This essay is a serious look at type Physicalism, particularly drawing from Jaegwon Kims book, Philosophy of Mind.
In Jaegwon Kim's work "Philosophy of Mind", Kim seems to be progressing, chapter by chapter through views about the way the mind works that at first glance appear to be obviously wrong, to views that seem to be a more accurate representation of the way the universe is actually operating. Starting with Dualism, Kim quickly moves on to Behaviorism. While both of these models may be useful in predicting some aspects of the human condition, they are both clearly not systems that can be accepted as the complete picture. Next, Kim moves on to speaking of the mind in a physical sense, where the mind is the brain. The physicalist's approach is explained in detail and then several objections to this approach are listed. Kim differentiates between two different groups of phycalists, token and type, and defines type physicalism as "Mental kinds are physical kinds; alternatively, mental properties are physical properties (Kim, 102)." Type physicalism is a much more rigid form of physicalism then token physicalism, which simply asserts that "Every event that has a mental property has also some physical property." (Kim, 102)
The first epistemological objection Kim gives against physicalism seems fairly wrapped up in semantics. The objection centers around the idea that just because a human may know that he feels pain, this does not mean he knows anything at all about the specific brain state that is occurring when he is feeling pain. The argument states that he knows nothing about his brain states, but is this really true? A man feeling pain certainly knows something about his brainstate, he knows that he is in pain. He may not be able to talk specifically about what the brain is doing, but he certainly has some access to what is happening. This objection simply cannot be held true. There are many cases where something turns out to be more complicated then previously thought. Even simply looking though the eyes of child, there are many phenomena that they could make an observation about but not have a full understanding of. Ultimately just because our mind does not have direct access to how it works, it does not follow that our mind is not physical.
Objection two is slightly different, and poses a serious problem for type physicalists. The second objection seems to suggest that just looking at a brainstate is not good enough to define pain because it is not empirical evidence of the event causing the pain happening. The particular brainstate would only point to the definition of pain, not to any evidence. It goes on to say that "to make sense of the empirical character of psychoneural identities, we must acknowledge the existence of phenomenal properties distinct from neural properties."(Kim, 107) Even further, it says that the when a person recognizes a pain as a pain, this action is irreducibly psychic. The first objection has a problem with the idea that someone could feel pain without fully understanding how their brain was working to create that pain. This objection was quickly proven silly by the simple realization that things go on all the time around us that we do not have a full understanding and this does not disinclude the fact that there may be something more complex going on under the surface. This second objection seems to be more difficult to disprove.
The second objection is different from the first in that it cannot be immediately falsified. Type physicalists need to find a way around this objection as it seems to stand in complete defiance of their idea that things only exist in the physical realm and instead creates two properties, that of the mental and of the physical, which is unacceptable to a type physicalist. To get around this objection, Smart seems to think that he can turn observations into what he calls "topic-neural translations". An example of a topic neural translation would be, "When I look at the wall a similar thing is happening in my brain as when I look at the same or similar walls other times". This method of topic neural translation seems to be a viable way to cut out any sort of irreducible mental activity that the type physicalists so loath. The problem with the topic-neural translation however, is painfully obvious. While it may be technically correct to phrase sentences in such a way, it also seems like a giant leap away from the problem at hand. The type physicalist ultimately would want to be able to identify a particular brainstate for every single action, thought, belief, or emotion. This topic-neural translation steps away from anything of the sort. It simply says that when x is happening, it can correspond to any brainstate y, where y is a brainstate that has occurred before during x. This approach seems almost as crude and off the point as the behaviorist approach is. With the topic neural approach you can say nothing of new brainstates that you discover, you can only talk about them in terms of brainstates that you have already paired to previous physical states.
These two objections are not the only ones that can be leveraged against type physicalists. Their theories seem to fall apart pretty quickly when you start explaining new ideas in neuroscience such as neuroplasticity. It seems obvious that type physicalism is a slightly outdated idea that does not account for the complex and beautiful nature of our very physical and not at all static brains.
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