Question

transplants of organs such as the heart and kidneys are now routine procedures. Before too long, scientists assure us, the transplant of the brain will also be a reality. will such an operation ever be ethically justifiable? In answering, be sure to consider the various activities of the brain and their influence on personal identity

Answer 1

The identity theory of mind is to the effect that these experiences just are brain processes, not merely correlated with brain processes.

Some philosophers hold that though experiences are brain processes they nevertheless have fundamentally non-physical, psychical, properties, sometimes called ‘qualia’. The identity theory as denying the existence of such irreducible non-physical properties. Some identity theorists give a behaviouristic analysis of mental states,

Brain Transplants
In the spirit of Locke’s ‘Prince and the Cobbler’, brain transplant thought experiments figure prominently in the personal identity literature. Recently the idea has entered the public
debate as a science fiction prospect for future medical use. The story goes something like this:
imagine someone’s brain (or their cerebrum as the seat of their distinct psychology) is transplanted into someone else’s empty skull (or their brain with a removed cerebrum). Then we are
asked to ponder: who is the person that wakes up after the operation has been performed; is
the resulting person identical to the ‘brain donor’ or to the ‘body donor’, or is it an altogether
different person? Ever since Sydney Shoemaker (1963) introduced these sorts of imagined cases
into the modern debate, they are frequently presented as support for psychological continuity
theories and seen as troublesome for competing views. Particularly, they are fairly often regarded
as more or less decisive evidence against animalist takes on personal identity. However, there are
at least two lines of reasoning against this interpretation. Advocates of bodily continuity theories
such as Bernard Williams (1970) have claimed that a variant of brain transplants, sometimes
described as ‘body swapping’, actually works in favor of bodily continuity views. By slightly
altering the story, Williams has shown that our intuitions as to who the resulting person will be
can easily tilt. Modern-day animalists such as Eric Olson (1997) are allies in this interpretation
of brain transplants. Paul Snowdon (2014) has recently presented further arguments questioning the alleged support for psychological continuity theories gathered from hypothetical brain
transplants. Another, more general line of criticism comes from Kathleen Wilkes (1988), who
claims that due to an inevitable lack of detail in the description of hypothetical scenarios, conclusions drawn from there often lead to a false reliance on predictions about how our concept
of personal identity would apply in the imagined case. On this view, brain transplant thought
experiments do not support psychological continuity theories but simply track intuitions that
have no bearing on our concept of personal identity