The Mind-body Dualism And Human Experiences

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What is this, that I am experiencing right now as I type this? And what was it that I was experiencing the other night, when I could barely sleep, kept awake by my thoughts racing? What is it that is giving me these words that I am using right now? I know that we have called this “consciousness,” and I also know that my brain is a physical thing in my head, wherein neurons fire and supposedly generate this consciousness. But up until starting this class, I did not see any issues here. I was content with just accepting that I’ll never understand how my neurons turn into the person that I am, but evidently, there is a lot more to it than just that.

I absolutely have internal thought processes, but what are they? Are they an act of my soul, or are they neurons just firing in the way that they’re supposed to? Philosophers have spent centuries struggling with the question of how consciousness relates to the physical organ of the brain. In many ways, this is a struggle between our own intuition and the traditions that have come from it, and what we can physically prove to exist. I can think about the act of moving my own arm, I can actually move my arm, and my arm can move purely by reflex in reaction to something like pain. I can imagine conversations and arguments in my head, or attempt to predict what will happen in the future, but no matter how intense my imaginings are, what I imagined did not physically occur, right? Scientifically, neurons did fire to make that happen, but if someone were to look at my neurons firing, they would not be able to tell what I was imagining. More than that, they would never be able to put themselves directly into my shoes and experience exactly what I was experiencing. The first-person act of experiencing is known as qualia, and it seems to be something at odds with scientific progress. Our qualia is very different from the use of precise instruments to measure the forces of our world. Imagination and extrapolation seem almost inherent to the human experience, and to fight against that through pure materialism is going to lead to objection. We have to believe that there is something more, right? Many people do not fall squarely into the camp of pure dualism, the idea that the mental realm is made of different stuff than the physical realm, or pure materialism, the belief that all mental processes are simply the result of electrical and chemical reactions in one’s brain. At the moment, I know that I fall into some sort of materialist camp, but In my essay, I hope to gain a greater understanding of the many perspectives by which philosophers have viewed the world around them, and find which perspectives form my own worldview successfully.

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To begin, dualism is the perspective in which I have spent much of my life. Dualism requires a belief that the mind is not a physically occurring thing, but is its own entity, such as a soul. Intuitively, this is what makes the most sense to us. It explains why we feel as though we have minds, personhood, and consciousness distinct from our physical form. B.F. Skinner points out in “Behaviorism at Fifty” that its intuitiveness is depicted quite well in people’s beliefs in out-of-body experiences, having visions, and possession (1). We now have a much better concept of what dreams are, and of mental illness, but at the time, the idea that the mind or soul was a separate entity from anything physical made it very simple to assume that it could just leave the body. In a common theme, dualism itself seems to become less and less plausible as we learn more about the physical world. However, even without scientific progress, problems did become apparent. Princess Elizabeth, in correspondence with René Descartes pointed out one of these: it could not be easily explained how something non-physical would have a direct influence on the physical matter of the body. No such explanation for how this problem could be overcome has been presented. Other philosophers have attempted to justify this by claiming that God himself was coordinating this interaction, but this cannot be proven. With scientific research, it becomes even more clear how big a problem this is for dualism. Upon brain injury, drastic changes in behavior occur. Bertrand Russell states, “We all know that memory may be obliterated by an injury to the brain, that a virtuous person may be rendered vicious by encephalitis lethargica, and, that a clever child can be turned into an idiot by lack of iodine” (2). This being the case, it is hard to believe that the mind, our personalities, and our memories are non-physical. They can clearly be acted upon via physical things, which shows that dualism is flawed.

With dualism out of the question, we must turn to materialist theories, and admittedly, I have had a lot of trouble understanding the concepts behind materialist theories such as behaviorism or Mind-Body Identity Theory. I need to do more work to research exactly what the arguments for and against these theories are to fairly discuss them.

Functionalism is a materialist belief system that takes a vastly different approach to our existence. It claims that consciousness is equivalent to a theoretical program that our brain just happens to be running, and that other structures would be capable of running as well. Our brains themselves aren’t conscious, but they are capable of running the feature set that creates consciousness. Our brains run the feature set that gives us wants, desires, or response to external stimuli. With this in mind, it is not hard to imagine that a machine with enough complexity to, say, match our neuron count in terms of processing power, would certainly be able to run its own programmed consciousness. However, authors like Searle take issue with the idea that the mind can be reduced to a program. One criticism he brings up is that computer simulations do not create real events, and that in much the same way, a computer’s simulation of consciousness does not create real consciousness (3). However, to me, this greatly depends on the amount of shortcuts taken by the simulation, and how the simulation manifests itself. A “simulation” like the example that he gives of beer cans being programmed to identify and announce thirst, seems unnecessarily reductive of the concepts behind AI, when compared with the potential of a brain-scale system of simulated neurons that are actively taking in environmental information and giving of their own volition. On the other hand, it is clear that we have not yet created anything complex enough to successfully do such a thing. On top of that, it still leaves us with the question of how we are what we are, our subjective experience of existing.

One surviving argument against pure materialism is “What Mary Didn’t Know,” a thought experiment by Frank Jackson, wherein a woman named Mary is kept in a completely black and white environment with a television and a library of knowledge, and spends all of her time researching color. She understands all of the wavelengths, how colors interact, how color is perceived by the cones of the eyes and then interpreted by the brain, and every other conceivable piece of information about what color is. However, when she steps out of the room for the first time, she sees color for herself for the first time. The question is then posed, has she learned something new? This is intended to show that something has been missing from her knowledge up until that point, which is the qualia, or subjective experience of color. I agree with this premise, but I disagree with the idea that this must refute materialism. I do not believe that it is possible to physically convert qualia into another form of archival, someone can write all they want about their experience of visiting Paris, or about their experience of being blind, but no matter how many times I read and reread their depiction, I will not have experienced visiting Paris or being blind. This to me does not mean that qualia is not a physical thing that occurs in the brain. It simply means that the experience cannot be documented. Thomas Nagel discusses the disconnect between qualia and the physical neuron firings in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”. “…In discovering sound to be, in reality, a wave phenomenon in air or other media, we leave behind one viewpoint to take up another, and the auditory, human or animal viewpoint that we leave behind remains unreduced” (445). To me, this seems applicable to “What Mary Didn’t Know,” because it shows our inability to sufficiently document an experience without leaving several large aspects of that experience out. However, we do still experience things in their fullness. If there’s one thing capable of documenting our experiences, it is the human brain itself. Does that mean that there is something inherently different from our capabilities of experiencing something, versus our abilities to explain things? Is it purely a language limitation? Art could be claimed to be an attempt to document the fullness of qualia, but it tends to just induce new qualia in others. Listening to an album when I am bored with nothing to do tends to leave me with a rather bland experience, but listening to the same album after a wildly emotional event entirely recontextualizes that album for me.

It is clear that we cannot easily or intuitively reduce the human experience to physical reactions. I can’t say for sure that I subscribe entirely to materialist theories, because as much as I know objectively what scientists have determined to be the truth of our existence, it really does feel like there should be something more to it. Or perhaps, it could all just be an illusion, generated by the combination of our prior memories and experiences stored in our brains and the external input we receive constantly. I recognize that this paper in its current state is extremely flawed and lacking in substance, but I would like to visit a writing tutor and refine my own understanding of philosophy to make a more competent essay.

WORKS CITED

  1. From Skinner’s ‘Behaviorism at Fifty,’ in T.W. Wann, ed., Behaviorism and Phenomenology: Contrasting Bases for Modern Psychology. Copyright © 1964 by William Marsh, Rice University.
  2. Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), pp. 88 – 93.
  3. John R. Searle, ‘The Myth of the Computer,’ The New York Review of Books, April 29, 1982, pp. 3-5.
  4. From Philosophical Review, Vol. LXXXIII, No. 4 (October 1974), pp. 435-450.

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