Is the Mind the Brain?
So I was at a philosophy study session late last night and after going over about a dozen essays on various aspects of rationality I got into a totally unrelated argument with another student about whether or not there are souls and whether the mind is in fact non-physical (the student was a dualist). He brought up the classic argument that we can perceive colors and shapes yet there are no such colors or shapes in the brain. For instance since I can see a dog, but there is no dog-shaped part of the brain, some non-physical mind somewhere must be experiencing the dog for me. This is a completely ridiculous argument and it totally misses the point of how perception really works. Below is a brief essay I wrote last year that I think illuminates the absurdity of the students argument. Enjoy.
One argument against mind-brain identity is that when I have a green after-image there is nothing in my brain that is green. The mind–brain identity theorist can best respond to this argument by stating that the brain does not have to be green to experience the sensation of greenness. The fallacy in the dualist's argument is thinking that the after image is an actual object. If the after image was an object in the brain, it would indeed seem to follow that there should be something green in the brain. Of course there is nothing green in the brain, but then the after-image isn’t really an object, it is a sensation. If green is just the sensation we get when we see things that emit light at a certain frequency, it should be possible to have the sensation without the stimulus. If the neural circuit in the brain that causes a green sensation were activated by something other than a green object, a green sensation would still be the result. It is critical to emphasize that the color of the circuit producing the green sensation is irrelevant to the sensation it produces. To say the brain must be green to produce a green sensation would be like saying a picture of a dog must contain a real dog to produce the representation of a dog. Clearly the idea of the dog is a different entity from the actual dog, just as the picture is an entity independent of the dog. In the same sense, the green sensation is not the same as the green object; it is just a representation. The after image is how we experience a sensation; it is not the thing creating the sensation. With these defenses in mind, one can see that the above line of argument against mind-brain identity is flawed.
