Abstract

According to the identity theory of the mind every mental state is equal to a physical brain state and can be reduced to it. The risk of this kind of reduction is that we also reduce away consciousness and have to deny the existence of the phenomenological qualitative character of our mind. Kripke argues that identity theory cannot be true, but what I will try to show in this paper is that we can hold a form of identity theory and still believe in the subjective experience of our mind. For this I will use a paper by Nagel in which he suggest the existence of a concept to which both mental and physical properties can be reduced.