Strictly speaking, it need not hold that the mind is identical to the brain. Idiomatically we do use ‘She has a good mind’ and ‘She has a good brain’ interchangeably but we would hardly say ‘Her mind weighs fifty ounces’
SOME ARGUE THAT THE hat the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile,
Ryle and in effect Wittgenstein toyed with the attractive but quite implausible notion that ostensible reports of immediate experience are not really reports but are ‘avowals’, as if my report that I have toothache is just a sophisticated sort of wince.
he properties of experiences are ‘topic neutral’. Smart adapted the words ‘topic-neutral’ from Ryle, who used them to characterise words such as ‘if, ‘or’, ‘and’, ‘not’, ‘because’. If you overheard only these words in a conversation you would not be able to tell whether the conversation was one of mathematics, physics, geology, history, theology, or any other subject. Smart used the words ‘topic neutral’ in the narrower sense of being neutral between physicalism and dualism. For example ‘going on’, ‘occurring’, ‘intermittent’, ‘waxing’, ‘waning’ are topic neutral. So is ‘me’ in so far as it refers to the utterer of the sentence in question
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