And The Body? Essay, Research Paper
The
relationship between the mind and the body is one of the philosophical problems
that has never been adequately answered. The functioning of the mind remains,
for the most part, a mystery, and its precise nature and origins are still
matters of controversy. The
essential question regarding the relationship is simple to explain. How does my
physical body, composed of more or less the same organs[1]
as the person next to me correspond to my mental processes and thoughts, which
I do not have in common with him? Two main streams of thought on this
relationship have emerged: dualism and monism. Dualism was the approach
favoured by Descartes, and has at its core the indivisibility of the soul and
the clear distinction between the soul (of which the mind is a part) and the
body. A monistic approach to the mind/body problem is the belief that they are
not distinct, and that the mind and the body are part of the same thing. This
usually takes a materialistic form-the mind is a physical substance in the same
way the heart or lungs are. It
is worth pointing out at this stage that dualists are unlikely to consider the
mind/body problem in the sense that a corpse, being a body devoid of a mind, is
proof that the two are distinct entities. Clearly, this is irrelevant:
dualists, when referring to a body, are basing their arguments on a living one.
What happens to the mind after the living body dies is another issue
altogether. A central tenement of Descartes? philosophy is the view that the
mind/soul is immortal ? although it exists on earth inside a body, it is
released after death to the next world. A
dualist, like Descartes, is of the opinion that the physical body, which the
outside world sees, occupies space and is governed by the laws of physics as
much any other physical entity is. The mind, on the other hand, does not
inhabit space, is therefore not governed by the usual natural laws, and can
only be ?seen? by itself. Descartes, when considering the relationship, did not
think it was the same kind of relationship as ?a pilot in a ship?, implying
that the mind does not merely observe physical damage to the body, in the way a
ship?s captain would, but it experiences it itself. The two are connected
through some system designed to do this. Descartes himself considered that the
two entities were connected through the pineal gland, which sent and received
messages to/from the body (qv). If this is the case, then one cannot consider a
mind to both be an entirely separate entity to the body, and not be merely like
the pilot. Furthermore, Descartes? view is open to the criticism which was
elegantly expressed by Ryle when he referred to it as ?the ghost in the
machine?. He claimed that it suggests there is a complex visible system called
the physical body which has as an engine an invisible complex called the mind,
which takes on a spiritual form, ever-present inside the body. Indeed, Ryle is
of the opinion that this form of Cartesian dualism is a category mistake, the
meaning of which is explained by a simile with a tourist visiting Oxford,
seeing the colleges and the libraries, and then asking where the university is.
This is to say that Ryle considers the treatment by Cartesian dualists of
mental events as separate to the other aspects of the body, rather than seeing
them as just one part of the processes of the human. There is thus no
categorical difference between mental processes and physical ones. Even
so, Ryle?s criticism does not explain why the mind and its consciousness
actually occur. The chemical reactions, biological operations, and physical
operations of the various components of the body are unlikely to create the
mind as if it were a side effect. This would lead one to a discussion of
whether free will could exist, and Ryle does not appear to be an advocate of
determinism. However, if the immortality of the soul is discounted, then Ryle?s
position becomes more tenable. The mind can thus be considered to be a separate
part of the body; one which inhabits the brain. Certainly, if the mind/soul
dies with the body, it requires the body to think (for example, a constant
supply of oxygen to the brain and so on). This interpretation, though, is still
likely to degenerate into determinism, as any consideration of the mind being a
physical object will. The
relationship between the mind and the body is at its most confusing when the
issue of sensations is considered. Descartes considers the sense of hunger he
gets when his stomach demands food: why, he asks himself, does a feeling of the
stomach tightening indicate this to him? In the Meditations, Descartes
tries to understand the relationship by suggesting that the nerves transmit the
signals to the mind via the pineal gland. He describes the nerves as acting in
a similar way to ropes pulling bells. At the most basic level, he is actually
very near to the modern understanding of the nervous system, although it
neither ends in the pineal
system of electrical impulses). This description of it by Descartes is
introduced when he considers the phantom limbs which amputees complain are
causing them pain. This is used by Descartes to suggest that interferences or
disturbances from elsewhere affect the body whilst giving the mind confusing
signals. This,
though, does not explain how the mind sends signals in response to these
messages in order to get a reaction. Although Descartes believed that some
responses, like the jerking of a hand away from a hot stove, were automatically
controlled by mechanical processes, thus removing the mind from the process,
others were the result of ?animal spirits? flowing from the pineal gland to the
bodily part it wishes to control. If, though, the mind and the body are truly
distinct, this aspect of the relationship becomes more difficult to explain. As
with the pineal gland, the idea of ?animal spirits? is not only discredited
scientifically, but Descartes does not attempt to actually explain what they
are. With a mind separate from the body, the only way it could control a part
of the body, either as a result of received sense-data or as a result of its
will, would have to be through some form of psychokinetic activity. I can will
my fingers to touch the keys on this keyboard, but there has to be some form of
connection between my thinking of the necessary movement, and its occurrence.
To say that the mind can merely will bodily parts to move is not enough: I can
will my ears all I want, and yet they fail to wiggle. Moreover, to say that the
mind operates its control over the body through psychokinetic energy is only a
step away from saying that it can also move external objects. Even if it were
denied this power, the stomach cannot be willed to stop digestion, for example. At
any rate, the way the communication between the mind and the body still raises
questions of what the mind does with the information it receives. As has been
mentioned above, Descartes considers that the pineal gland is where the
interchange takes place, and, thus, one presumes, where the data is transferred
to other parts of the mind for processing etc. Dennett has expressed this idea
as the ?Cartesian Theatre?, and argues that the mind does not function in one
place as the model suggests. The mind, according to him, takes in information
from the body and the senses but does not deal with it in one central place.
The mind operates (to use a computer metaphor) on a parallel basis, rather than
the serial basis, which the theatre model seems to require. Descartes
considered the mind to be the only thing that cannot be separated from himself.
This means that he considers that it is the essence of the mind to think.
Essence, to Descartes, means the properties of a substance or thing that cannot
be removed from it without losing the concept of it. The essence of a thing
contains only that which is necessary for it to exist. Descartes therefore
considers that his essence is thinking, thus he cannot detach his thinking self
from his essence. Descartes, though, does not suggest that having an essence
entails existence: this is only true in the case of God. However, as Malcolm
suggests, if he can perceives the essence of something, he can perceive the
thing itself. He can perceive thought, so he is able to perceive himself. The
body is not at the essence of the person; it is an extension of it. Although it
is possible to doubt the existence of the body, he cannot doubt the existence
of his mental self (hence the famous cogito). Therefore, the mind is
inseparable to him. Arnauld, though, argued that just because one can doubt the
fact that a right-angled triangle can have the length of the hypotenuse
calculated using Pythagoras? theorem, does not mean that this property is not
essential. Using this idea, Arnauld argues that just because one can imagine oneself
without a body, this does not make it an inessential part of me. Descartes,
though, argues that this ignores the point he is trying to make: he is merely
trying to see what constitutes his essence, and only by doubting all that is
possible to doubt can he do this. Malcolm has rightly pointed out that the
Descartes? test for what his essence consists of is to see if he is aware of
that property, which makes him aware of himself. Only thought fits this
description. Therefore, they can be said to be different things. The
relationship between the mind and the body is too complex to even begin to
explain in an essay of this length. Descartes considered that the mind, whilst
being connected to the body through the pineal gland and able to send and
receive data through the use of ?animal spirits? and the nervous system. By
today?s standards this understanding is flawed, but much of the current
theories are still either dualist ideas akin to this, or materialist, which
carries the risk of determinism. [1] I hesitate
to use the term ?genetic information? for fear of over-complicating matters
375