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So, I know we may have moved on from this topic, but I just thought I'd share some of my thoughts. When we first started talking about this, I was reminded of a philosophy class I took in the spring of 2005 called Concepts of the Self. I was reading over a paper I had written on The Identity Theory that basically states that mental states (eg. pain) are identical to their corresponding physical states (eg. C fibers firing)¹. This pretty much sounds to me like brain= behavior. The prompt of this paper asked us to consider an alien race that had the same mental states as humans, but did not share the same physical states and decide then whether human mental states were still then equal to human physical states. I don’t really know how this pertains, but I thought it was an interesting idea to put out there…

As for my own opinions, I am very hesitant to say that there is more to our behaviors than the brain. I’ll admit to have initially scoffed at many of the arguments championing Descartes and the mind body dualism due to their lack of empirical support. No two humans can share the exact same environment and even identical twins may have certain slight mutations rendering them different. Altruism has evolutionary benefits and morals are very culturally driven.

However, I did try and think of arguments on the other side to convince me of possible duality and began thinking of the idea that the first step to recovery is recognizing you have a problem. Is this the step where your mind conquers your brain? I still find this difficult. Couldn’t one say that it is merely another part of your brain checking the part of the brain causing the problem, once it has been exposed to an environment that has allowed it to override this other part of the brain? I hope that was coherent.

Similarly, I thought of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), where patients know that their obsessions and compulsions are not healthy but cannot control their actions. Again, is one of these inputs mind and the other brain? I can’t bring myself to say so.

These two examples come back to the main idea of metacognition or thought about thought. Is this where the mind comes in? I can’t say that I know the biological basis of metacognition, but I am interested in discovering it and making this point stronger.

I think it’s interesting though that, all this said and done, I still feel great unease at saying that there is no mind body distinction. However, unlike most people on this forum, my problem is with the absence of free will and agency. Indeed, I am a proponent of those who posted that we still do have free will and agency, but that its basis is the brain. One person alluded to the fact that with the mind = brain model, when our brain dies, so does our mind. I believe this is much more than a religious issue, as I myself am not at all religious. The idea that there is something more to a person than neurons firing and DNA transcribing can be an important thought to many people nearing death or (to a greater degree?) to those experiencing the loss of a loved one. It’s odd because I don’t know what I think about afterlife, but I feel an almost desperate hope that behaviors exist beyond death, beyond the brain.

Thus, the problem for me lies in the conviction that brain = behavior and the desire for there to be something more.

¹ J.J.C. Smart, “The Topic-Neutral Approach,” The Philosophy of Mind, ed. V.C. Chappell, (Englewook Cliffs, New York: Prentice-Hall Inc, 1962).