token identity thesis - The view that for each mental event token there is a physical event token that it is numerically identical to
By itself, the token identity thesis does not yet capture the crux of the intuition behind physicalism since it is consistent with a situation obtaining in which two qualitatively (but not numerically) identical physical events are each numerically identical to two extremely different mental event tokens. By itself, the token identity thesis is consistent with supposing that my molecule for molecule doppleganger and I could have qualitatively identical evolutionary and social histories and yet differ radically in our mental respects, or in whether each of us is subject to mental events at all. The bare token identity thesis seems inadequate as an expression of physicalism since it says almost nothing about the ways in which the mental is constrained by the physical. One way, however, that the physical constrains the mental in this view is as follows. Since the identity relation is transitive, if mental event N was identical to physical event P, and physical event P was identical to mental event M, then M and N would be identical to each other. But if M and N were different mental events, they could not be identical to each other, and therefore could not both be identical to P. If M is identical to P, N must be identical to some other physical event P*. Any two different mental events must be identical to two numerically distinct physical events. But it does not yet entail that the physical events in question be qualitatively different, as would be expected given an intuitive notion of physicalism. This is where the supervenience thesis comes in.
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