system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What do people mean when they say something is a brain state?

I've heard people say pain is a brain state. The colour red is a brain state. What do they mean by this? Could I say a giraffe is a brain state? Or Jupiter is a brain state? Or my body is a brain state? My brain is a brain state?
gpt
A brain state (or brain process) is just a way that the nervous system of an organism might be at a given moment in time or over a short period of time. Despite the label 'brain', neurons outside the brain are pretty much always included in talk of 'brain states' and talk of 'brain states' also covers organisms with neurons but no brain. The ways that a nervous system might be are usually extended to cover anything that a neurologist might study about an organism's nervous system, anywhere from the structure of the entire neural network down to the membrane potentials or other characteristics of individual neurons and the subcellular parts of those neurons.

When someone says that pain is a brain state, they are usually making something like the claim that being in pain is nothing more than a way for an organism's nervous system to be - what it is to be in pain is for your nervous system to have the relevant neural structure, the relevant neuron activity in the relevant parts of that structure, and so on. This position is often called 'reductionism' about the mind or an 'identity theory' about the relationship between mind and body (sometimes mind/body identity or mind/brain identity as another user mentioned).

So, no, neither giraffes nor Jupiter are brain states. A reductionist would say that *seeing* a giraffe is a brain state or that *thinking about* Jupiter is a brain state but the giraffe or Jupiter aren't brain states. Now, it might make sense to say that your brain is a brain state but it is at minimum weird to say that your brain is the way that your brain is right now. Your brain *has* a state - there is a way that it is right now - but whether or not your brain is what it is right now is going to depend on further philosophical questions about time and the continued existence of a thing over time.