, perceiving, deciding or giving orders. And while resisting the conceptual muddle involved in talking of the brain doing what persons do, the identity hypothesis tries to provide a philosophically respectable basis for the equation of mind and brain, maintaining that ‘mind’ is just a term for a group of activities and dispositions, and that these in turn are in some sense to be identified with brain activities or traces. On the other hand, from the point of view of religion and traditional philosophy the suggestion is completely unplausible — creative or inventive thought, and aesthetic, moral or religious experiences seem so far removed from mechanical or physiological processes that a good deal of softening up is necessary if any kind of identity theory is to get a fair hearing. This softening up is best carried out by considering the difficulties in the main rival philosophical view, interactionism.
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Notes
P. F. Strawson, Individuals (Methuen, 1959), pp. 104 ff.
J. R. Smythies, ed., Brain and Mind (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 252.
Cf. J. Passmore, Philosophical Reasoning (Duckworth, 1961), p. 54.
H. Feigl, ‘The “Mental” and the “Physical”’ in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. ii (University of Minnesota Press, 1958), pp. 370–497.
Wilfred Sellars, ‘The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem’, Review of Metaphysics, xviii (1965). pp. 430 ff., esp. p. 442. Sellars also thinks that what is at issue is the identity of ‘raw-feels’ universals and brain-state universals. But how then can the identity be empirical and not logical?
J. J. C. Smart, ‘Sensations and Brain Processes’, Philosophical Review, 68 (1959), pp. 148–50. Cf. his Philosophy and Scientific Realism (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), esp. pp. 94 ff.
Smart, Philosophical Review, 70 (1961), p. 407, explains the elusiveness as ‘our inability to describe sensations except by reference to stimulus conditions’. But we have no such inability, cf. ‘loud’, ‘sour’, ‘pungent’, ‘dazzling’, ‘a dull ache’, although as sensations are private (not elusive) we may find it easiest to convey information about them in unusual cases by referring to what presumably gives other persons the same experience.
R. J. Hirst, Problems of Perception (Allen & Unwin, 1959), ch. 7,
and G. M. Wyburn, R. W. Pickford and R. J. Hirst, Human Senses and Perception (Oliver & Boyd, 1964), ch. 15.
Cf. R. Chisholm, Perceiving (Cornell, 1957), pp. 169–70.
A. Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 198. His own favoured scholastic criterion placing ‘the intentionality of psychological actions precisely in the fact that they do not change their objects’ rules out ‘love’, ‘hate’, ‘fear’ and other psychological attitudes which affect their human or animal objects if present.
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© 1968 The Royal Institute of Philosophy
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Hirst, R.J. (1968). Mind and Brain: The Identity Hypothesis. In: The Human Agent. Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27908-1_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27908-1_9
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