down with identity theory!

I have been thinking about identity theory, or the theory that brain states are equivalent to mental states, and trying to come up with arguments against it.

ARGUMENT 1

So this only works for identity theorists that assume the existence of implicit beliefs.
Ok, so I could organize this as an actual premise-premise conclusion argument, but it's not really organized enough in my mind yet so I will give you the confusing, scrambled version.

So if you believe in identity theory and implicit beliefs, you accept that both are physically represented, and thus you have to believe that a representational physical change occurs in your brain when you formulate an explicit belief from an implicit belief. I.E. someone asked me whether taking an elephant apart could ever assemble a bicycle (a question I had never heard before), there had to be a physical event in my mind that changed the belief from implicit to explicit. Now if you consider beliefs (as I think is generally the trend these days) as mental tokens coded by neuronal connections (that are unique, so a specific neuron connection leads to a specific belief), then the formation of a new belief would involve the reorganization of neurons to connect previously unrelated parts of your semantic net. The creation of an explicit belief from an implicit belief would involve this reorganization.

However, before this belief concerning elephants and bicycles was formed in my mind, those neurons were not connected. They had the capacity to be connected, but they lacked the actual unique connection of the conscious belief. If identity theorists are going to acknowledge the difference between conscious/unconscious beliefs and thoughts, they have to admit that it is a physical difference. And yet, here is an example of a physical belief that, if they believe in implicit beliefs, has to exist, yet lacks the characteristic physical representation.

The conclusion I get from this is that if you believe in differentiation of conscious/unconscious thoughts/beliefs, you can't believe it's a physical difference, and thus physicalism (and identity theory) fall. I know there are a lot of holes in this argument, but to me it still proves at least that it is somewhat contradictory for physicalists to acknowledge the existence of unconscious or implicit beliefs. So even if physicalists can get by by just discarding the belief in implicit beliefs, that at least denies a semi-accepted philosophical entity.

I sent this argument to my TA for my philosophy class, and she gave me the response I was expecting, namely that identity thoerists could counter that an implicit belief is a potentiality rather than a substantially existing entity. This still seems a weird statement to me coming from a physicalist philosophy. Also, the easy way out is to just reject the existence of implicit beliefs altogether, but that, to me, doesn't seem quite right either. I know there are ways to neurologically prove or disprove this argument of mine, and I'm not sure if the necessary experiments have been carried out. For the time being, it's an interesting, if not shaky and semi easily defeated, argument.

ARGUMENT 2 (which I find stronger epistemologically but less convincing personally)

This is vaguely going off of some arguments by Hillary Putnam...

Identity theory says that the stimulation of C-fibers is the same as the experience of pain. Thus mental and physical properties are identical. I think the idea is that even for people feeling phantom pains in an amputated limb, the neurological pain response is still actually occurring, and that even for superstoics that can act as if they are not feeling pain, their c-fibers are still being stimulated.

This line of reasoning is fairly sound it turns out in the world today, and it is hard to find arguments against it. However, I think I have come up with something. There have been experiments performed (on cats, sadly) where the spinal cord was disconnected from the brain and the cat's paw was touched to a hot surface. It was found that the paw still retracted reflexively, even though there was no communication to the brian. The reason for this is that the physioligical reflex mechanism is localized and can occur without CNS involvement.

We consider the reflexive withdrawing of a body part from a hot surface a behavioristic pain response. Thus we can conclude that the C fibers (or whatever it is these days that produces pain; we unfortunately skipped the somatosensory chapter in neuroscience this year) are still firing.

The mental experience of pain, however, involves mental processing of pain events within the mind. This is especially convincing if you consider pain as a mental state as consciously observed. The conscience resides in the CNS, not in peripheral pain reflexes. So in a whole cat, C fiber stimulation of the paw causes action potentials to run along neurons until they reach the brain where a pain even is evoked. There is a very small time delay between fiber stimulation and pain feeling, but it isn't enough to deny that c-fiber stimulation is pain, and thus pain is a physical property.

However, what about the bisected cat? The paw's c fibers are stimulated; the limb is withdrawn; but no information ever reaches the brain. We would say that the cat exhibits c-fiber stimulation behavior, but not that the cat experiences pain the way we usually think of pain. Therefore there is some inherent subtle difference between pain and c-fiber stimulation, and either pain is a mental response while c-fiber stimulation is a physical response, or pain is the physical composit of two phyiscal responses (c-fiber stimulation and CNS awareness), in which case it is still not identical to a single physical event (although arguably that could go down, molecule by molecule, forever, and I may not be justified in saying that it isn't a single even in the physicalist schema).

So both arguments are far from perfect, but I think they have potential at least.