The Mind-Brain Identity Theory

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Here is some background material.

This is a video lecture about a the 1956 paper "Is Consciousness a Brain Process?" by U.T. Place. This lecture distinguishes the "is"s of identity, prediction, definition, and composition. And I explain how Place uses these distinctions to defend the identity theory from a common line of attack. The central idea is that the mind-brain identity theory is a scientific hypothesis, which cannot be rejected or disproven on logical grounds alone. This is part of an introductory philosophy course.

[SkiRedMtn]

“I have to talk for 3-4 minutes about the word ‘is.’” Your reaction to this statement is going to govern whether you love, hate, or just endure Philosophy.

[amandagalloway]

Oh my goodness, this was so helpful for my Phil of Mind class. You explained it in such a coherent manner. I can’t wait to check out the rest of your channel, thank you!

[Senjuk]

professors in romance language classes always would talk about how "to have" and "to be" can be extremely connected (like how age is expressed in "'having years", or "being hungry" is "having hunger"), but there was never a solid explanation about it other than it being the way the language expresses these ideas. I think this discussion of two "is"'s finally helps make the relation between the words and ideas make sense for me. Thank you!

[iotheyare]

You are an awesome teacher. The video got me thinking. The fact that you can describe your mental imagery and sensations without knowing anything about your brain processes aligns with the meditation principles of the five aggregates of the first noble truth in Buddhism. Namely, form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness. It fits with pain as a definition and a contingent. The secession of pain is abandoning the clinging to the five aggregates. Entrapment in putting out the fire is what keeps the fire of pain burning. Impermanence and physicality of the brain make the mind hurt, but it is just a scientific contingent that predicates suffering.

[davidkuehberger]

Growing up my male classmates and I always tried to scare each other and laugh about the reaction. i did not take long for us to teach us not to show any emotion not reaction to beeing scared. even today when there is a loud sound behind me, i stay calm (too calm even)

[PaulLupascu]

Hey Jeffrey, I love your videos and I mostly listen to them on headphones. Unfortunately, the sound is always louder in one channel than the other (stereo, right is louder than left). Also the volume could be a lot higher. This is pretty annoying when you're listening on headphones, and I'd love it if it was fixed. Thanks!

[chrisw]

Great lecture! I can't believe poor Mr. Place had to put in all this effort to explain the scientific process to his peers. I think a lot of philosphers generate elaborate articles with extremely complicate language to cover up that they really don't know much and do a lot of deduction from their ivory tower.

[hissingfaunaa]

the real talent of these videos is being able to write all of this perfectly mirrored

[TheJosephCapone]

thank you for this, i was so confused in my philosophy of the mind class

[murathax]

I could not understand something when I first read Place's article. Since you made a video about it, I can just ask you. Place concedes in his article that we cannot explain some of the states of consciousness by examining the brain processes. If this is the case, how is Place a physicalist? Does he not implicitly accept the existence of a mind by saying such thing? I am writing a paper about identity-theory but i am not sure how I should describe Place's position.

[ibizza]

- 00:00:05 🤖 Теория идентичности ума и мозга утверждает, что ум и мозг - это одно и то же
- 00:02:18 🛡 Физикализм - это представление о том, что все в мире, включая ум, является частью физического мира.
- 00:05:37 💼 Теория идентичности ума и мозга - научная гипотеза, которую нельзя опровергнуть логическими доводами.
- 00:09:18 📑 Теория идентичности ума и мозга утверждает, что ум и мозг идентичны, но не по определению, а по факту.
- 00:19:31 🪑 Теорию идентичности ума и мозга нельзя опровергнуть логически, нужно смотреть на реальный мир.
- 00:28:00 🧠 Теория идентичности ума и мозга утверждает, что сознание - это мозговой процесс, но не по определению, а по факту.
- 00:28:52 🤯 Теорию идентичности ума и мозга нельзя опровергнуть логическими доводами, нужно проводить научные исследования.
- 00:30:18 🛡 Научное утверждение о составе
- 00:30:44 ☁ Облако — это частицы в воздухе
- 00:31:25 👶 Объяснение ребёнку о составе облака
- 00:32:41 🎤 Мыслительный эксперимент о боли без мозга
- 00:33:33 🧠 Теория тождества ума и мозга

[danwylie-sears]

I thought I understood the distinction between "is" of predication and "is" of identity. But then you said that "the car is a blue vehicle" is identity.

For me to call a relation "identity", that relation has to be reflexive, symmetric, and transitive. Reflexive means that 'A is A' remains true, no matter what you substitute in for A. For example, Superman is Superman. Symmetric means that whenever 'A is B' is true, 'B is A' is also true. For example, Clark Kent is Superman, and Superman is Clark Kent. Transitive means that if 'A is B' and 'B is C' are both true, then 'A is C' is also true. For example, if Superman is Clark Kent, and Clark Kent is Kal-El, then Superman must also be Kal-El. But the car is a blue vehicle (at least as stipulated for discussion), and the Stena Freighter is a blue vehicle (at least if the first page I found on my web search for 'blue ship' is accurate), but it does not follow that the car is the Stena Freighter. As I understand the words, 'is a blue vehicle' is predication, not an identity.

Neither "a blue vehicle" nor "an old packing case" pick out a specific object. By the way, "Clark Kent is Kal-El" isn't necessarily true. There are early versions in which Superman's birth name was "Kal-L" instead.

Then there's the idea that you can never refute an "is" of composition just by analyzing it. That makes no sense either. Instead of saying the his table is an old packing crate, let's say that his table is an old colorless green idea crate. If you think about that for even a moment, you can tell that it can't be true: colorless green ideas, even if they're anything at all, certainly can't be the kind of things that would have crates. Likewise, if someone interprets mind-brain identity as saying that our minds are composed of brain but presumably other minds could be composed of some other kind of stuff, they may still attack it by saying that 'a mind made of brain' is in the same category with 'a crate made to contain colorless green ideas': attempt to describe a thing, that in each case turned out to be word-salad.

Reason (a) fails. 25:52 Definitions can be used while still having gaps in them, denoted by phrases such as 'that which does ____'. For example, you can talk about "that which makes heavy objects tend to move downward" in a quasi-Aristotelian framework where it's just a matter of definition (under your theory) that it's the same as the telos of earthy-ness. Then if someone engages with your theory, but hasn't learned the details yet, they can talk about "that which makes heavy objects tend to move downward (in the theory under consideration)", and ask about the empirical implications of your partially-described theory, without having any idea that any such thing as teloses (or teloi or tele) even exist in your theory.

We've all been living with theories of mind that are on a level with that hypothetical half-baked quasi-Aristotelianism. And maybe if we worked through the implications of how we understand the words we use, we would find that it follows from our implicit definitions that mind has to be brain, because the questionable science is baked into the theory. In other words, maybe we're so committed to a limited range of possible understandings of mind that if we turn out to be wrong enough about the science, a lot of our statements will turn out to have been word salad.

[MusingsFromTheJohn]

I think this hypothesis is correct, but with an important additional distinction. The mind is a dynamic pattern of information that arises from and is 100% dependent upon the physical system which gives rise to it, which in this case would be the human mind of a human and the brain of that same human, where the two are not separable at this time.

That is the key difference.

If you could have two absolutely identical (not realistically possible) then the two minds arising from the two brains would also be identical. Understanding the mind/brain is constantly changing its dynamic pattern of information, thus a mind from one day is not exactly the same as it is on a different day, if we could create and artificial brain and transfer the dynamic pattern of information from an existing human brain into that artificial brain, such that the dynamic pattern of information which is the human mind as virtually the same, as close as a human mind stays the same over days, weeks, and years, then we will be able to move a mind between supportive physical structures.

In other words, the mind will always be 100% dependent upon a physical structure to give rise to it, but it could be possible for a mind to move between such supportive physical structures, like a program can move between supportive computer hardware systems.

[BrianHartman]

Brings me back to the 90s...

"It depends on what the definition of 'is' is." :)

[JackPullen-Paradox]

But what is a sufficient way to verify a scientific hypothesis? Why wouldn't a thought experiment that demonstrated the improbability of an hypothesis not be admissible? The thought experiment would be based on observation or empirical experience to some degree, just not a full-blown physical controlled experiment. In fact, most experiments would have to break down the grand claim of physicalism into parts and look at each separately. That means that a logical operation on the inductively proved parts would be necessary to prove the grand hypothesis: in other words, something like a thought experiment would be necessary to bring together the parts and achieve a synthesis. One would have to posit a reasonable story of what the whole should look like.

I don't see the follow-up video that challenges Place's claims at the moment. I will be interested to see how a professional philosopher approaches the claims and the paper as a whole. (I just realized that this is a scientific hypothesis, and that I cannot know the result until the event; yet, I can assign it a probability. I appear to be assigning it a probability of 1 but realizing that Place has a valid argument to some extent, I must logically assign it a value somewhat less than 1, so that is can be updated when the evidence is in.)

[jacobsee]

I can see both dualism and physicalism.
My argument for physicalism, is that before birth we are almost completely a blank slate, 99% while in the womb we learn how to depend on our mother for survival, crying with our first breath would be one of the few programmed things in us, etc... every experience we have, no matter how big or small, becomes learned and remembered in order to know how to act in the future each experience effect us fundamentally down to the particle/wave duality thats makes up our physical being. Each possible reaction to.an experience will create a new timeline and each time line will have its own unique consciousness, even if only unique by 1 quark or something. The reason we experience the complicated, unexplainable consciousness, is because evolution made out conscious and subconcious seperate in order to have a significant amount of automation, in a sense, and feelings, hunches, etc... are just the perception of the subconscious at work.

Now the argument for dualism, my version atleast, is the consciousness isnt here, its in a different, unknown reality, and it pilots the body, basically. Kind of like if my first argument were totally true, and the implication of the, possibly, infinite amount of consciousnesses formed from the wave function collapsing, for my physical body, all versions, at all possible locations of space and time where i could possibly exist. The reason for this, i like to believe, atleast, is because in the real world i may have decided to go to the local learning store and paid to have some lesson or something downloaded onto my brain, and when i die in this world all of my experiences from all my lives will come together as one. I hope they work in parallel and not sequentially, like how reincarnation is perceived. Regardless, when that happens, and i "wake up" thats when ill be aware of all my previous experiences from the "real world"

That idea makes sense to me, even when thought of at a societal level, imagine an advanced version of AI, and it has a fundamental rationale of preserving human life, and being beneficial. Well, the way we just "luck" into discoveries or inventions, can be reality breaking if we make a quantum virus or something, so good ol' elon musk and his neuralink allows us to connect to.the internet, and the AI wants us to thrive, but also not destroy ourselves because we are effectively super smart, primitive monkeys. So, the AI uses neuralink to stimulate our neurotransmitters, and at the same time, while in the tripping, halucinogenic state, the AI guides the "journey" and we have our own virtusl reality that we can make all the mistakes we want, until we learn how to efficiently, and effectively live in the real world, then we wake up. Thatd be cool, and its gice purpose to all the crappy struggles we go through.

All infinite possibilities are likely, so thats what seems good to me, gives me comfort, purpose, etc...

By the way. The zombie argument, i have trouble conceiving the zombie thats exactly like me but not conscious, because, how would it NOT experience what i experience. I mean, i wouldnt see through its eyes, buts thats like me going back in time and meeting myself from yesterday, i only see through MY eyes and experience my experiences, the yesterday me, would be a different consciousness. Im not crazy, however, the limitless possibility in subject's, such as this, allows my imagination to have fun.

[skepticsagar]

Thanks for such beautiful thought-provoking lectures

[Phat-D]

thank goodness, i felt like i was going insane when you were talking about behaviorism because do those people not feel? how would hey come to the conclusion that there's no activity of private comprehension of feelings; that is like saying everything is sub-conscious, how could everything be sub something that doesn't exist

[Menschenthier]

Very interesting! But: “A square is an equilateral rectangle” is not the same as “Superman is Clark Kent”. The latter sentence is indeed an identity statement (a = b), but the former is a definition (F = H). Identity statements need nominators on both sides of the "is", but in the first sentence we have pedicators (terms), right? Identity statements are fundamentally different from definitions (set inclusion) – so I don't understand why Place even classifies both "is" under identity statements.
If I understand correctly: What Place ultimately wants to say is that "Pain is brain process B" is not a definition (or: not a knowledge a priori), but a statement of identity (a = b / or: a knowledge a posteriori)?

[Reienroute]

The unique issue with assigning a physical sensation to a singular neurological cause is that a sensation can never be singular by the very nature of the fact that it is both "a thing that is experienced" and is dependent upon "experience" which has that thing as its subject. For example, you can give a person enough opiates to completely shut down their brain's mechanism of generating the sensation of pain, but that does nothing to the backdrop of awareness which is necessary for that sensation to be given an audience so to speak(the "I" in this case). Lumping a sensation into a singular cause is just attempting to answer the easy problem of consciousness while ignoring the hard problem.