The Mind-Body Problem.

The Mind-Body Problem.

The world we perceive seems to be divided into two: one being the mental formations such as pain or pleasure and the other – physical world around us. We view objects such as pencils, mountains, and other people as separate from us and yet forming an experience in our consciousness. The world is necessarily perceived subjectively and while we do seem to find ourselves in a material world outside of us, we cannot experience it objectively and thus can only rely on interpretations of our mind. Our own body is curiously perceived as somehow separate, being part of the physical world and yet intimately connected to our mind. We feel as if our minds are imprisoned in the head of our bodies and forced to experience everything the body comes to contact with through its senses. We look in the mirror and find ourselves asking “what am I?”. We see the body reflecting back to our consciousness but is it the whole picture? What is the connection between the mental experiences of the mind and the body of the physical world? That is what we call the mind-body problem.

The are a number of solutions offered by philosophers through the years but in the face of modern science many are negated. The few that still hold ground is a type identity theory favoring the materialist approach and qualia theory attempting to defend dualism. Type identity theory states that the mind is the body/brain, meaning that the mind states are identical to the brain states and in fact are the brain states. How that comes to being is not entirely known but neurology had offered us a number of undeniable insights into the inner nature of the brain/mind. Qualia on the other hand attempts to disclaim the idea that physical processes could account for what we call subjective experience and consciousness. While Qualia argument has a good point that I will describe in greater detail later in the essay, I believe that type identity theory as of today is the most logical solution.

As an argument for my thesis, namely the type identity theory – I offer the following premises:

1. If the brain state is identical to mind state, then by changing the brain state, the mind state should change too.
2. Change in the brain state does in fact change the mind state.

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C. Type Identity Theory is true.

What I mean by changing the brain state in this argument falls under two categories:

1. Brain damage that changes the physical composition of the brain.
2. Psychoactive drugs that change the chemical composition.

To make it more clear the argument is as follows:

-If the brain parts are(identical) the mind parts then by removing a certain brain part responsible for X, the X in the mind should also disappear.

-If one of the ways the brain works is through chemistry then by changing the chemical composition through psychoactive drugs, mental experience should change too.

Of course we cannot directly experience that the person whose brain was damaged or who took psychoactive drugs did in fact experience a change in his mind but we can have a behaviorist argument by observing the changes in behavior of a person or him describing his experience and seeing if the changes took place. One example I offer to support my premises is the fact that people who experience stroke often loose ability to speak, experiencing aphasia. That can be easily explained through neurology because the part of the brain that is often damaged Is the part that is responsible for speech thus supporting my premise by showing that the ability that was lost was identical to the brain part damaged. Another famous medical case I want to use as an example is a case of Phineas P. Gage. The details are not important but the essence of the story is that Gage’s frontal lobes were damaged as a result of accident at work and as a result changed his character dramatically. He was a religious, what we call “good man” before the accident and right after the accident suddenly stopped going to church, started doing drugs and explored the “sinful” pleasures such as gambling and prostitution. To a neurologist it is not a surprise because the frontal lobes of the brain are responsible for inhibition and it was only natural that the man would be less able to control himself after suffering the damage, thus supporting my thesis. Now I also want to bring up numerous drugs out there that are known to change perception of the world or any other mind state through chemically influencing the brain. Speed, LSD, DMT, Prozac just to name a few all can make you suddenly happy or sad, see something that was not there before or not see something that was always there, loose the self or feel like you are everything at the same time. Further there are mental disorders such as split personality disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar that are known to be caused be chemical imbalances and can be fixed by certain drugs that further prove my point. The list of known facts that support type identity theory is endless.

Qualia argument states that the fact that we experience cannot be reduced to electro-chemical neurological processes. It states that the way everything feels is a sign of something separate from the brain.

Here are a number of possible objections and my defensive arguments:

O. While the brain states influence what you experience it doesn’t change that fact that there is an experiencer(an observer).

D. The ability to observe, the consciousness, the qualia is a faculty of the brain, a byproduct of the complexity of the brain. Certain brain damages such as frontal lobotomy seem to make people loose that ability.

O. The atoms, the chemicals and any of the particulars that the brain is composed of are only related physically and do not posses qualities such as consciousness and feelings. If the particulars do not posses these qualities, how does the whole produce them?

D. While the science today cannot explain that and it remains a great mystery – it is still more likely that it does in fact happen, namely that consciousness and qualia appear as a result of complexity of interactions of particulars. The science might be able to explain it later on.

O. How do you know that the mind(the thought) is not what causes the chemical change in the brain?

D. The thought IS the chemical process and the ability to think IS a faculty of the brain and can be also reduced to chemical processes. Thinking cannot go against chemical processes. For example if I stimulate a certain part of your brain, you will experience whatever that part of the brain activates and no thinking will change that. A thought can be induced and the ability to think can be removed. Thinking is also easily influenced by stimuli, such thoughts of food will appear when hungry and seeing food. All these facts indirectly point to likeliness of type identity theory.

I will admit that we cannot know for certain what the truth of this matter is but the evidence so far seems to make type identity theory much likelier to be the truth with the help of Ockham’s razor.

Having said all that I think that it is important not to devaluate our human qualities to just chemical processes. Yes it may be true that that is in fact what they are but that doesn’t change the fact that we experience, have emotions and fall in love. Phenomenology must not be ignored. While we might be able to point to a few chemicals and say “ha-ha this is what you call love!” but that would be ignoring a 400 pound gorilla in the room, namely the vast spectrum of subjective experience.