What is the solution to the mind-body dichotomy?

Metaphysics and Epistemology
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Last night I was pondering the Mind-Body Problem and the proposed Objectivist solution to it. To me, it seems as though the Objectivist position is tied to some sort of dualism because they reject materialism. But this doesn’t make any sense because Objectivism rejects the supernatural. So I spent 4 hours last night as well as more time today trying to discover a solution which solves the mind-body problem AND is compatible with Objectivism. I have concluded, with the help of the others, that the mind is purely physical. Here is a summary of what I concluded.

At birth a new born baby can merely take in concretes via sensory perception. The sense perception is a purely physical action but it does not yet result in anything. As more and more concretes enter the brain through the senses, the brain formulates the beginning of consciousness and reason, which are also both purely physical actions. As more and concretes enter through the senses, the brain conceptualizes these through the consciousness. But, man’s mind does not work automatically thereafter. A process must develop which can abstract to an even higher level than the conceptualization. This is where reason comes in. Reason, a purely physical action, is developed by the brain in response to the flood of information coming in through the senses. However, REASON IS NOT AUTOMATIC. You, the brain, must actively engage in the process of reason in order to use it. And the brain processes of reason work exactly the same way in which your muscles work in the body. The more you exercise your reason, the stronger it gets. Now the question is, where does free will come in to all of this? Once consciousness is established automatically by the brain after sense perception, a faculty is required to control the higher functions of the brain. The creation of consciousness is like the creation of identity. Therefore, a faculty of consciousness, which is a purely physical process, is free will. The free will to engage in the exercise of your reason or not. All of these things can be described by a purely PHYSICAL process. In each human being, the exact physical process by which these things happen is different. This is most apparent in the construction of a concept. In person A, physical process A IS the concept of an apple. In person B, physical process B IS the concept of the same apple. This would seem to denote the existence of universal concepts, but it does not. Rather, it affirms that the object apple exists in reality with certain attributes which are perceived through the senses. The senses then conceptualize the information. The brain categorizes certain sensory perceptions into its memory centers which are called upon when similar senory pereceptions are perceived. The brain makes the physical connection that the group A of sensory perceptions is very similar to group B of sensory perceptions and therefore that the sensory pereceptions of those groups indicate one object. All of these processes are physical. This is how different physical processes equal the same thing, because ultimately in both cases, the apple is an apple, A is A, and reality is reality. This also means that all knowledge possible to man is derived from the senses. This includes the objects of logic and mathematics because without sense perceptions, reason could not develop in the human brain. The understanding of logic and mathematics is created by physical processes in the human brain. This does not mean that mathematics and logic are CREATED in the human brain, this means that the human brain creates the capacity to understand them via the senses but ultimately through the faculty of reason, which is a purely physical process. All of the concepts in our mind ARE physical. Here’s an example of what I mean in the mind of a newborn infant. Let’s say that there is one object of our perception, object 1, and each time we perceive it, we receive the sense perception a+b+c. a+b+c enters our brain through the sense perception but is lost because we don’t yet have a consciousness. we perceive a+b+c again, and there is same process as before. We keep pereceiving a+b+c again and again and again until our brain recognizes a pattern. This is the beginning of consciousness. The next time a+b+c is pereceived, our brain conceptualizes these sense pereceptions into object 1. The sense pereceptions of a+b+c are purely physical, and the brain takes this physical element and condenses it into a new physical element which is then stored in the memory of the brain. This is how concepts are purely physical. The same process is repeated for all other knowledge, except that when it gets to the third step, reason,it is dependent on our free will, but it is still physical nonetheless. Thus, everything is physical.

This theory seems to be compatible with Objectivism. What do you think?

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I think that you could have made it alot easier on yourself if you thought about it from a different angle:

From my observations of people who espouse the mind-body dichotomy (and please excuse any spelling errors in advance :slight_smile: ), they do so because they are incapable of imagining such intangible things as “thoughts” and “feelings” as being something of the body. Since they are used to concepts of intangiblity, they ascribe mysticist principles to explain such phenomenon. They basically see thought and reason and, yes, free will as another kind of deity, or the product thereof, and so they create a split that was ready-made with the concept of God: body (tangible) mind (intangible). It is so natural a cognitive jump for them. However, it is obvious to anyone who uses reason and not feeling to come to their conclusions that the mind is in fact an organ of the body, a body-part, and just as you would not assume the action of any organ to be some divine process unknowable to man, you would not assume the processes of the mind to be such, either. Emotions, “feelings,” come from connections made in the mind, whether or not we choose to be conscious of such connections. It is here that our theories definately coincide:

Consciousness Is Volitional.

One must choose to be conscious of such processes, of reality, if one wants to be able to use reason to come to correct conclusions about that reality.

It is very easy to ignore reality, to make various excuses for yourself and your actions, such as “I don’t know, I feel.” But such excuses are just that: excuses, not reasons, not valid arguments. It is a crime to classify the most cerebral, most knowable processes to faith. FAITH! To say that the mind and God are both unknowable, and that we must merely have faith that they work as they should is the most disempowering belief Mankind holds. Ugh.

What do YOU think?

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I think that when I wrote this post I did not have nearly as much knowledge as I do now. I agree with what you said.

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Based on my current reading and thinking about it, I think that the mental and the physical are inseparable. When you are thinking (mental event) a combination of chemical elements in your brain are interacting (physical event). And so when you make a choice to do something (mental event) there is a corresponding physical event occuring. It is not a matter of the mental acting upon the physical and the physical upon the mental but rather the two acting in conjunction with each other.

"What was always true though not obvious has become inescapable (except to those who wish to escape it). The mind is indispensable to human life. Abstractions are not a luxury, but a necessity. Thought is man’s guide to action. Reason is a practical attribute.

The metaphysical fact about man that underlies these  truths is that man is not a battlefield of contending dimensions, spiritual and physical. He is, in Ayn Rand’s words, “an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness.” Consciousness in his case takes the form of mind, i.e., a conceptual faculty; matter, of a certain kind of organic structure. Each of these attributes is indispensable to the other and to the total entity. The mind acquires knowledge and defines goals; the body translates these conclusions into action"

From OPAR by Peikoff

What do you think?

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I think that attempts to defend volition as purely physical are just as misguided and erroneous as attempts to defend it by quantum randomness. The “mind-body problem” is actually a false dichotomy, as is any attempt to define the mind as either purely physical or entirely non-physical.

Consciousness and volition is probably the hardest aspect of philosophy to understand, and the analogy I use to help me understand it is hardware vs. software. Hardware is the framework that the software runs on, and it places certain limits on the speed and complexity of the computation. Software is the conceptual description of the physical process that occurs during computation. Take the simplest example: a light switch. The hardware is the physical on/off switch and the software is our concept of on or off. The brand of switch may vary, but the concept remains the same. The makeup of a computer program is logical commands and raw data, and the makeup of a mind is concepts and sense impressions. We don’t say that software is physical or not-physical, because it is in fact a description of relationships between physical components – and so is the mind. Consciousness is an emergent entity that can’t be reduced to any single idea or brain cell, and is not dependent on any particular “platform” – but it nevertheless defined and limited by the brain it runs on. Thus, computers are limited to a certain operating speed and memory capacity as defined by their hardware, and humans are limited to a certain thinking speed and limited focus defined by their brain.

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I wasn’t trying to reduce consciousness and volition down to the purely physical in my last post. I said that the two work in conjunction with each other, rather than two separate entities from separate realms.

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I think that the way you are describing it, although in different terms, retains the same connotation of two seperate entities: a dichotomy. When you say “mental event” v. “physical event,” you are seperating mental and physical, mind and body. The way I understand it is that there is no seperation. Since the mind IS the body (it is a body part), an action or ‘event’ of the mind is an action or event of the body.

(And to answer your question of a different post topic, no, I have never read OPAR, I couldn’t even tell you what it stands for!)

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OPAR - Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff.

It is an excellent and logical presentation of the whole of the Objectivist Philosophy. If you have not read it, I highly recommend it.

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I am 7 chapters through it (I’m in the process of reading it). All of my comments came as the result of reading what is in OPAR.

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I am also currently reading OPAR for the first time. In light of some of the points Peikoff makes (particularly in chapter 2), it’s almost tempting to think of consciousness as a certain type of relationship (between existence and a certain kind of entity, namely a perceptual form of life) rather than as an entity. There has to be more to it than that, because that would not explain some of the unique characteristics of consciousness. But it is an interesting way to look at it, because it makes it easy to see why some of the objections against consciousness are invalid.

For instance, materialists think that consciousness must be purely physical (which usually reduces to denying that there’s such a thing as consciousness), and idealists think that it must be supernatural (which usually reduces to the claim that mind and body are independent and can be separated, as in Descartes’ substance dualism). The faulty premise at work here is that if it is not a physical entity and there is not some other supernatural non-physical realm or “substance”, then it supposedly cannot exist. In other words, a false alternative is set up between physical (in the sense of physical entities) and supernatural (which seems to be the false alternative with which Steve was struggling in the first paragraph of this thread). But relationships exist, and are neither physical entities in and of themselves (but are physically existent) nor supernatural.

This would also relate to the principle of the primacy of existence over consciousness. Similarly, physical entities have primacy over relationships. Relationships presuppose and depend on the entites that are in somehow in relation to each other; there can be no such thing as relationships among nothing.

Just some thoughts; and like I said, I don’t think that that’s an entirely accurate description of the mind. But there are even some places in OPAR where Peikoff comes very close to describing consciousness as a relation between a certain kind of living being and reality. I’ll have to reread that chapter and see if I can find the exact quotes I’m thinking of.

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I have been studying Objectivism for almost 2 years now, and there is still a major gap in my understanding about Objectivism’s solution to the mind-body problem.

In my learning of the mind-body problem here in college, the false alternative was presented that either one uses logic to determine that the mind does not exist but rather it is only certain physical events occurring in the brain; or that one is a mystic who attempts to posit this nonsensical, immaterial consciousness.

Even with my limited knowledge of Objectivism at the time, I believed that this was a false alternative. However, since that point, I have not quite understood exactly how Objectivists are able to provide a solution to the mind-body problem without positing some sort of mystical element.

What is the exact refutation of philosophers who claim that the mind is merely an interaction between a number of physical things?

I’ve also tried the same line of thought that AshRyan used when responding to my earlier post. It would seem that consciousness is something that emerges from the interaction between a physical existent (the brain) and reality. Thus, consciousness is essentially a relationship between the brain and reality. But if this is so, where does free will come in?

If anyone could give their thoughts on this issue, or suggest particular readings or audio recordings on this issue, I would greatly appreciate it.

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What could it possibly mean for the mind to just be an interaction of physical things? Consciousness is mental, not physical. It is an interaction, not between the brain and reality but between the self and reality, or man and reality. That probably doesn’t help.

Understanding why consciousness is axiomatic and irreducible is the first step here. You probably grasp this, but are having trouble integrating this with many other things you know. I definitely had problems with the mind-body dilemma and am still not fully clear on many aspects of it. It’s a ubiquitous error that manifests itself in countless ways. I empathize and sympathize. I studied Objectivism for about two years before I could even conceive of an alternative to my initial hangups on the issue.

I highly recommend Harry Binswanger’s The Metaphysics of Consciousness tapes on this subject.

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A quick request – if you don’t want to be referred to by your screenname, could you toss a quick signature at the ends of your posts? I’ve lost track of who’s who.

Anyway, RationalEgoist: your revised position is still hugely problematic. By denying causal efficacy between the mental and the physical, your position now amounts to epiphenomenalism – the idea that consciousness is real, that it results from physical objects, and that it’s totally irrelevant to everything. If the physical alone is a sufficient cause for your actions, then volition is a totally bizarre idea (you can choose, but you have to choose in accordance with what is physically determined, and *everything* is physically determined – i.e., you can’t choose.) Either that, or you just flat-out reject volition.

But volition is self-evident. Part of its self-evidence is that it is causally efficacious. You can’t look at yourself choosing to focus, for example, and say “Well, yeah, I chose to focus, but I didn’t cause myself to focus. That was the chemicals in my brain.”

Leibniz, I think, had an idea really similar to this: he thought that there was the mental and the physical, and one could make choices mentally, but it was just by the will of God that the physical corresponded to the mental.

On a reread, I might be getting the wrong idea from what you wrote. You might also mean, simply, that the mental is the physical understood from a different perspective. Lots of philosophers think that: the mind is the brain, seen from inside. But again, the same problem. It makes the mental distinct only insofar as it is a faculty of experience, and it can’t even explain *that*. It *certainly* can’t deal with volition.

Anyway, give it some more thought. If I can tell you what I think your basic problem is, I think it’s this. The mental and the physical are both *primaries*, in a certain epistemic sense. The history of materialism and idealism could be put this way: the materialists took the physical for granted, but not the mental, and tried to explain the mind in terms of the physical. (More often, they tried to deduce it.) The mind became a total puzzle to them, and the most consistent of them ended up as behaviorists, denying the mental altogether. The idealists did the opposite: they took the mind for granted (in the form of experience, sense-data, or whatever) and tried to deduce the physical from it. Again, it can’t be done; the most consistent of them, like Berkeley, ended up denying the physical – the rest either said it’s not knowable, or ended up confused in even weirder ways. The only way to avoid these traps is to realize that you can’t take one as primary over the other. (I mean this in a different sense than the primacy of existence, of course. Different issue.) Both the mental and the physical are givens. We perceive THINGS; WE PERCEIVE things. If you understand that both of those are unquestionable starting points, you can move on to question the specific nature of their workings and interactions, without falling into the trap that has thrown most of the history of philosophy into a top-to-bottom mind-body dichotomy.

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MinorityOfOne and Mattbateman, I thank you for your replies to my inquiry. I think you both identified that my main problem arises from a failure to understand the axiomatic nature of consciousness.

I agree that this is the source of my problem here. I simply do not see why volitional consciousness must be axiomatic.

MinorityOfOne, please keep in mind that there has been a large gap in time between my first post and my most recent. My recent position is that consciousness arises as an emergent property of the interaction between the brain and reality.

If consciousness is not an emergent property of the interaction between the brain and reality, how else can the existence of consciousness be explained? It does not seem to be sufficient to just say that consciousness is. Clearly, since human beings have not existed for all time, there must have been some point where consciousness arose out of some earlier physical state. Clearly, there must have been some point in human evolution where humans advanced from operating on a perceptual level only to the conceptual level.

I am thoroughly confused as to why consciousness is axiomatic as well as how to defeat the materialist argument (or the many variations).

Please keep in mind that I have read OPAR, and found it unsatisfying in terms of its ability to provide answers to these questions (as well as why the senses are valid, why human beings have free will, and some other small points).

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There’s a way that you can make emergentism make sense, but it isn’t the way it’s usually interpreted.

Consciousness (mental stuff) does arise (somehow) out of certain configuration of physical stuff and is dependent upon it to exist–no brain, no mind. But it is not reducable to the physical stuff, nor is just looking at necessary physical conditions of the brain under a microscope anything like looking at consciousness.

Physical and mental stuff are not just two sides of the same coin (unless you mean in the very broad sense that they are both two aspects of man). Neither is reducable to or explicable by the other.

Consciousness has causal efficacy. John Searle memorably describes what this would mean. Paraphrasing from memory, “This means that will must somehow be able to make molecules in the brain swerve from their paths.” This is startling, I know, but in another sense its not. You know that you can, with your consciousness, make your arm go up and down. It’s the same principle applied to the brain.

Epiphenomenalism denies causal efficacy. So if you cut it out of emergentism, then you do get somewhere, but not very fast.

Consciousness is mental and the brain is physical. They are certainly related to one another, and act on one another, but neither can be reduced to the other.

The materialist argument can be defeated like so: “Materialism is the idea that there are no ideas.”

(All of this is in The Metaphysics of Consciousness.)

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I simply do not see why volitional consciousness must be axiomatic.

Why would the material world have to be axiomatic?

I think we have a discrimination issue here: :slight_smile: You accept the possibility of material objects and their interactions, but don’t accept the possibility of spiritual “objects,” or conscious powers, which perform actions on material objects under their control.

BOTH of these are self-evident givens. Those who accept the possibility of the spiritual, but discount the material as something merely “conjured up” by the spiritual, fall into the primacy of consciousness trap. Those who accept the possibility of matter but “can’t imagine” the spiritual end up becoming materialists. But the fact that you can’t imagine something doesn’t mean that it’s impossible; it only means that your imagination rejects it because it’s unlike anything you have seen before.

Now, you don’t see your consciousness, but you’re very well aware it, so you might as well imagine it as possible! :wink:

Clearly, since human beings have not existed for all time, there must have been some point where consciousness arose out of some earlier physical state.

Yes. From what science has shown us so far, I would induce that a sufficiently complex structure of neurons results in the creation of a conscious power which has the actions of the neurons under its control to some extent.

Again, this is something that is difficult to “imagine,” given that the physical structures we assemble in our everyday lives continue to act as determined by the rules of physics, with no sign of being controlled by some conscious power. But remember that reality is not limited by what you can imagine.

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Capitalism Forever,

I am not claiming that the existence of consciousness does not make sense because it is “hard to imagine.” I am looking for a proof, a validation of the existence of consciousness, or a good explanation as to why it must be an axiom.

The reason why I accept that there is interaction between material objects is becuase of the fact that there is direct perceptual evidence for this being the case, along with leagues of scientific evidence as well. Where is this evidence for the existence of a mental entity that has the ability to cause certain physical events? When one says that, “You know that you can, with your consciousness, make your arm go up and down. It’s the same principle applied to the brain,” how does one know that it is some mental existent that is causing this physical action to occur?

Neither of you have given me a reason to conclude that there is a mental existent (consciousness) that has the ability to cause certain physical events to happen. Unless you can demonstrate that there is a causal connection between the two, doesn’t that view seem absurd?

I still fail to see how the existence of this mental entity, consciousness, is a self-evident fact.

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You know consciousness has efficacy because you directly experience it. You will your arm to go up and down. You’re conscious of this fact directly and immediately, as directly as you are conscious of physical entities. You don’t perceive consciousness, you experience it. That experience is what makes it self-evident.

EDIT: I thought of maybe a more helpful way to put this.

Take the position that consciousness is simply brain events considered from a different perspective. So what is going on when you perceive your keyboard in front of you? Well, physically, neurons are firing, glands are releasing hormones, etc.. But the same process considered from “inside” your head is the awareness of the keyboard.

This means that looked at one way, its a brain process, and looked at another way, its perception. So consciousness–in this case, consciousness of a keyboard–is just one way to look at a physical process.

But then what does “look at” mean here? What’s doing the looking? Well… consciousness. So consciousness is just a brain process… considered from the perspective of consciousness?

The problem is that there is no more evidence for consciousness beyond the fact that you are aware. And it can’t be reduced further than that either. The axiomatic nature of consciousness really shows itself when you try to define it or explain it like I did above. Just try to give a definition of consciousness for a while. (I mean consciousness in its widest sense, i.e., awareness.) It’s impossible. You can only come up with synonyms. Your awareness is irreducable and incontestable.

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I am not claiming that the existence of consciousness does not make sense because it is “hard to imagine.”  I am looking for a proof, a validation of the existence of consciousness, or a good explanation as to why it must be an axiom. 

The reason why I accept that there is interaction between material objects is becuase of the fact that there is direct perceptual evidence for this being the case, along with leagues of scientific evidence as well.

You accept the existence of a material world because there is direct perceptual evidence for it? Without first accepting consciousness as an axiom, that very statement is full of stolen concepts–it amounts to the following:

[Who?] [blanks] the existence of a material world because there is direct [blank] [blank] for it.

Your very statement relies entirely on the existence of consciousness. You accept the material world because you directly perceive it–perception being an act of consciousness. In other words, you accept the idea that existence exists–but are still having trouble with the idea that ideas (consciousness) exists (as part of existence).

But just as the existence of the external world is self-evident to you by direct perception, so is the existence of the external world self-evident to you by direct perception. In other words, your consciousness–i.e., your awareness–i.e., your perception–is just as self-evident to you as the fact that existence exists. You just have to “open your eyes.”

[edit] The particular nature of consciousness is then a very difficult issue to conceptualize–but its existence is self-evident and must be accepted before any further inquiry into its nature can be undertaken. (And while I’ve been talking only about “consciousness,” everything I’ve said actually applies specifically to volitional consciousness.) [/edit]

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Ash, thanks for the clarification. I agree that the existence of consciousness, as such, is an axiom. It is self-evident in any perception of existence. Perhaps I did not word my confusion in the best way possible. What I am confused about, is how we know that consciousness is a mental existent as opposed to being purely physical, and how we know that our consciousness is volitional as opposed to determined. Thanks.