Mind And Body Essay Research Paper Much

Mind And Body Essay, Research Paper

Much of the intellectual history of psychology has

involved the attempt to come to grips with the problem

of mind and body and how they interact.

While the philosophical distinction between mind and

body can be traced back to the Greeks, it is due to

the influential work of Ren. Descartes, (written

around the 1630’s) that we owe the first systematic

account of the mind/body relationship. When Descartes’

friend and frequent correspondent, Marin Mersenne,

wrote to him of Galileo’s fate at the hands of the

Inquisition, Descartes immediately suppressed his own

treatise. As a result, the world’s first extended

essay on physiological psychology was published only

well after its author’s death. In this essay, he

proposed a mechanism for automatic reaction in

response to external events. According to his

proposal, external motions affect the peripheral ends

of the nerve fibrils, which in turn displace the

central ends. As the central ends are displaced, the

pattern of interfibrillar space is rearranged and the

flow of animal spirits is thereby directed into the

appropriate nerves. This is the reason he has been

credited with the founding of the reflex theory.

Descarte was the first to talk about mind/body

interactions, and thus had a great influence in later

psychologists and thinkers. He proposed that not only

body can influence mind, but that mind could also

affect body.

Years later, the work of Nicolas Malebranche was

probably the most influential provider of

occasionalism. Occasionalism deals with the

contradiction that if the nature of causality is such

that causes and effects must have a necessary

connection and be of a similar type, then mind/body

interactionism is unsound. He argued that both of

Descartes’ substances, mind and body, are causally

ineffective. His belief was that G’d is the one and

only true cause. There is no influence of mind on

body or of body on mind.

“In order to retain the notion of God as the one true

cause without sacrificing the idea of causality as

operative in both the mental and the physical spheres,

Benedictus de Spinoza abandoned Descartes’

two-substance view in favor of what has come to be

called double-aspect theory.” Double-aspect theories

are based on the notion that the mental and the

physical are simply different aspects of one and the

same substance. Nonetheless, he agreed with Descartes

that the world of consciousness and that of extension

are qualitatively separate. He believed that

substance, G’d, is the universal essence or nature of

everything that exists. In other words he believed

that mental incidents can determine only other mental

incidents, and physical motions can determine only

other physical motions, “mind and body nonetheless

exist in pre-established coordination, since the same

divine essence forms the connections within both

classes and cannot be self-contradictory.” These

dual-aspect theories go went through a resurgence

during the 19th century.

Another view introduced by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

was that of psychophysical parallelism, which holds on

to both the dualism of mind and body and the notion of

a regular correlation between mental and physical

events. This view, however, avoids any assumption of

an underlying mind/body connection. It believes that

mind and body are so different, that they cannot

affect one another. They do, however, recognize the

fact that every mental event is correlated with a

physical event.

During the 18th century, the problem of re-relating

mind and body arose. George Berkely talked about the

view of immaterialism in which “he denies even the

possibility of mindless material substance. For

something to exist for Berkeley it must either be

perceived or is the active mind doing the perceiving.

>From this perspective, there is no mind/body

distinction because what we think of as body is merely

the perception of mind. While Berkeley had few

contemporary adherents, immaterialism was to resurface

in the later 19th century in the guise of mind- stuff

theory.”

As the 19th century progressed, the problem of the

relationship between mind and brain became

increasingly present. This is palpable especially in

texts after 1860. To a large extent, this directly

reflected two major developments that converged to

impress philosophers and psychologists with the

centrality of the mind/brain problem. “The formal

beginning of psychology as a modern science came in

1879 when Wilhelm Wundt founded, in Leipzig, Germany,

the first laboratory devoted to experimental

psychology.” Toget

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