The MindBody Duality

1
The Mind-Body Duality

• Source
• Robert H. Wozniak
• http//serendip.brynmawr.edu/Mind/Descartes.html

2
Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
3
Mind-Body Dualism

• Descartes -- The rational mind connects with the
  animal body at the pineal gland. Thus, mind
  affects body and body affects mind. Animals have
  no minds.
• We now know the pineal gland does something else,
  but
• Is there a mind or soul independent of the
  brain?

4
17th Century Philosophy (1600s)

• Causes and effects must be of similar types
• Physical cause leads to physical effect.
• God is the only true cause Malebranche
• Spinozas double aspect theory mind and body
  are both aspects of God in preestablished
  coordination.
• Leibnitzs psychophysical parallelism causation
  is rejected, coordination remains.

5
18th Century Philosophy (1700s)

• All is mind vs. all is body.
• Berkeleys Immaterialism There is no body
  because all matter is perceived by the mind and
  cant be known apart from it.
• Materialism there is no mind, only matter.
  Mental events dont exist.
• La Mettrie, Lhomme machine.
• States of the soul depend upon states of the body.

6
19th Century Philosophy (1800s)

• Localization of cerebral function showed that the
  brain is the organ of the mind.
• Mental states were shown to affect the body.
• Trauma, mesmeric trance, mental suggestion.
• Huxleys Epiphenomenalism
• Mental states have no causal efficacy, like paint
  on a stone (neurophysiology is the stone, mind is
  the paint).
• We are conscious automata.

7
Interactionism

• Carpenter mind and brain interact
• Light produces a change in nerves in the brain
  that results in mental sensation of seeing.
• Desire to move is translated into commands to the
  nerves that move muscles in voluntary motion.
• There exist circuits between mental and physical
  activity.
• How this is accomplished is unknown.

8
Dual-Aspect Monism

• Lewes mental and physical processes are two
  aspects of the same psychophysical event.
• Mind is subjective while body is objective.
• Terms used to describe the two are not
  inter-translatable.
• Lewes still provides the best argument for why
  psychology cannot be replaced by neuroscience.

9
Mind-Stuff Theory

• Higher properties of mind are compounded from
  mental elements (pieces of mind-stuff).
• When molecules come together at a level of
  complexity sufficient to form a brain and nervous
  system, correlative mind-stuff forms
  consciousness.

10
James Idea of Mind-Stuff
11
William James

• James adopted a pragmatic empirical parallelism
  of the sort many psychologists still support.
• The "simplest psycho-physic formula is a "blank
  unmediated correspondence, term for term, of the
  succession of states of consciousness with the
  succession of total brain processes ..."
• Principles of Psychology, p. 182

12
Ongoing Controversy

• We still do not know how mind emerges from
  body.
• The nature of the relationship between specific
  mental states and the neural substrate is still
  not understood.
• Those debating mind-body today largely express
  ideas that are versions of the philosophical
  arguments proposed over the past 250 years.

13
Interview with Rodney Brooks

• Human as machine, machine as human
  http//www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/show.html
• http//news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/cta/progs/02/hardtal
  k/brooks19aug.ram