Thinking that the mind is simply the brain, no more and no less, involves a hopeless contradiction:
In a discussion with Robert J. Marks at Mind Matters News, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor reflects,
Eliminative materialists… actually say that there are no mental states, that there is only the brain. Which is kind of an odd thing to say because what eliminative materialists are saying is that their ideas are mindless.
How can you have a proposition that the mind doesn’t exist? That means propositions don’t exist and that means that you don’t have a proposition.
But at least the eliminative materialists have found a way to support the claim that the mind arose from mud by a purely Darwinian process.
Further reading on theories of mind:
Can we engineer consciousness in a robot? One neuroscientist thinks we need only “simple guidelines.” His underlying assumptions are just wrong.
and
Neuroscientist Michael Graziano should meet the p-zombie (Michael Egnor) To understand consciousness, we need to establish what it is not before we create any more new theories.