RE: Is your mind identical to your brain?
Coming from the perspective of hermetic philosophy an individual is composed of body, mind and living spirit. So reductionists not only reduce our minds to something physical, they also reduce our living spirit to something physcial too! Which is absurd.
The mind is not identical to a brain, you can crack a skull open and you wont see a mind because it is something immaterial (not made of atoms or molecules). For me, testimony of people who consciously experience separation from their bodies during near death experiences, accounts of astral travel, and other other documented 'paranormal activities' such as parakinesis, etc, provide strong evdience that we are in fact much more than simply meat sticks. Materialism is dead.
Dr Rupert Sheldrake conducted some fascinating experiements suggesting that the mind is not local. http://opensciences.org/videos/consciousness-studies/nonlocal-mind
I don't know if materialism is dead, but it's in deep trouble. Where things get really wild is when you consider the implications of overlapping theories. For example, integrated information theory plus the holographic principle gives you another, and particularly deep, form of panpsychism (maybe).