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The Mind-Body Problem, by Jonathan Westphal: Westphal outlines the history of the mind-body problem, beginning with Descartes. He describes mind-body dualism [...] he also examines physicalist theories of mind; antimaterialism, which proposes limits to physicalism and introduces the idea of qualia; and scientific theories of consciousness. Finally, Westphal examines the largely forgotten neutral monist theories of mind and body, held by Ernst Mach, William James, and Bertrand Russell, which attempt neither to extract mind from matter nor to dissolve matter into mind. Westphal proposes his own version of neutral monism. This version is unique among neutral monist theories in offering an account of mind-body interaction.

This article is adapted from Jonathan Westphal's book ... part of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/disco...y-problem/

EXCERPT (Westphal): . . . It’s a mystery. That mystery is the mind-body problem. Our mind-body problem is not just a difficulty about how the mind and body are related and how they affect one another. It is also a difficulty about how they can be related and how they can affect one another. Their characteristic properties are very different, like oil and water, which simply won’t mix, given what they are.

There is a very common view which states that the French philosopher René Descartes discovered, or invented, this problem in the 17th century. According to Descartes, matter is essentially spatial, and it has the characteristic properties of linear dimensionality. [...] What is characteristic of a mind, Descartes claims, is that it is conscious, not that it has shape or consists of physical matter. Unlike the brain, which has physical characteristics and occupies space, it does not seem to make sense to attach spatial descriptions to it.

[...] The difficulty, however, is not merely that mind and body are different. It is that they are different in such a way that their interaction is impossible because it involves a contradiction. It is the nature of bodies to be in space, and the nature of minds not to be in space, Descartes claims. For the two to interact, what is not in space must act on what is in space. Action on a body takes place at a position in space, however, where the body is. Apparently Descartes did not see this problem. It was, however, clearly stated by two of his critics, the philosophers Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and Pierre Gassendi. They pointed out that if the soul is to affect the body, it must make contact with the body, and to do that it must be in space and have extension. In that case, the soul is physical, by Descartes’s own criterion.

[...] Though Descartes was no doubt right that very different kinds of things can interact with one another, he was not right in his account of how such different things as mind and body do in fact interact.

[...] We have inherited the sharp distinction between mind and body, though not exactly in Descartes’s form, but we have not inherited Descartes’s solution to the mind-body problem. So we are left with the problem, minus a solution. We see that the experiences we have, such as experiences of color, are indeed very different from the electromagnetic radiation that ultimately produces them, or from the activity of the neurons in the brain. We are bound to wonder how the uncolored radiation can produce the color, even if its effects can be followed as far as the neurons in the visual cortex. In other words, we make a sharp distinction between physics and physiology on the one hand, and psychology on the other, without a principled way to connect them. Physics consists of a set of concepts that includes mass, velocity, electron, wave, and so on, but does not include the concepts red, yellow, black, and the like. Physiology includes the concepts neuron, glial cell, visual cortex, and so on, but does not include the concept of color. In the framework of current scientific theory, “red” is a psychological term, not a physical one. Then our problem can be very generally described as the difficulty of describing the relationship between the physical and the psychological, since, as Princess Elisabeth and Gassendi realized, they possess no common relating terms.

Was there really no mind-body problem before Descartes and his debate with his critics in 1641? Of course, long before Descartes, philosophers and religious thinkers had spoken about the body and the mind or soul, and their relationship. [...] Something important clearly had changed in our intellectual orientation during the mid-17th century. Mechanical explanations had become the order of the day, such as Descartes’s balloonist explanation of the nervous system, and these explanations left unanswered the question of what should be said about the human mind and human consciousness from the physical and mechanical point of view. (MORE, detailed elaboration)
I could be called an interactive dualist. I believe mind and matter are two irreducibles, both existing absolutely. But there is a third emergent medium thru which they interact with each other: namely, energy. Energy in my sense is the dynamic agent uniting mind and matter into one being. It's very taoist in a way--the spin of the wheel of opposites facilitating unity into a third higher state of being. In human terms, consciousness dialectically fused with the body equals the third transcendental state called soul.
I would philosophically agree with neutral monism, that both the mental and the physical share a common source, but in practical application, mind-body dualism cannot really be ignored.
(Aug 11, 2019 07:27 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]I could be called an interactive dualist. I believe mind and matter are two irreducibles, both existing absolutely. But there is a third emergent medium thru which they interact with each other: namely, energy. Energy in my sense is the dynamic agent uniting mind and matter into one being. It's very taoist in a way--the spin of the wheel of opposites facilitating unity into a third higher state of being. In human terms, consciousness dialectically fused with the body equals the third transcendental state called soul.


Today or this week I might tend toward a Leibniz-ian like route of experiences being synchronized with NCCs in the brain at a level prior in rank to both forms of representation (phenomenal appearances and physical models). But I don't rule out a wholly brute coordination between the two either. Just as objects/happenings in a realistically behaving CGI cartoon can behave in a predictable fashion as if they're literally interacting with each other (or one construed as the cause of the other). "Lawfulness" is just what a lengthy cartoon sequence (planted on traditional film) has built into it without any external "metaphysical stratum" providing the regulation for events as it either "plays" or extends statically across its frames.

Despite the claim about mind as derived from Descartes, manifestation actually has internal spatial properties to it -- that's what our concepts about space were abstracted from to begin with. Even when it comes to "sound" in a qualitative context, direction and distance can be inferred from those auditory presentations.

Where conscious "showings" do lack spatial form is when one tries to publicly find them in the brain. Instead there are only the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs), which are communicated between experts as descriptions, images, structural mappings, or measurements that do not resemble anything like what we privately experience.

That's also why (at least in a non-compromised physicalist approach) manifestations would have no explanatory role or influence upon the body. It is instead those NCCs that would make the body verbally think, behave, or vocally report that it is having experiences. Manifestation is causally impotent or superfluous, and accordingly since it cannot affect the brain and other "material entities" of the public world, it shouldn't exist in the catalog of physical affairs.

To further clarify this: Imagine that robots were what conducted science rather than humans, and that the former are philosophical zombies. From their POV, people talking about their "experiences" is pretty much akin to humans clucking about gods or supernatural agencies. Make-believe. The robots can't detect anything in our brains that corresponds to "manifestations". Only the processing of sensory information, the physiological responses and behaviors stemming from that, and again the neural activity that causes us to personally and overtly engage in the myth or pretense of having phenomenal consciousness.

Switching back to the actual scenario, where scientists and philosophers are people rather than robots... Despite their senses and internal thoughts exhibiting manifested content (it's just "given", one doesn't have to infer or speculate about about such)... Advocates of materialism inevitably drift toward the extreme of eliminating phenomenal consciousness, as did their robot counterparts above much more speedily. Because the materialists' commitment to physical models of the world comes first, not their own qualitative perceptions. The latter are deemed an "illusion", even though the meaning of illusion normally entails an experience, manifestation, or presentation of some mode which is merely interpreted incorrectly.

There are physicalist alternatives to eliminativism, but deeper exploration into them usually exposes them as dualism in disguise, with similar traditional problems. Thus, eliminativism is ironically being more pure or true to a materialism/physicalism orientation (whatever label). Despite the appearance to most of the population that eliminativists possibly chart as insane (the majority of us who accept or believe that we are not imagining a "not even nothingness" as "something").