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 ounces’. 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 others say that mental states are actual brain states. Identity theorists often describe themselves as ‘materialists’, but ‘physicalists’ may be a better word.
The identity theory (in its various forms) may be considered as an ontological physicalism. A physicalist could say that trees are complicated physical mechanisms.
In other words, the simplest proposal for explaining how the mental is nothing but the physical is the identity theory. In his classic paper “Materialism” (1963), the Australian philosopher J.J.C. Smart proposed that every mental state is identical to a physical state in the same way as the episodes of lightning are identical to episodes of electrical discharge, for instance. The primary argument for this view is that it enables a kind of economy in one’s account of the different kinds of things in the world, as well as a unification of causal claims: mental events enter into causal relations with physical ones because in the end they are physical events themselves. This view is also called reductionism, which conveys the suggestion that the mental phenomenon is “made less” or reduced to being physical phenomenon.
In very simplified terms: a mental state M is nothing other than brain state B. The mental state desire for a cup of coffee would thus be nothing more than the firing of certain neurons in certain brain regions. On such a view, it would turn out that any two people with a desire for a cup of coffee would have a similar type of neuronal firing pattern in similar regions of the brain.
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