Why do philosophers care about answering question on identity or consciousness?

There is one very general reason and two more specific reasons that philosophers are interested in the question of whether consciousness is identical to a particular bodily state. The general reason is this: we are interested in knowing what the most basic constituents of the world are, and how they are related. If consciousness is not identical to a bodily state, then wewant to know what sort of thing it is and how it seems to be able tointeract with the body. But if consciousness is identical to a particular pattern of brain waves, for example, then we are justified in thinking that mental states are not something different than physical states and consciousness can be understood through the study of the brain. In short, we want to clarify different categories of existence, eliminating the confusions that result from thinking that there are two (or more) things when there is just one, or thinking that that there is just one thing when there are actually two (or more). A more...