John Jamieson Carswell Smart
He refuses to make consciousness the one exception in an otherwise wholly explicable world: sensations are not correlated with brain processes, they are those processes.
British, later Australian · 1920 – 2012
British, later Australian philosopher, chief architect of the mind-brain identity theory and of "Australian materialism": sensations are not correlated with brain processes, they are identical to them. He also defended act utilitarianism and a scientific realism.
Justification
Smart argues that sensations are not merely correlated with brain processes: they are identical to them, as lightning is an electrical discharge. This identity theory rests on a principle of economy: if everything else in the living world is explained in physico-chemical terms, making consciousness the sole exception would force us to admit dangling laws, with no role in the edifice of science. It is objected that one can know one's own sensation while knowing nothing of the brain: he answers with a topic-neutral analysis, saying "I have an orange after-image" amounting only to saying that something is going on in me like what goes on when I see an orange. The statement says nothing of the nature of that "something", and nothing forbids its being a brain process.
"Sensations and Brain Processes" (1959) · Philosophy and Scientific Realism (1963)
Justification
Smart holds that an explanation is complete only when carried back to physical constituents and their interactions. Admitting properties that would escape this analysis would force supernumerary laws, with no role in the edifice of science, which a principle of economy forbids. His identity theory applies this to mind: not one more property arising from the brain, but the same processes, described in another vocabulary.
Philosophy and Scientific Realism (1963)