The Mind-Body Dualism Concept - Essay Example

• Substance Dualism: This was Descartes's theory that there are two basic types of substance—mental, which cannot have a physical existence, and material, which cannot think.  • Property Dualism: This view asserts that there is only one kind of substance –physical, but there are two kinds of properties—physical and mental, and that mental properties such as thoughts and emotions exist in some physical substance like the brain.

• Predicate Dualism: This theory states that mental predicates are essential for describing things and cannot be reduced to physical predicates without suitable connecting laws.   Relevance of Mind/Body Dualism Ideas on mind/body dualism have been around for a long time, with great philosophers like Plato and Aristotle having views about a “soul” bearing intelligence and wisdom. They believed that someone’s intelligence could not be explained in terms of their physical body.

 Plato’s theory of Forms states that since Forms make the world intelligible, hence the mind or intellect must be a nonphysical entity. In this way, this theory laid the foundation for Descartes’ substance dualism. However, Aristotle revised this theory, discarding the idea of the independent existence of forms in concrete entities. He didn’t believe that intellect could be something material. Over the years, after several modifications, modern Catholics believe in the inseparability of body, mind, and soul, while some protestants say that only the immaterial soul goes to heaven, not the physical body.

Modern Science accepts the view that only the physical, or measurable, is real, while all mental states and processes are biological. Nevertheless, some dualism-based thinking persists in modern biological studies. According to the American Journal of Psychiatry (May ’99), functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging raises questions about the relation between brain state and its manifestation in behavior, thereby getting relevant to Descartes’ mind/body dualism. Hence, mind/body dualism persists even today, though in a latent state.

Subjective Argument for Mind/body dualism Philosophers of mind believe that mental events have subjective aspects called qualia, which seem difficult to reduce to anything physical. Frank Jackson formed his Knowledge Argument based on a thought experiment called Mary’s Room, wherein he asks us to consider a neuroscientist Mary, who is born and brought up completely in a black and white room. She collects data on the nature of colors on her black-and-white computer monitor and knows all about the physical aspects of colors. On leaving the room, she will learn what it is like to see these colors, this knowledge being non-physical. It is practically impossible to reduce this sensation to something physical.

In the twentieth century, this belief was questioned strongly for violating the heuristic principle of Science—causal closure of the physical world. If something non-physical causes a physical event, the law of conservation of energy and the basic laws of physics are violated. There is a lack of explanation as to how something without any physical properties has physical effects, and where and how the material and immaterial interact.

Argument from Brain Damage: It has been scientifically observed that different parts of the brain have certain specific functions, and any physical damage caused due to disease, drugs, or accidents to a particular area affects the properties and functions associated with that area. Dualism fails to explain why a brain injury causes damage to mental properties if the mind and brain are completely separate entities. Several modern experiments have been conducted on animals like monkeys under controlled conditions, where certain parts of their brains are damaged or manipulated repeatedly, and every time the change in the property associated with that part of the brain is the same. Hence neuroscientists have ascertained a link between the brain and the mind’s properties.

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