Mind-Body Dualism

[gL.edu] This article gathers contributions by Christoph Ziegler, developed within the context of the Conceptual clarification about "Information, Knowledge and Philosophy", under the supervisión of J.M. Díaz Nafría.

Overview

Mind-body dualism is a philosophical concept, most famously put forward by french philosopher Renè Descartes, used to describe the apparent differences of immaterial (human) mind or conciousness and the material, spatial (human) body, and how they can't be one and the same entity. Thus it concludes that we humans must be made of two differing entities at once, hence dualism. It attempts to solve the mind-body problem, also called the mind-body split, which itself asks questions such as 'how do mental phenomena interact with the body?' or 'what is the self?'. The concept of duality of mind and body as seperat entities, is not only a claim of a lot of theologies/religious believes, but goes, in one form or another, back to the beginnings of philosophy.

The direct opposite of the so called 'Cartesian Dualism' is either a form of monism, whether it is: (i) a materialistic monism; or (ii) an idealistic one; or (iii) a more complex relation between these two entities.

These are some of the central theorems in the 'philosophy of mind', which revolves around the relationship of the mind to the physical world.

Historical Views

A depiction of the mind and body as sets with no intersection. They are two completely different entities and have no reliance on each other according to Descartes.

The earliest western example of the philosophical distinction between mind and body can be found by plato in his dialogue Phaedo, also known as On The Soul in which he tries to argue the human soul is an eternal, indestructible carrier of knowledge, reason, memory and ability, that lives inside a human body and gives it the gift of live.

On death the material body decays but the soul searches for a new 'host'. In the same Dialogue he also talks about how achieving true knowledge can be a challenging task.

René Descartes

René Descartes is often credited with 'inventing' or introducing the mind-body dualism, and while some philosophers before him already acknowledged the problem of interactions between mind and body, and who/what we fundemantally are, he set out to proof the dichotomy. To this day, he is the go to example for dualism, as he was one of the first proponents that didn't use the existence of god as a basis for the dichotomy. But rather tried to prove the existence of god using it, aswell as his 'radical doubt'.

For that reason, when talking about the duality of mind and body, the term 'cartesian duality' is used, named after Descartes himself. Descartes was quite radical in his stance on the dichotomy, and stays one of the most extreme examples of the seperation between mind and body, arguing they are completely distinct from one another and don't overlap in their definition aswell as that 'one could exist without the other'. Meaning a mind can exist without a body, which ties in with either the often religious concept of the soul being able to leave it's body for eternal paradise/damnation or to be reborn such as in eastern religions, or the concept of mind transfer/mind uploading if we are not bound to one physical body. As well as the concept of a body without a mind, which in modern interpretations can mean something along the lines of a 'philosophical Zombie' Another Synonym, of sorts, for his theorem is 'substance dualism', which puts an emphasis on the difference in 'substance' of physical and mental things, and how they together shape us.

For Descartes, the world famously consisted of two central substances which are fundamentally different:

• 'res cogitans'
• and 'res extensa'

which translated from his latin work Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641/1642) means either the 'thinking' or the 'extended' 'thing'/'matter'. His term 'res cogitans' encorporates all immaterial things, such as the human mind. Things that aren't in the grasp of physical objects, not reachable or visible, but instead are able to feel, to think, to reason, to imagine and to want. Whereas the 'res extensa' is defined by all spatial and material 'extensions'. It is the framework for science, maths and geometry, and defines our material body alone as mechanical automatons.

To proof all this, Descartes uses his famous foundation of Truth: cogito ergo sum (I think therefor I am), which he derives from radical doubt. In short, this process works by finding elemental truth, which he describes is hard, as our senses to receive information from the world can easily trick us. For instance, how can we tell a dream is 'false', if our perception tells us the experiences we are making are real. To circumvent this, Descartes proposes to doubt not only our surroundings/enviroment, and if they are real, i.e. really exist. But also doubts his own existence, as he can't tell if his body is an illusion/lie, e.g. his arm feeling heavy, or felling himself touching his own face could be a falsehood aswell. This leaves him at the conclusion that he can't doubt his own thinking, as this would mean he couldn't even begin to doubt it. Thus he proves his minds existence, and has found an elemental truth on which he can build his other theses.

Using this he claims he has found one substancial difference between mind and body already. The fact that his minds existence is a logial truth, whereas the same cannot be said about his material body, differentiates the two. He formulated this in Meditationes de prima philosophia, in qua Dei existentia et animae immortalitas demonstratur in mediation VI. The Existence of Material Things, and the Real Distinction between Mind and Body :

[O]n the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in so far as I am simply a thinking, non-extended thing [that is, a mind], and on the other hand I have a distinct idea of body, in so far as this is simply an extended, non-thinking thing. And accordingly, it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it (AT VII 78: CSM II 54).

Which he later revises in the same meditation:

[T]here is a great difference between the mind and the body, inasmuch as the body is by its very nature always divisible, while the mind is utterly indivisible. For when I consider the mind, or myself in so far as I am merely a thinking thing, I am unable to distinguish any parts within myself; I understand myself to be something quite single and complete….By contrast, there is no corporeal or extended thing that I can think of which in my thought I cannot easily divide into parts; and this very fact makes me understand that it is divisible. This one argument would be enough to show me that the mind is completely different from the body[...] (AT VII 86-87: CSM II 59).

Additionaly, he later goes on to deliver additional proofs, using the existence of god as well, which he also proofed in the same work.

Modern Views

Neuroscience

With the advancements in medecin and psychology, the mind-body problem seized to be a purely philosophical topic of discussion, and started to be debated interdisciplinary. With both sciences generally advocating for a physical explanation for the existence of human conciousness and the process of human thinking. Famous experiences can model human brain activity to concrete actions and motions.

Contemporary Philosophy

The mind-body problem is still to this day a philosphical point of debate, with new papers, books and arguments still being release every year, exploring the topic further. A famous proposed example of modern dualism was formulated by famous contemporary philosopher and mathematician Saul Kripke. In his 1980 Book Naming and Necessity he puts forward a substancially changed version of dualism compared to Descartes, which relies on the core of his book, names as a description of things.

References

Primary

• Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols., trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch and Anthony Kenny, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984-1991
• Plato: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus. Greek with translation by Harold N. Fowler. Loeb Classical Library 36. Harvard Univ. Press, 1914

Secondary

• Crane, Tim; Patterson, Sarah. History of the Mind-Body Problem. London Studies in the History of Philosophy, 2001
• Almog, J. What am I? Descartes and the Mind-Body Problem, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001,