Identity Theory Explained (Philosophy of Mind)

This is the main idea behind Materialism, rejecting the idea that the mind is something more than the physical, nothing special or metaphysical about it. Identity Theory, following this line of thought claims that the mind can be reduced to nothing more than the physical brain. So are all mental states, physical states? Is the mind just the brain? Watch as George and John critically assess.

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[manut]

In theory, we could actually map consciousness.
Thoughts and emotions are unique in the way they manifest in the subject, but we can actually observe the physical effects of them in the brain. We can observe how the brain reacts to particular sensory information and arrange the information in a frame. Then, we could observe a brain and know what the person is feeling and thinking by just interpreting the physical brain dynamics.

[infinitifyr]

This is the kind of linguistic nonsense that physicalists have sunk to that has no explanatory power whatsoever.

[balancedmars]

how is this different than property dualism???

[aidanvidal]

Fails to address it with the technology and information we currently have available. Interesting video!

[Nword]

wot does it even mean that two things are identical when u clearly have 2 distinct things...

[C.D.J.Burton]

There's a fundamental problem with this theory, and any theory which defines consciousness as a particular formation of matter.

Firstly, although consciousness can be seen as being separate from identity, I believe that identity should be included in the search also as it is the central reason why anyone would want to know in the first place.

The problem goes as such, if we (hypothetically) quantum scanned and printed a 100% accurate physical clone of me atom-by-atom, therefore obviously including my brain and its neural network (my memories of me and so on) and brought it to life, I suspect it wouldn't be me. As the result of a successful experiment, i.e. meeting the complete demands of our materialist definition of "me" would surely entail that I would suddenly interface with two separate bodies looking out of 2 sets of eyes in different directions and so on. Obviously we can make a confident assumption here because the copy of me and I wouldn't be physically connected, but still, that doesn't change the point. Which is, building the special formation out of matter would at best only produce a clone of me that passed the Turing test and convince all my family and friends, but I would know that it wasn't really me. So then that means that the real me is either a result of something matter doesn't account for, or that each unit of matter (proton, quark etc) are in themselves unique, or at least, not identical.

I know it's a hypothetical, but it's really no different than claiming to know what creates consciousness in the first place, it also postulates an equivalent hypothetical scenario.