the mind/body problem

One of the classic problems of philosophy, specifically the philosophy of mind.

The legacy of the problem can be traced back to Rene Descartes, (see Descartes' argument for dualism). It is a tricky issue to say whether he created it or discovered it, an issue full of the contradictions inherent in language and thought. It is similarly tricky to describe what the mind body problem is about. In fact, it seems to evaporate when you really describe it, making it seem, like other things to be a non-problem.

"Descartes cleavage," as my philosophy professor describes it, is the idea (fact?) that mind and body are different and separate. The mind and the body are separate things, and yet we seem to have both. Descartes proposed naively that the two interacted through the pineal gland. Other explanations of just "where" the mind "is" and how it communicates with the body seem equally silly.

Many philosophical theories have, over the past few centuries, tried to deal with the "problem" "created" by Descartes. Spinoza proposed the double aspect theory, in which both mind and body are effected by God, causing them to be in synch. There is also, idealism (only mind exists), materialism (only body exists), mind/brain identity (the mind just is the brain, except that theorists' emphasis is usually on the "brain" side) and other bouts of theoretical contortionism too numerous to mention.

My own view is that this problem is simply one of perception. We cannot resolve the mind/body problem because it is not a problem -- mind and body are the same thing. They are in no way separate things. They do not communicate any more than a computer communicates with its wiring. I've become more and more convinced of this the more I study about the science of the human brainmind. But, unlike many people, I have become less and less convinced that science, as it stands now, can tell the whole story of consciousness. Ken Wilber's books finally convinced me. This quote from The spectrum of Consciousness, talking about dualism in general, should sum things up nicely:

"...it is almost as if man were given two pictures of his body, one taken from the back, and the other from the front. In trying to decide which of these views was "really real," man divided into two camps: the Frontists, who firmly believed that only the picture taken from the front was real, and the Backists, who steadfastly insisted just the opposite. The problem was a tricky one, for each camp had to devise a theory to explain the existence of the other, and so the Frontists had just as much trouble exlaining the existence of the back as the Backists had in explaining the existence of the front. To avoid the contradiction, the Frontists spent their time running away from their backs, while the Backists were just as ingenious in devising ways to run away from their fronts. Occasionally the two would cross paths, yell obscenities at one another, and this was called philosophy."

Elsewhere, Wilber gets into the idea of a bodymind, a deeper reality of mind in which we acknowledge that mind and body are "not two." Try asking yourself: Would I say that I have a body, or that I am a body? If your answer was the first one, try defending the proposition in a debate. You may discover some interesting things.

After I noded this, I talked to a friend about it.

The reason why solution hasn't been accepted by everyone in the philosophy community is simple: it doesn't address the mind that the critics believe needs explaining. There are very few philosophers who doubt that psychology is firmly grounded in the brain; almost no one seriously proposes that reason is the exclusive property of an immaterial soul anymore. They do claim, however, the physicalism, for all it's success, it silent on the issue of consciousness of the what-it-is-like sort (as opposed to wakefulness or attention, where science is doing quite well). In many respects this is an epistemological problem (the 'explanatory gap'): consciousness doesn't fit in physics because physics is designed to work with the objective world and can't provide us with information about the subjective elements that may exist. Perhaps there's no particular reason why consciousness couldn't be physical, but at this point we have no data on where in physics it could be. (Quantum mechanics -- vanilla QM; none of this revisionist stuff -- includes quite a bit of epistemology and other interesting philosophical issues, but it tends to beg questions, not answer them.) Solving this problem would take care of the 'where' and probably the 'when' of the mind/body problem once and for all, but leave the troubling 'how' and 'what'. ('Why' can go to your choice of theologians, physicists, or biologists.) Nevertheless, it would go a long way toward an eventual solution (or at any rate, cease-fire).

At some point epistemology gives way to metaphysics, which greets the problem with a quizzical look and vanishes into the study for several centuries to ponder just what 'experience' is. Among those metaphysicians who continue to believe that the M/BP is a problem -- which is to say, all who take their job seriously -- it seems to be largely agreed upon that materialism is wrong in some important way, even if no one can say just how. Dualism has never been a satisfactory answer simply because it isn't an answer, just a restatement of the problem. Idealism is better, but fares poorly in most other respects and once again doesn't offer much to explain consciousness. Recognition of the need for some sort of objective (insofar as the entire world wouldn't disappear in a puff of qualia if there were no observers) monism is nearly universal: there's no evidence the world isn't monistic and somewhat objective, and it makes things a lot easier if you don't have to work an interaction between worlds into the equation. Unfortunately, you are left a problem almost as large: how can something be both objective and subjective at the same time, and what do those two properties have in common that allows us to say that they are a unity? (Notice that we're on our way back to epistemology.) It has been suggested that this problem may be insoluble: not only may we not have the tools (intellectual and physical) needed to unravel the knot, but we may not be capable of understanding the answer if we found it. Unfortunately, Tthe most promising result of all of this speculation is only that people have started paying attention to the problem again. The last few years have a torrent of activity in journals and conferences on consciousness and the M/BP (the most (in)famous being Tucson I-IV), and considerable interest from beyond philosophy (oddly, primarily from physicists; psych and neurosci still haven't come around). While things aren't looking up at all, it's certainly a much more exciting time than a few decades ago.

(Postscript: All of this is ignoring the looming problem of intentionality, which is superficially easier to explain but surprisingly difficult once you begin. Consciousness and intentionality have long been linked, and it's entirely possible that consciousness will never be satisfactorily described without first tackling intentionality. Thus far few people have even tried to bind the two together, and no proposal has escaped harsh criticism (that is, harsh criticism of actual problems, not the criticism that accompanies philosophy jounals like noise on my phone line [see US West]). Aside from the never ending debate over where meaning lives -- in the mind or in the world -- little progress has been made since the term reentered the English language. On the other hand, philosophy seems to have this one all to it's own; at least we don't have worry about those pesky scientists coming in and trying to explain away all our subject matter.)

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Back to Rene Descartes for a moment, here's some history.

Starting with The Method of Doubt, going on through Cogito, Ergo Sum, and putting some faith in God into the mix, Descartes decided that he could be pretty sure that the basic truths (math, logic) are indeed true. But here he has been working with the mind, and the material world is not all in your head. So all this stuff doesn't apply to sensory input, does it?

We would like to think that it does. But how could he be sure? Well, he came up with two arguments to proove that the mind is separate from the body.

Argument #1: I (my mind) is not dubitable (in doubt). But here I am, doubting my body. So my body is dubitable. And if two things do not share the same intrinsic properties, they cannot be the same thing.

But we can argue that... dubitableness is not an intrinsic property. You have to have a doubter to doubt, and as such, the property does not exist on its own, apart from the rest of the universe.

So... Argument #2: My mind is not divisible. But my body is (Cutting off a finger, for example). They have different intrinsic properties, so they are indeed different things.

But... I'm not sure how well this went over in Descartes time, but it's not accepted today. The mind does seem to consist of different 'parts'; ask any neurologist or psychologist. Of course, the brain is not the same thing as the mind, but the mind can indeed be lost 'in parts'; you can loose some memory, or some senses, or some rationality, etc.