What Is The Relationship Between The Mind

And The Body. Essay, Research Paper

The

relationship between the mind and the body is one of the philosophical problems

that has never been adequately answered. The functioning of the mind remains,

for the most part, a mystery, and its precise nature and origins are still

matters of controversy. The

essential question regarding the relationship is simple to explain. How does my

physical body, composed of more or less the same organs[1]

as the person next to me correspond to my mental processes and thoughts, which

I do not have in common with him. Two main streams of thought on this

relationship have emerged: dualism and monism. Dualism was the approach

favoured by Descartes, and has at its core the indivisibility of the soul and

the clear distinction between the soul (of which the mind is a part) and the

body. A monistic approach to the mind/body problem is the belief that they are

not distinct, and that the mind and the body are part of the same thing. This

usually takes a materialistic form-the mind is a physical substance in the same

way the heart or lungs are. It

is worth pointing out at this stage that dualists are unlikely to consider the

mind/body problem in the sense that a corpse, being a body devoid of a mind, is

proof that the two are distinct entities. Clearly, this is irrelevant:

dualists, when referring to a body, are basing their arguments on a living one.

What happens to the mind after the living body dies is another issue

altogether. A central tenement of Descartes. philosophy is the view that the

mind/soul is immortal . although it exists on earth inside a body, it is

released after death to the next world. A

dualist, like Descartes, is of the opinion that the physical body, which the

outside world sees, occupies space and is governed by the laws of physics as

much any other physical entity is. The mind, on the other hand, does not

inhabit space, is therefore not governed by the usual natural laws, and can

only be .seen. by itself. Descartes, when considering the relationship, did not

think it was the same kind of relationship as .a pilot in a ship., implying

that the mind does not merely observe physical damage to the body, in the way a

ship.s captain would, but it experiences it itself. The two are connected

through some system designed to do this. Descartes himself considered that the

two entities were connected through the pineal gland, which sent and received

messages to/from the body (qv). If this is the case, then one cannot consider a

mind to both be an entirely separate entity to the body, and not be merely like

the pilot. Furthermore, Descartes. view is open to the criticism which was

elegantly expressed by Ryle when he referred to it as .the ghost in the

machine.. He claimed that it suggests there is a complex visible system called

the physical body which has as an engine an invisible complex called the mind,

which takes on a spiritual form, ever-present inside the body. Indeed, Ryle is

of the opinion that this form of Cartesian dualism is a category mistake, the

meaning of which is explained by a simile with a tourist visiting Oxford,

seeing the colleges and the libraries, and then asking where the university is.

This is to say that Ryle considers the treatment by Cartesian dualists of

mental events as separate to the other aspects of the body, rather than seeing

them as just one part of the processes of the human. There is thus no

categorical difference between mental processes and physical ones. Even

so, Ryle.s criticism does not explain why the mind and its consciousness

actually occur. The chemical reactions, biological operations, and physical

operations of the various components of the body are unlikely to create the

mind as if it were a side effect. This would lead one to a discussion of

whether free will could exist, and Ryle does not appear to be an advocate of

determinism. However, if the immortality of the soul is discounted, then Ryle.s

position becomes more tenable. The mind can thus be considered to be a separate

part of the body; one which inhabits the brain. Certainly, if the mind/soul

dies with the body, it requires the body to think (for example, a constant

supply of oxygen to the brain and so on). This interpretation, though, is still

likely to degenerate into determinism, as any consideration of the mind being a

physical object will. The

relationship between the mind and the body is at its most confusing when the

issue of sensations is considered. Descartes considers the sense of hunger he

gets when his stomach demands food: why, he asks himself, does a feeling of the

stomach tightening indicate this to him. In the Meditations, Descartes

tries to understand the relationship by suggesting that the nerves transmit the

signals to the mind via the pineal gland. He describes the nerves as acting in