Reincarnating the Identity Theory

Abstract

The mind/brain identity theory is often thought to be of historical interest only, as it has allegedly been swept away by functionalism. After clarifying why and how the notion of identity implies that there is no genuine problem of explaining how the mental derives from something else, we point out that the identity theory is not necessarily a mind/brain identity theory. In fact, we propose an updated form of identity theory, or embodied identity theory, in which the identities concern not experiences and brain phenomena, but experiences and organism-environment interactions. Such an embodied identity theory retains the main ontological insight of its parent theory, and by invoking organism-environment interactions, it has powerful resources to motivate why the relevant identities hold, without posing further unsolvable problems. We argue that the classical multiple realization argument against identity theory is built on not recognizing that the main claim of the identity theory concerns the relation between experience and descriptions of experience, instead of being about relations between different descriptions of experience and we show how an embodied identity theory provides an appropriate platform for making this argument. We emphasize that the embodied identity theory we propose is not ontologically reductive, and does not disregard experience.

The Problem of Meaning in AI and Robotics: Still with Us after All These Years

“…While the rejection of internal representations can lead to a kind of dynamical eliminativism, a more popular approach has been to directly identify aspects of mind with patterns of the brain, or with whole brain-body-world dynamics. Philosophically, we can conceive of this approach as a suitably updated version of identity theory [53], which is why we will refer to it as the nature== strategy. Its key claim is that mind should be identified with emergent properties of neural and/or behavioral dynamics that in turn exert top-down constraints on those same dynamics.…”

Embodied AI beyond Embodied Cognition and Enactivism

“…Constitution is an ontological claim and requires corresponding ontological premises. As a matter of fact, the constitution thesis hinges on various models that have yet to find definitive theoretical and empirical confirmation: enactivism [28][29][30][31], radical embodiment [32,33], the extended mind [34,35], embodied functionalism [36], the spread mind [37,38], radical enactivism [39,40], embodied cognition [32], sensorimotor identity [41], sensorimotor direct realism [42], and many others. As regards AI, it is not obvious whether any such models have any practical consequence.…”

“…Enactivism (or any other E) has so far been unwilling to make a strong ontological claim about the identity of mental states (a notable exception is Myin [41]). Unfortunately, the stuff that makes up sensorimotor contingencies is not the right one.…”

“…Recently, two authors have suggested positions not too far from the proposed mind-object identity: Beaton [27,42] and Myin [41]. I will briefly compare the mind-object identity with these two views.…”

Revaluing the behaviorist ghost in enactivism and embodied cognition

“…pain) across different species, and perhaps computationally, have also been influential. We discuss pain below, but for a good response to this concern seeMyin and Zahnoun 2018.…”