Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 52 of 138
Minds are just brains
The sheer implausibility of behaviorism had become an embarrassment by the 1960s and it was gradually replaced among materialist-minded philosophers by a doctrine called “physicalism,” sometimes called the “identity theory.” The physicalists said that Descartes was not wrong, as the logical behaviorists had claimed, as a matter of logic, but just as a matter of fact. It might have turned out that we had souls in addition to bodies, but the way that nature in fact turned out, what we think of as minds are just brains, and what we think of as mental states, such as the feeling of pain or having a tickle or an itch, are just states of the brain—and perhaps the rest of the central nervous system. This thesis was sometimes called the “identity thesis” because it asserted an identity between mental states and brain states.