Mind-Body InteractionBy localizing the soul's contact with body in the pineal gland, Descartes had raised the question of the relationship of mind to the brain and nervous system.Yet at the same time, by drawing a radical ontological distinction between body as extended and mind as pure thought, Descartes had created a difficult philosophical problem.Notes from Wozniak, Robert H. "Mind and Body: Rene Dscartes to William James" http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/Mind/; Bryn Mawr College, Serendip 1995

Mind-Body Interaction

In Descartes' conception, the rational soul, an entity distinct from the body and making contact with the body at the pineal gland, can become aware of changes in the flow of animal spirits brought about by external motion affecting the nerves. When such awareness did occur, however, the result was conscious sensation -- body affecting mind. In voluntary action, the soul might itself initiate a change in the outflow of animal spirits: Mind, in other words, could also affect body.

Problem:

If the natural world is divided into the mental and the physical such that the physical is extended in space and the mental is not, and if the nature of causality is such that causes and effects must have a necessary connection and be of a similar type, then Descartes mind/body interactionism is incomprehensible.

Occasionalism

Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) There is no causal influence of mind on body or of body on mind. God is the one and only true cause. God intervenes to produce the regularities that occur in experience.

Double-aspect Theory

Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677) God

is the one true cause, but causality does operate in both the mental and the physical worlds. The mental and the physical are simply different aspects of one and the same substance.

Double-aspect Theory

For Spinoza, God is the universal essence or nature of everything that exists. Consciousness and matter are attributes of only one infinite substance: God.

Psychophysical Parallelism

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)Psychophysical parallelism rejects interactionism on the grounds that events so totally dissimilar as those of mind and body could not possibly affect one another. It also rejects occasionalism and dual-aspect theory on the grounds that no third entity, whatever that might be, could be responsible for such vastly different effects. Parallelists simply accept the fact that every mental event is correlated with a physical event in such a way that when one occurs, so does the other.

Psychophysical Parallelism

Consider two clocks that agree perfectly; Leibniz argued that there are only three possible sources for this agreement.1. 2.

3.

It may occur through mutual influence (interactionism), through the efforts of a skilled workman who regulates the clocks and keeps them in accord (occasionalism), or by virtue of the fact that they have been so constructed from the outset that their future harmony is assured (parallelism).

Psychophysical Parallelism

Leibniz champions parallelism -- the notion that mind and body exist in a harmony that has been pre- established by God from the moment of creation.

Immaterialism

George Berkeley (1685-1753) To avoid the mind/body problem entirely, one must deny any distinction between mind and body. Immaterialism denies even the possibility of mindless material substance. There is no mind/body distinction because what we think of as body is merely the perception of mind.

Materialism

Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709-1751) Whatever exists depends on matter. Mental events are real, but causally dependent on bodily events. States of the soul depend upon states of the body.

The 19th Century: Mind and Brain

Epiphenomenalism

Events in the nervous system form an autonomous chain independent of accompanying mental states. Comparing mental states to the colors laid on the surface of a stone mosaic and neural events to the supporting stones, the stones are held in place by one another and not by the colors on the stones.

The 19th Century

Interactionism

Neural events and mental events are causally related. But we dont (yet) know how.

The 19th Century

Dual-aspect monism

There is only one kind of "stuff" and mind and body differ only in the arrangement of that stuff or in the perspective from which it is apprehended. Mental and physical processes are simply different aspects of one and the same series of psychophysical events. When someone is thinking, the psychophysical series is mental. When seen from the objective point of view (e.g., when someone observes what is going on in the thinking person's brain), it is physical.

The 19th Century

Mind-stuff Theory

Consciousness is compounded of mental elements which do not themselves possess consciousness. Even the most basic material elements possess a small piece of mind-stuff such that when these elements are combined, mind-stuff is similarly combined.

For example, when molecules come together at a level of complexity sufficient to form a brain and nervous system, correlative mind-stuff forms consciousness.

Psychical monism: Mind is the only actual substance and at the material world is nothing more than an aspect under which mind is apprehended.

The 20th Century

The Cartesian impasse remains. Some give priority to the empirical, others to the mental. All have trouble explaining the relation between the two.