The Mind–Body Problem after Fifty Years

An introduction to the mind–body problem, covering all the proposed solutions and offering a powerful new one. Philosophers from Descartes to Kripke have struggled with the glittering prize of modern and contemporary philosophy: the mind-body problem. The brain is physical. If the mind is physical, we cannot see how. If we cannot see how the mind is physical, we cannot see how it can interact with the body. And if the mind is not physical, it cannot interact with the body. Or so it seems. In this book the philosopher Jonathan Westphal examines the mind-body problem in detail, laying out the reasoning behind the solutions that have been offered in the past and presenting his own proposal. The sharp focus on the mind-body problem, a problem that is not about the self, or consciousness, or the soul, or anything other than the mind and the body, helps clarify both problem and solutions. Westphal outlines the history of the mind-body problem, beginning with Descartes. He describes mind-body dualism, which claims that the mind and the body are two different and separate things, nonphysical and physical, and he also examines physicalist theories of mind; antimaterialism, which proposes limits to physicalism and introduces the idea of qualia; and scientific theories of consciousness. Finally, Westphal examines the largely forgotten neutral monist theories of mind and body, held by Ernst Mach, William James, and Bertrand Russell, which attempt neither to extract mind from matter nor to dissolve matter into mind. Westphal proposes his own version of neutral monism. This version is unique among neutral monist theories in offering an account of mind-body interaction.

Psychosomatic medicine, with its prevailing biopsychosocial model, aims to integrate human and exact sciences with their divergent conceptual models. Therefore, its own conceptual foundations, which often remain implicit and unknown, may be critically relevant. We defend the thesis that choosing between different metaphysical views on the 'mind-body problem' may have important implications for the conceptual foundations of psychosomatic medicine, and therefore potentially also for its methods, scientific status and relationship with the scientific disciplines it aims to integrate: biomedical sciences (including neuroscience), psychology and social sciences. To make this point, we introduce three key positions in the philosophical 'mind-body' debate (emergentism, reductionism, and supervenience physicalism) and investigate their consequences for the conceptual basis of the biopsychosocial model in general and its 'psycho-biological' part ('mental causation') in particular. Despite the clinical merits of the biopsychosocial model, we submit that it is conceptually underdeveloped or even flawed, which may hamper its use as a proper scientific model.

I have argued in a number of writings that the philosophical part (though not the neurobiological part) of the traditional mind–body problem has a fairly simple and obvious solution: all of our mental phenomena are caused by lower level neuronal processes in the brain and are themselves realized in the brain as higherlevel, or system, features. The form of causation is ‘bottom up’ whereby the behaviour of lower-level elements, presumably neurons and synapses, causes the higher-level or system features of consciousness and intentionality. (This form of causation, by the way, is common in nature; for example, the higher-level feature of solidity is causally explained by the behaviour of the lower-level elements, the molecules.) Because this view emphasizes the biological character of the mental, and because it treats mental phenomena as ordinary parts of nature, I have labelled it ‘biological naturalism’. To many people biological naturalism looks a lot like property dualism. Because I believe property dualism is mistaken, I would like to try to clarify the differences between the two accounts and try to expose the weaknesses in property dualism. This short paper then has the two subjects expressed by the double meanings in its title: why my views are not the same as property dualism, and why I find property dualism unacceptable. There are, of course, several different ‘mind–body’ problems. The one that most concerns me in this article is the relationship between consciousness and brain processes. I think that the conclusions of the discussion will extend to other features of the mind–body problem, such as, for example, the relationship between intentionality and brain processes, but for the sake of simplicity I will concentrate on consciousness. For the purposes of this discussion, the ‘mind–body problem’ is a problem about how consciousness relates to the brain. The mind–body problem, so construed persists in philosophy because of two intellectual limitations on our part. First, we really do not understand how brain processes cause consciousness. Second, we continue to accept a traditional

The Mind–Body Problem

Famously posed by seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes, the mind–body problem remains unresolved in western philosophy and science, with both disciplines unable to move convincingly beyond the dualistic model. The persistence of dualism calls for a reframing of the problem through interdisciplinary modes of inquiry that include non-western points of view. One such perspective is Islamic theology of the soul, which, while approaching the problem from a distinct point of view, also adopts a position commensurate with (substance) dualism. Using this point of convergence as a conceptual starting point, we argue that bringing into dialogue contemporary neuroscientific, philosophy of mind, and Sunni Islamic theological discourses may provide a fruitful way of reframing the age-old mind–body problem. This paper provides an overview of how these three discourses have approached the issue of the mind–body (-soul) problem. Juxtaposing these three discourses, we hope, may ignite further scholarly dialogue and investigation.

The paper presented by Miss Ishiguro offers a reasonable approach to — even a way out from — the mind — body problem. It combines certain methods of British philosophy (e.g. the analysis of the logical priority of the concept of ‘person’) with those of Continental philosophy (e.g. the more phenomenological analysis of the future-dimension of human existence).

When, in the twenty-first century, psychologists or popularisers ask 'what is consciousness?', or refer to the 'mind body problem', what are they up to?Does their discourse, sometimes called cognitive science, fall within the modern idea of the natural sciences? Like many before them, some try to reduce human beings to machines: both mind and the brain become computers. Kinds of knowledge outside the sciences are ignored or derogated. Cognitive scientists consequently make it difficult or impossible for them to understand themselves, let alone other people, or to adopt a moral stance. This essay, in contrast, was not generated by a computer, nor is it addressed to one.

Eric Voegelin’s writings on the historical development of the concept of race in the early 1930s are important to philosophy today in part because they provide a model upon which scholars can further integrate modern philosophy with the critical philosophy of race. In constructing his history, Voegelin’s methodological orientation depends on the centrality of both Kant’s work and the problem of the mind–body union to the concept of race. This essay asks how one might hold these premises if Kant seems to reject the dominant approach to the mind–body union in the mid-eighteenth century, physical influx, and then go on to publish several essays on race that do not thematize that doctrine in any way. I argue that Kant’s racial union of mind and body cannot be understood as an interaction in space, as his contemporaries had presumed. Rather, the union must be approached as a repetition in time. In this way, Kant’s four racial categories are not merely a part of the mind–body problem, but instead each is a veritable mind–body union. This permits the conclusion that ‘race’, as Kant understood it, is a viable solution to the mind–body problem.

It was about half a century ago that the mind–body problem, which like much else in serious metaphysics had been moribund for several decades, was resurrected as a mainstream philosophical problem. The first impetus came from Gilbert Ryle'sThe Concept of Mind, published in 1948, and Wittgenstein's well-known, if not well-understood, reflections on the nature of mentality and mental language, especially in hisPhilosophical Investigationswhich appeared in 1953. The primary concerns of Ryle and Wittgenstein, however, focused on the logic of mental discourse rather than the metaphysical issue of how our mentality is related to our bodily nature. In fact, Ryle and Wittgenstein would have regarded, each for different reasons, the metaphysical problem of the mind-body relation as arising out of deplorable linguistic confusions and not amenable to intelligible discussion. There was C. D. Broad's earlier and much neglected classic,The Mind and Its Place in Nature, which appeared in 1925, but this work, although robustly metaphysical, failed to connect with, and shape, the mind–body debate in the second half of this century.

Descartes’ mind–body dualism is frequently thought to lie at the origins of our concerns about the relationship of the mental to the physical. His approach to the issue is very different from that of most current philosophers and he is frequently a target for their criticism, as contemporary philosophers tend not to be dualists but are generally more inclined towards some form or other of materialism. There is, however, another significant difference between Descartes and current discussions: unlike contemporary philosophers, Descartes focused on arguing for substance dualism. The question he addressed at length was the question whether thinking and material qualities could belong to the same substance. He thought it pretty 1

ABSTRACTNot so long ago, the idea that analytic philosophers would be taking panpsychism seriously would have been hard to believe. That is because in its early, logical positivist, stage, the analytic movement earned the reputation of being militantly anti-metaphysical. But analytic philosophy has come a long way since the heyday of logical positivism; and, in fact, the dialectic of recent debates on the mind–body problem among analytic philosophers has pushed many of them in the direction of panpsychism. In this paper, I want to explain how this has come about and take a look at some of the versions of panpsychism that have emerged. This will involve running through a quick history of debates on the mind–body problem since about 1960, focusing on how panpsychism has been proposed as a promising, though not unproblematic, way of breaking an apparent impasse that has emerged between more standard physicalist and dualist theories of mind. Along the way, I will also have occasion to comment on the prospects of panpsychism as a respectable scientific theory and how a number of scientists stand on this.

All in the mind or in the body?

The Mind–Body Problem

The rise of cognitive psychology has heralded a revival of interest in the mind-body problem. As a heuristic, Hyland (1985) suggested that mind terms and body terms be thought of as complementary descriptions of the same event. Complementarism precludes causal relations between mental and physiological events, and instead posits identity relations between these two types of variables. Independently, Kirsch (1985) proposed that for all causal sequences linking one mind state to another, there is a corresponding causal sequence of physiological states. Rather than being mind-body philosophies, complementarity and causal isomorphism are shown to be logical consequences of virtually all monist philosophies, including those that are currently most prominent. Their heuristic value is demonstrated with respect to empirical questions about psychophysiological phenomena.

Interest from varied academic disciplines regarding the mind–body connection has increased in recent decades. This interest has resulted in a proliferation of empirical research investigating the phenomenon. This growing body of research, coming from the cognitive and behavioral neurosciences and identified under the label of embodiment research, combined with the lively conversation between embodiment researchers, are of great importance to the field of dance/movement therapy (DMT). However, in order for DMT to participate effectively in the conversation, the field first needs a clarification of its own theory regarding the mind–body connection. This article distills a sub-section of existing DMT theory into a set of grounded descriptive statements, and summarizes existing empirical data from cognitive and behavioral neurosciences that substantiate the statements. A modified grounded theory method was used. Implications for future research direction are discussed.