Is there a Mind-Body problem? Any doubts about physicalism?

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It seems fairly clear to me that the mind is the product of physical processes in the brain.

The neurons and support cells of the central nervous system use a combination of ion control gates and neurotransmitters to manage charges called "action potentials" in networks of neurons. Some of these are specialized networks involved in moving, seeing, feeling, touching, listening, speaking, thinking and so on. The cumulative action of all those processing centers running in parallel is what we call "mind"

This perspective is a monistic physicalist model.

Some people want to believe in a ghost, spirit or soul that is completely different than the body. The ghost has some means of directing action in the flesh machine that is the body. This is the Cartesian Dualist model. Having seen people die and seen dead people up close, I understand how strongly it seems that a separate thing "left the body" when the person died and that experience of the difference between a person you know and the cadaver that they become on death, but this also makes sense if the situation is that the mind and person that previously animated the body was the effect of all those specialized neural networks working in concert.

The natural analogy that comes to my mind is that of a computer and software, but the CNS has nothing but volatile ram and a little bootstrap rom in the DNA. The mind is the software that runs from the moment there is enough a nervous system to support it up to death.

I don't understand why there is still any controversy around this, but I am not a student of philosophy.

I wondered if anyone here is anything other than a monistic physicalist and if so, why?

I would guess religious people of a certain type would favor cartesian dualism but I wondered if there was anything else to it?

I believe in the Diyochenian model of consciousness, which recognizes that the mind has its own existence independent of the brain and manifests into it, for physical interaction.
The reason why I believe is because of qualitative accounting, and that through a free rational account of consciousness, it seems clear that it holds qualities which do not arise from matter, but rather manifest in it.
Matter is the condensed produce of energy into the spatial temporal dimension. The qualities held in material objects come immaterial existing things, which manifest their qualities into them.
While the consciousness may have physical correlates, it holds essential qualities of intellect and personhood. This includes processes which are in their qualitative substance non-physical, and for a numbers of processes are referent to non-physical non-empirical matters. Proceeding from these matters, it seems clear that the qualitative origins of mental processes comes from a non-physical source.
Likewise, the individual holds within them personhood; the essential being, which is the qualitative moral, intellectual, and characteristic center of the individual. This personhood consists of non-material essential qualities, which can only arise as a manifestation of non-physical origins. Thus, the conclusion is made that the individual is not physical in origin, but arises from a non-physical personhood, which manifests itself into the homo sapien vessel, and consequently acquires consciousness.

I have not heard of this before and could find no reference on google. Is this a term of your own invention or did you hear it/learn it from someone?

In some ways, the model you are discussing reminds me of the monads posited by Leibniz. You also seem to be in the same territory as Karl Popper and his world 1/world 2/world 3 system.

Can you explain what you mean by "qualitative accounting" I picture a bunch of guys in suits with calculators and spreadsheets.

What processes do you believe are non-physical?

Medical issues often impact an individuals moral sense, intellectual abilities, emotional states, memory, attitudes and so on. This would seem to argue for a mind that emerges from the functioning of the central nervous system and that breaks down when the CNS is injured or under stress from illness. Does your system imagine that these physical systems are necessary to facilitate connection of the non-physical being with the physical body? Why is this deemed a better way of thinking of this than that the mind and person are epiphenomena of the electrochemical programs running in the physical system?

Would you consider it appropriate to class the Diyochenian model of consciousness as a form of neutral monism?

Thanks for your reply.

The main motivator for people to adhere to the mind-body dualism is that if there isn't one, all chances of any afterlife (heaven, limbo, reincarnation, fill in the blanks) are gone, period.
If the mind truly is a product of the chemical and physical processes of the brain, this means that death truly is the end, and there will be entirely nothing left; a scary thought.

If people are just inventing stuff to allow for an out, they could come up with ways to make it work.

For example, off the top of my head: there are alternate planes of reality. The material plane contains the matter and energy of the observable universe. In addition to this there is a plane of platonic ideals where essential forms and abstractions have an independent existence and in addition to the material and ideal there is a plane of information and knowledge where ideas that form in the minds of sentient beings in the material plane take on a permanent existence, along with the information that constitutes their identities as individuals.

I note that most systems that suggest some sort of continuity after death also involve a transformation so radical that the identity is only said to survive in a vague way. Buddhists, for example, don't believe that "you" come back in reincarnation, but rather a certain subtle fragment of you, carrying karmic bonds but in most ways not at all "you" in the identity of this lifetime, returns. Christians believe all sorts of contradictory things, but the discussion of marriage in heaven with the lady at the well made it pretty clear that whatever survives is very, very different than a human identity.

But it does make sense that anxiety about mortality would push people toward cartesian dualism. It just seems so arbitrary and unsupported by evidence.

Kind of surprised I'm seeing this post this late in the game.

I think what would initially push a lot of people out toward conviction that there's more going on than just neural activity would need to be experience - ie. theoretically, like you said, unless you experience something you can't explain you won't see a need for additional causal mechanisms and without that experience about all there is to go on is hearsay from other people which is shaky considering motivated reasoning and our proclivity toward optical illusions, misinterpreting what we see, etc.. We also live in a world where you see organized religion make up all kinds of things in a sort of ends-justify-the-means way that makes chicanery a very credible explanation in many cases.

Something I'd want to interject up front though - I don't necessarily think it's a dualism. To think of it that way really starts sounding like we're the proverbial 2-D flatland saying there's 2-D, then there's woo. I think the woo is much more integrated and natural, so much so that we barely ever see it in operation unless there's a significant hiccup of some type. Otherwise we'd have to admit that what we're starting with is patently absurd - ie. trying to merge two distinct asymmetric planes with links largely made of psychological neediness.

I don't know what kinds of things you've gone out and looked at but probably one of the most agreed upon oddities is with the Ganzfeld studies that included the four possible films a projector in one room or facility was watching, random chance being a probability of .25 and the results consistently averaging out at either .30 or .31 - something that Carol Watts (an associate of Susan Blackmore) indicated was of interest and worthy of further analysis. With that study it's not the 5-6% difference that's surprising people but the number of trials and the population size that it's persisted over.

Past that you have the group out at University of Virginia that's been doing a lot of work with near-death studies, research on children with past life memories, etc.. The UVA book 'Irreducible Mind' is probably a little dated by this point with how fast things are gaining momentum in this area (ie. Deepak-style quantum consciousness and NDE research) but it was a mid-2000's release where they went over their findings, hypotheses etc. and it sounds like they're still going ahead full steam. You also have Stuart Hameroff's Orch-OR which for a long time was getting shot down due the warmness and wetness of the human brain but we're consistently seeing other pieces of quantum biology, such as with photosynthesis in plants, showing that biological systems can and will use quantum effects in their processes - I don't know that this necessarily vets Hameroff and Penrose's theory but it puts it in the territory of being a worthwhile for hypothesis testing.

Another article I saw recently also suggested that a well-known geologist (Joe Kirschvink) performed a study at Cal Tech that seemed to verify magnetic reception in the human nervous system, not in a particularly robust state but enough to class ourselves with the rest of animal life that we know to have a sensory register of magnetic fields. As far as I know it's still pending replication but it sounds like the scientific community at large trusts the experimental design and that it's likely that information will be confirmed. Not a quantum-woo thing but it's another possible component for sensory perception.

When we come to understand a particular facet of nature we have a way of recovering it from the 'supernatural' and replacing it in the natural or positing it as part of our physical universe. From the other things I mentioned above I have a feeling we'll be pulling a lot of things across that barrier that have been in highly contentious/controversial territory for a while. That's very important to me on two fronts - a) it starts getting funding and b) the chicanery, fraud, and self-deception will increasingly get cooked out of it. Some of it may very well be consciousness reaching out much farther than we thought, some of it - in the case of magnetic reception - would be us registering or connecting with less direct environmental queues than we would have formerly recognized.

I'd also add that there's a lot that we're looking at on other levels - ie. self-organizing systems, the behavior of what are really molecular machines in living cells, and add to that we're seeing evidence of single-celled organisms learning which is a very difficult thing to do without neurons as we understand it.


In a lot of ways what I'm seeing in these areas makes me feel like it might be wise to look at physicalism, especially as the forces it's brought under it's jurisdiction become increasingly less 'physical', as more of a philosophic rebellion and reaction against items tagged as superstition in broader culture than an internally coherent philosophy that will be able to hold its ground as the state of human knowledge continues to progress. Your mileage on that of course may vary and it would be interesting to hear more from the convinced physicalists here about what in particular knocks this research off their radars, particularly if they have spent a lot of time looking into it.

The mind-body problem is definitely a thing, the problem is most materialists don't understand what the problem is. One can address the mind-body without going into dualism, by they still need to explain how you get from material to the mind, and most materialists just beat around the issue. For your example, you didn't even address the mind at all! The mind isn't the combination of iterations behind behavior(at least not as far as the mind-body problem is concerned), it's the subjective experience, the qualia, associated with the states of the body (which is NOT a synonym for the brain).

You also severely misinterpreted Cartesian dualism. That's not Cartesian dualism, that's just materialism with a pointless spirit element added, you're really using brain in the same manner as soul was traditionally used. In actual Cartesian dualism, matter is an extension of the spirit. The spirit isn't in the physical world, it just interacts with it, somehow (this is the area where Descartes actually got the criticism, failing to explain the bridge between spirit and matter). Liebniz's explanation was that they didn't actually interact, they were just in harmony, which does solve the problem, but it's kinda silly because in such a model the material world is utterly pointless. After all, we only know about the material world because we observe it, so if we aren't actually observing it it's just a meaningless abstract. It's possible to just get rid of the material world (idealism), but you can't rid of the subjective world. The proper objective of the materialist would be to show the subjective world is just an aspect of the material world rather than something separate, that's the distinction between materialism and dualism.

Anyway, as far as the mind-body problem is concerned I'm a monist, but not in manner which can be divided in materialism or idealism, the distinction between material and spiritual is ultimately arbitrary. So I'm a neutral monist.

Hmmm. I think you know very much more about this than I do and have spent more time thinking about it, so I suspect that I don't fully understand what you mean by mind.

My first thought on reading your first paragraph was that I did explain what I thought mind is and since you claim that explanation isn't there, you must not like it, not recognize it or reject it on grounds I don't see.

I think the mind is software, running on the neural networks of the CNS. It is mostly in the brain, but partly distributed throughout the body, because while many crucial functions of mind run in the CNS, the whole nervous system is involved in some processes contributing to mind.

It's going to be a while before we get a solid understanding of the way mind runs or is built up from the subsystems that support it, but advances in digital processing and sensing technology are now beginning to bring this within reach of researchers.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 1914001633

I think the experience we have accumulated of physical damage and unusual activity in the brain's networks (e.g., epilepsy and other types of seizure) taken together with the picture emerging from brain scanning, creates a powerful argument for the idea that mind really is an emergent phenomenon of the brain.

I don't think you can meaningfully talk about subjective experience without recognizing the role of memory in the maintenance of a sense of experience. The experience of the now is processed in one type of system that doesn't retain anything for more than about 15-20 minutes. After that, portions of the "now" sensorium get processed by the hippocampus into long term episodic memory. Facts and abstract information are stored in another system, semantic memory. Yet another system stores a kind of experiential memory based more in the motor system and pain perception system: implicit memory.

When a mind contemplates the world, it can't for the most part be accessing the fleeting memory of immediate experience, so it must be doing so in models of reality built from the long term memory systems: the sense of subjective experiene of which you speak are in that matrix of memory types.

When those memory systems are disrupted or destroyed, the mind changes. When those memories are lost, the mind is radically compromised.

I confess, I have only a very superficial understanding of this. I understand spirit in the emotional sense, the spirit of the age, team spirit. The other spirit idea though, I don't really get that. It seems like it's an unnecessary hypothesis. Saying matter is an extension of spirit makes no sense to me. Matter obviously is. Spirit, not so much--why suppose that it's there at all?



I suspect that is the way it is. The subjective world floats on neural networks and other entities in the material world.

I would enjoy reading an elaboration of this, were you inclined to write it.

It's not that I don't like your description of the mind, it's that whatever you are describing isn't what the mind is in the mind-body problem, it's the body. Defining mind as body doesn't solve the problem, it's just shuffling semantics around and covering up the actual problem. The real issue is you postulate that there are specialized networks involved in feeling and whatnot (which there certainly is), but then you don't do anything to postulate about HOW the networks are involved, how you get from the networks to the subjective feeling. And the mind isn't the the networks, it's what the networks are involved with. Saying it's software doesn't solve anything either, because software is just a pattern expressed in the hardware, it's not a mind. It should be noted that modern philosophy has moved the goal posts a bit from Descartes, because he placed too much emphasis on reason, which has now been shown to not be as important due to the advance of artificial intelligence, so the modern version of the problem focuses on qualia. If you want a good explanation of the mind-body problem in the context of modern neuroscience and philosophy, David Chalmers is probably the best place to look: https://www.ted.com/talks/david_chalmer ... sciousness

Anyway, I study psychology, emergence is just a semantic garbage word psychologists use that has no philosophical value whatsoever. Psychologists just use it to plug the philosophical holes in their theories because they are concerned with the pragmatics of the mind, not the philosophy. While there is evidence that cybernetic aspects of the mind as psychology defines it (psychology is concernced with mind and behavior, originally is was just mind which was similar to the philosophical definition of mind, but then behaviorism rose, and then mind was redefined in response to behaviorism) are emergent, that has nothing to do with the mind-body problem. All that stuff on memory says is that at least a good part of memory is part of the body rather than the mind, and it's experience as being part of the mind is just an illusion, does nothing to solve the actual mind-body problem.

in metaphysics, something is spiritual if it is not material. What exactly it means for something to be material, I don't exactly know, at some level I think it's pointless semantics, but it most coherent metaphysical systems there is a pretty hard line between the spiritual and the material, like with Plato's physical realm, and the realm of the abstract. Generally a key aspect of material is that it's exists at a point in space in time (which leads to the question if materialism is actually compatible with modern physics as it challenges traditional notions of time and space). The soul meanwhile is used in two different ways, either to refer to whatever animates the body (which could be the body itself), or to what gives the body subjective experience. In many languages such as Greek and Hebrew, the world for soul is the same as the word for breathe, reflecting the first definition of soul. The second definition was invented by the philosophers after it was clear things really aren't that simple, as it's the meaning most people use today, though many people make the mistake in assuming the soul has to be something spiritual or otherwise separate from the body. This often leads to ridiculous strawman arguments from materialists with a poor understanding of metaphysics, as well as actual ridiculous arguments from Christians with a poor understanding of both physics and religion. Finally, the term spirit is used both as a synonym for the soul, and for something which is spiritual in nature, which leads to some confusions.

The existence of matter is only obvious if you haven't taken the time to really think about how we know exists. Pretty much every epistemology agrees there is nothing obvious about the existence of matter, it's just taken for granted. Basically the only reason we know about matter is because we can observe it, but it theoretically could just be an illusion. Subjective experience, meanwhile, cannot be an illusion, because illusions can't exist without subjective experience. Now, for his proof Descartes used reason rather than subjective experience (he could not doubt his ability to doubt), but it leads to the same result. The spirit is what he used to explain the subjective experience (it needs to be noted that Descarte's philosophy was strongly shaped by Catholicism, which was strongly shaped by neo-platonic philosophy), but either way, you need SOMETHING to explain it.

I'm writing a big tumblr post on my general philosophy which I haven't finished yet (as it's written so far I think it more endorses idealism than physicism, but that isn't really what I believe), but as it relates to mind-body problem it's all in the metaphysics. I believe the fundamental nature of reality is something akin to monads (which I call spirits), but I take it in a very different direction from Liebnitz. Matter exists, but what it really is an abstraction as the result from how spirits interact with each other, the actual laws of physics (as opposed to the theoretical ones) are the rules for how spirits interact on the physics level (which is to say matter-energy-fields-whatever may be not be spirits themselves, but rather the result of the interaction of spirits in a regular way). The mind is also the result of the interaction of spirits and likely isn't a single spirit, but multiple together, and the physical structure of the brain plays a role in organizing the mind. So it's not correct to say the body arises from the mind or the mind for the body, but both are different ways in which spirits and matter are organized which can't entirely be separated as they both are made of the same thing, it's just different aspects of the same thing.