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Mind/Body Dualism

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Tenure

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I've been thinking a lot about the Mind/Body problem recently. I know Ayn Rand wrote a lot about how there was no dichotomy, but I think she was talking more about the whole Theory/Practice, Fact/Value, Rationalism/Empiricism gap, and all the many, many, many different variations on this theme (i.e. the Mystics of Mind and of Muscle).

I'm talking more about the Cartesian dualism, this whole issue of having Mind and Body being distinct entities which act upon one another. To the best of my memory, she said it was a scientific issue, but I believe there is still a significant philosophical question or two to be solved here. Namely, if Mind and Body are distinct entities, with one being Incorporeal and the other Corporeal, how does this Incorporeal entity act upon the Corporal one? It's not a highly original question I'm asking here, but it's one I have not found any answers to in the Objectivist literature.

I think Descartes solved it quite nicely, even if he turned it into some kind of epistemological solution. Basically, he starts by pointing out that when we think of something as being 'heavy', we imagine there is some real substance of 'heaviness' which is joining two objects together. So, when a dumbell sits in the gym, the reason it is difficult to pick up is because of the connection between the dumbell, some literal, corporeal force of 'heaviness' (not to be confused with the force of gravity) and the floor of the gym. It is like a kind of glue, sticking the two together. However, this is an incorrect conception: there is no actual heaviness there - rather, the object, the dumbell or what-have-you, possesses certain properties, as does the floor (well, the Earth beneath the floor), which draw them towards one another. Although we can describe this as gravity, we don't say that there's a certain amount of 'gravity' existing between the two objects, binding them - rather, we describe their relationship as being a gravitational one.

An easier example, although one he does not use, is the fire/heat one. Fire exists, heat does not. Obviously we feel heat, but there is nothing literally 'hot' about the fire. The fire, or any object 'heated' by the fire, has an effect on our nervous system in such a way, that it sends a certain signal, indicating heat. But there is no actual 'heat' without a person to feel it. We would be mistaken in describing a literal 'heat' particle, floating around amongst the fire.

Now, Descartes' solution consists of the following (it's pure Rationalism, by the way): we have certain innate ways of understanding the world. One of them is the proper, bodily, spatial way, where we understand the theory of gravity, or the way nervous system is effected by movements in particles, creating the feeling of 'heat'. The other is this notion of 'heaviness' literally existing, along with 'heat' as real things, not as properties/descriptions-of-relationships-between-property-bearing-entities or experiences, respectively, but as entities.

Now, Descartes points out the reason we make this confusion, is that this is the proper method granted to us, of understanding the mind/body relationship. The Union of Mind and Body is a literal thing, like this imagined heaviness or heat (let me reiterate that he is not stating these things actually are imagined, but that the conception of them as physical entities is imagined) we had earlier. The reason we think these relationships between physical entities are in fact physical entities themselves, is because we are given this method of viewing the world, as a way of understanding the Mind/Body Union as being a literal thing. There really is a Union between the two of them, such that Mind and Body are bound together.

Now, there is a distinct error in all this. It assumes the existence pre-concieved methods of thinking, or psycho-epistemologies, as I think they should be properly termed. There is absolutely no reason to believe that Descartes is right, that the method of understanding the Mind/Body Union is a result of some primitive notion, and the reason we know that notion exists, is because we make the mistake of applying it to the Bodily world by accident. It can only exist, because it makes sense for it exist - i.e. it's convenient.

I think it makes far more sense that we just make a mistake of assuming that, since we see physical entities all the time, that all there must be are physical entities. Throughout the History of Philosophy, until this idea was proven wrong, we have not allowed for the existence of these relationships as anything other than strictly material things. I think it is more an inherited philosophical error of Materialism, than any 'primitive' instincts instilled for us to understand the world.

But I'm wondering if there isn't something to this. Not any of this mumbo-jumbo about preconcieved ways of viewing the world, but what he points out about this whole matter of relationships. What if it were possible that a relationship between two corporeal entities could produce a third, incorporeal entity, as a relationship between the two of them. In other words, what if Consciousness is a relationship between neurons, and a literal one at that. It is like that primitive notion of 'heat' as actually existing. May I mark, however, that what I regard is something slightly different to Descartes. He holds that the Union of Mind/Body exist as this physical (incorporeal) thing, whereas I regard just the Mind existing as this physical (incorporeal) relationship between Body and Body.

What this would result in, would be an explanation for the fact that Mind/Body both change, and both rely upon one another for change, such as we observe in Neuroscience when changes in the brain accompany changes in the mind (and for thousands of years in the fact that the actions of the body reflect the will of the mind). This explanation of Supervenience would be very useful.

However, what this still leaves open is the issue of free-will. If both rely upon one another for change, and if Consciousness merely arises from the Brain, how on earth does this emergent property feedback onto the brain? How does it effect a change? This theory is perfectly sensible for non-volitional creatures, but it still leaves open the problem of humans. Is this then still a scientific question, as Ayn Rand posits?

Questions, Criticisms, Comments, etc are most welcome. I believe Binswanger has written/said something similar to what I'm thinking here, but I don't know exactly what he said. Also, I would deeply appreciate anyone who knows a little Descartes here to tell me if I have got him right, or have gone totally off-base.

Edited by Tenure
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It isn't accurate to say that "... there is no actual 'heat' without a person to feel it." There may not be a perception of heat, but there still is what a scientist would describe as heat. For example... place a large thermometer near the fire, and stand away, where you can read the thermometer without feeling the heat. The thermometer registers the rise in temperature. Heat exists even though we do not feel it.

Isn't this example more about sense-perception and the validity of the senses than it is about body/mind duality?

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It isn't accurate to say that "... there is no actual 'heat' without a person to feel it." There may not be a perception of heat, but there still is what a scientist would describe as heat. For example... place a large thermometer near the fire, and stand away, where you can read the thermometer without feeling the heat. The thermometer registers the rise in temperature. Heat exists even though we do not feel it.

I think you might be misunderstanding. A thermometer does not feel heat. Yes, what happens, we describe as a rise in temperature, or a transferal of heat, or energy, but all of this is explained at a much more fundamental level by a change in various physical things. The heat in itself, the feeling of hotness, does not exist in the bodies themselves. To put it another way, bringing us back to Descartes' original formulation: we can feel a body without heat (at least, theoretically), but we cannot feel heat without a body; the point being that heat is something that only comes about once we feel it - its existence is dependent upon our feeling it.

Let me be clear, that I'm not positing some primacy of consciousness. Yes, existence precedes experience. But that doesn't mean the things which are experienced can exist, without someone experiencing them. Essentially what I'm trying to get at is this idea that the union of Mind and Body exists by virtue of the fact that to perceive, is to perceive something, such that although Mind is distinct from Body, there is noway, by virtue of what it means to be a Mind, for a Mind to exist without a Body. So far, however, I think all I've proved is that the Mind is dependent on Reality, not that it is dependent on a specific Brain. But at least this proves that such a thing isn't a ridiculous notion.

Isn't this example more about sense-perception and the validity of the senses than it is about body/mind duality?

No. The example is about sense-perception, but not about the validity of it. And it's not just about sense-perception. That's just an example to show how things can be both one way and another - how there can be both the existence of something and the experience/description of it. What I'm thinking is that consciousness is nothing more than the experience of existence. Again, this is hardly an original insight, but this specific way of thinking about it is something I think we need to give more thought to, this whole conception of having a mind which 'arises' from the brain, as an experience of it.

Edited by Tenure
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It isn't accurate to say that "... there is no actual 'heat' without a person to feel it." There may not be a perception of heat, but there still is what a scientist would describe as heat. For example... place a large thermometer near the fire, and stand away, where you can read the thermometer without feeling the heat. The thermometer registers the rise in temperature. Heat exists even though we do not feel it.
For the same reason, it also isn't right to say "There is no actual 'sound' without a person to hear it", or "There is no actual 'color' without a person to see it". It would be accurate to say that there is no "pain" without a person experiencing it, similarly "fear", "sorrow". For starters, then, I would go back and reexamine those "particles". I'm not suggesting that there are heat particles, but rather that "heat" doesn't just refer to perceptual events ("pain", on the other hand, does). The concept is broad enough to include both the physical phenomenon and the perceptual effect."Heat" is not just the "feeling of hotness". "Sound" is not just the "perception of an acoustic event".
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Granted, all there is to these things is not just the perception of them, but my point is about the perception of them, when the rubber hits the road. That perception obviously does not exist in the thing itself. On heaviness, on properties which are not inherently perceptual to some degree, but which can make sense without someone perceiving them, I'm not so sure, hence why I doubt Descartes' answer having anything exactly meaningful to say. But I think it provides some kind of nod in the right direction, that the solution to the Mind/Body Union, is one of understand that Mind is an experience of Body.

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Tenure, One can use the term "heat" [Heat(1)] to mean the "feeling of heat" [Heat(2)], and that is fine in many contexts. However, if we're down at this level of analysis it would be an equivocation. We need two terms. To a physicist, temperature refers to a physical property: it is a measure of the jiggling of molecules (the quantity of energy). Heat(1) refers to the process by which (typically) one molecule hits another, and gets that one jiggling, i.e. to the transfer of this jiggling (energy).

The thermometer does not feel heat, in the sense that it does not feel anything; i.e. it is not conscious of it. However, it "feels" the heat in the sense that the molecules hit it, and set the mercury molecules jiggling, and they start to occupy more space.

When it comes to a person sitting by a fire, the high temperature of the fire causes physical changes to the air around the fire, etc., and finally to the person. The sensory organs are affected physically. This is the boundary upto which we actually have Heat(1) ... the type of heat that a physicist understands. At the point at which our sense organs are affected, we now get a series of signals taking place. Not sure how it works; perhaps an electrical signal goes to the brain. We end up with the human sensation of heat: Heat(2)

We cannot have Heat(2) without a person to perceive it. However, I don't think we can describe Heat(2) as a relationship between the person and the heat-source, simply leaving out Heat(1). Rather, Heat(2) is the way we are conscious of Heat(1).

Nevertheless, it would still support the idea that "...Mind is an experience of Body"

Edited by softwareNerd
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The meaning of the sense perception of heat has always been a bit of a struggle for scientists and it had some cause to confuse those who were trying to figure out how to scientifically represent it.

The heat we "feel" is not the actual energy within another body, but rather the movement of energy between two bodies of differing absolute energy levels. In this case the 2nd body is some part of our corporeal body.

That sensation is not the same thing, as snerd says, as the absolute level of energy in any entity.

So in effect, the sensation of heat does require the interaction of our own bodies in a way that can be confusing, but its context points out the difference between concepts. The classic example is a bucket of water that is at you own skin temperature. Initially you wont feel it as hot in any way. If you cool one hand, and warm another however, and then plunge them both into the original bucket you get this odd sensation of one hand telling you the water is "hot" and the other telling you it's "cold." What it is actually telling though is the direction which energy is being transferred in each hand as a result of the starting skin temps of each.

Thus the body of water may have a static property, but we perceive it only as the transfer of energy into or out of our own bodies. It's a bit like only being able to perceive certain wavelengths of light, and the meaning of color. Color is a property of reflectance, i.e. light has to hit the object and only certain wavelengths are reflected. If we cannot detect those particular wavelengths of light, does that mean that the body has no "color"? No, the phenomena still occurs according to the bodies nature, but we must find other ways than vision of confirming it.

Is the problem of mind body dualism as you are describing, really just an issue of not fully understanding the mechanism of our senses? That is, our senses are at the interface between mind and body, but in order to properly interpret them we must have a full understanding of their causal function in any sensory situation. That is, the senses are themselves entities that transmit data to mind, causally. That, just like the discovery of the outside world is an ongoing process, so there are many situations where we are apt to misinterpret or misunderstand sensory input because we lack the causal connection? If you look at the case of the early descriptions of heat which did not have a concept of internal energy you can see this confusion about sensory causality very clearly.

Edited by KendallJ
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I'm glad we agree as to this much then. There is this differentiation, but we must be careful not to assume that this means 'heat' does not exist. I understand that, of course, it exists. I'm talking about this experience of heat and this is the important point. Not H1 or H2, but whatever is the experience of H1 and/or H2.

What I'm getting at, as I've said, is that what I suspect this Mind/Body Union consists of, is the inseparable fact of the Mind's existence, that to be conscious requires consciousness of things. Now I don't mean just to say that, 'If you are conscious of a table, then it cannot be a total illusion - at some point, some real thing, outside yourself, must be communicating this illusion to you'. I'm saying that consciousness requires constant experience, that if nothing is being sent up from your brain to your mind, then you cannot be conscious at all - so, Mind and Body are separate things, but the reason the Body can impact the Mind is because of the very fact that the existence of Mind depends on its experience of the Body.

Now, this works all well and good for anything that isn't volitional, but how do we go about explaining the feedback mechanism - the fact that the actions of the body can be dependent on the experiences of the mind?

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What I'm getting at, as I've said, is that what I suspect this Mind/Body Union consists of, is the inseparable fact of the Mind's existence, that to be conscious requires consciousness of things. Now I don't mean just to say that, 'If you are conscious of a table, then it cannot be a total illusion - at some point, some real thing, outside yourself, must be communicating this illusion to you'. I'm saying that consciousness requires constant experience, that if nothing is being sent up from your brain to your mind, then you cannot be conscious at all - so, Mind and Body are separate things, but the reason the Body can impact the Mind is because of the very fact that the existence of Mind depends on its experience of the Body.

But you're really just saying that mind and body are in fact unified one way through continual experience. IN the opposite way they are unified through directed action. But then that goes to the nature of what the mind actually is, as a causal agent. That is how it functions. The mind certainly causes action, yes. The real question is how and to what end the mechanism?

Back in undergrad I did an Honor's Thesis on the use of neural networks for process control applications. Networks aren't analogous to brains, but are very simply models based upon the sort of action seen in a neuron, i.e. that input chemical potentials can build up to an output "firing" of the neuron. Anyway, these networks are very useful examples of how very complex interactions in reality can be easily modeled by very simple networks. It doesn't get you to volition, but it does show you how knowledge can be stored and then acted upon in ways that are unfamiliar to our very conceptual, verbal brains. The brain is vastly more complex.

Edited by KendallJ
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I think what Tenure might be confused about is the idea of perceptual form -- i.e. the manner in which we are aware of certain aspects of existence. Heat is the perceptual form in which we experience something being hotter than our skin; color is the perceptual form in which we experience different wavelengths of light. We have consciousness of existence, and our type of consciousness as well as our mechanism of perception, leads to us experiencing theses aspects of existence in a certain way. Something being heavy is our way of experiencing the fact that it is difficult to pick something up against gravity.

Given that, I think you are implying another question: Is our awareness of our consciousness the form in which we experience our neurons firing? That is, do we have some sort of internal "sensory" equipment that makes it possible for us to keep track of what our brain is doing? And I think that is a scientific question rather than a philosophical question. We do know that certain brain disorders or brain damages prevents the sufferer the ability to be aware of certain aspects of their own consciousness, so the tentative answer is that yes we do have an internal ability to be aware of what our brain is doing.

But regarding volition, we obviously have that ability, though we don't know how it works. It seems to be located in the pre-frontal cortex in that damages to that area of the brain renders volition subdued or not functional.

However, saying the mind is the same thing as the functioning of the brain is probably incorrect; just as sight is not the same thing as the functioning of the eyes, the optic nerves, and the visual cortex. A correctly functioning visual array makes sight possible, but we don't experience sight as the functioning of those mechanisms -- we see reality, not the optical pathways. Similarly, we are aware of our awareness of reality and our ability to direct that awareness, not the functioning of our neurons. Again, we are aware of reality and we are aware of our consciousness; but as to how that works is a scientific question. Philosophically, we can say we are aware of it, and come up with an epistemology of how it works as experienced, but the other details require specific investigations into the functioning of the brain, which is too specific for philosophy.

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But I'm wondering if there isn't something to this. Not any of this mumbo-jumbo about preconcieved ways of viewing the world, but what he points out about this whole matter of relationships. What if it were possible that a relationship between two corporeal entities could produce a third, incorporeal entity, as a relationship between the two of them. In other words, what if Consciousness is a relationship between neurons, and a literal one at that. It is like that primitive notion of 'heat' as actually existing. May I mark, however, that what I regard is something slightly different to Descartes. He holds that the Union of Mind/Body exist as this physical (incorporeal) thing, whereas I regard just the Mind existing as this physical (incorporeal) relationship between Body and Body.

If this is the piece of this you're really interested in, check out the literature on emergentism, specifically emergentism about phenomenal consciousness. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/ is as good a place to start as any. It's a position fairly close to what you describe here. Specifically, that article makes reference to a book: "Hasker, William (1999). The Emergent Self." - which sounds like it largely agrees with you.

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The human mind exists fundamentally (in the epistemological sense) as one's awareness of existence and the awareness of one's awareness of existence. We do need a means of bing aware, such as our senses, and a means of being aware of what is going on in our minds (but we haven't pin pointed that yet). The idea of consciousness being a phenomenology of something else more fundamental is the wrong approach philosophically, because one's awareness of one's content and operation of one's consciousness is the starting point of grasping what it means to have a consciousness. Whether consciousness arises due to neurons interacting is a higher level form of knowledge, not a lower level form of knowledge. In other words, knowledge of neurons comes long after we are aware of our awareness and become aware that we can direct it.

And the interaction of neurons would not create another entity, such as a spiritual mind stuff, which Objectivism rejects. Objectivism holds that we have both a mind and a body, without implying that the mind is somehow something that is separable from the body in the way that the Christians mean by the soul. Philosophically, we can say we have a consciousness, and that in certain ways it is difference than a material entity, such as your head doesn't get larger as you gain more knowledge, say when contrasted to a library which gets larger them more books are put into it. Conceptualization makes it possible to have vast amounts of knowledge without the need for more space in which to house it. And, yes, somehow there is a connection between neurons and consciousness, but one couldn't say that the neurons are the consciousness. Neurons are not the awareness, but I think it can be said that they make awareness possible.

However, awareness is not an entity, but rather the functioning of your body in such a way that you are aware. Any advances in science will show us how that is possible via neural networks and such, but it can never get beneath the fundamental fact that you are aware. And besides, one is aware of existence long before one is aware that one has a brain.

So, Objectivism is a dualism in the sense that it recognizes that we have both consciousness and a body, but it doesn't say that they are two different types of stuff -- in the sense of being two different types of entities. Awareness is not an entity; it is more of an ability brought about by man being the type of (one) entity that he is.

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