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Overview: The papers in this volume are all concerned with expounding and examining a certain view of the nature of the relation between mind and body, mental states and physiological states. The particular theory under discussion is commonly known as the Identity Theory, though at least some versions of it also go under the name of Centralstate Materialism
The view is, as the name suggests, that mental states are quite literally identical with brain states: any given mental state is, roughly, a brain state, brain process or feature of a process in the central nervous system. However, what is distinctive about the currently canvassed Identity Theory is that the proposed identity is put forward as a scientific discovery – or at least potential scientific discovery – and not as a truth concerning the meaning of mental terms or concepts. This explains a good deal.
At first sight it might seem strange that so apparently obvious a suggestion as this identification has not, until so recently, been much discussed by philosophers. The reason, though, is not hard to find. The suggestion has been thought open to insuperable objections. Philosophers, especially since Descartes, have usually defined the mental in terms incompatible with the physical; mind for Descartes was in essence unextended, matter in essence extended. Even at a more everyday level the mental is customarily contrasted with the physical – rather as hot is exclusively contrasted with cold, wet with dry, light with dark, abstract with concrete. Any suggestion, therefore, that the mental is physical inevitably carries with it an air of paradox, if not of outright contradiction; for it seems, on the face of it, to imply that the mental is not mental.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Educational
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