Analysis of Mind Body Problem - Research Paper Example

Mind Body Problem Evolution of Mind- Body Problem ‘Metaphysics’ by Aristotle has been ranked on the top, amongst books of all time, with respect to the attention that has been given to this book throughout in the history. However this book is considered to be the most difficult too, to understand. During eleventh century Muslim philosopher and physician Ibn-e-Sina, confessed by saying that he tried to read the Metaphysics, but could not understand its contents and was puzzled by the writer's objective, he confessed that he tried several times, and learnt the text by heart but could not understand what author wanted to say and mean. In his autobiography, Ibn-e- Sina said that he found a solution to this riddle in a discourse of Al-Farabi, and then he did finally go on to achieve a satisfactory understanding. But in the twentieth century Sir David Ross, the great English commentator and Aristotelian scholar, still writes of "this desperately difficult work," and most of us will agree with him. The Metaphysics is a supreme challenge to our intellects. It is a challenge to all sorts of scholars: philologists, historians, philosophers, and others. It is a challenge in its details and it is a challenge as a whole. What do the details mean, and how do they fit into the whole? Those who hold the affirmative seem to have the better of it, but what the mind is, is altogether another question, to which the answers are much less certain. Since the object of metaphysics is mental, here is precisely the root of the difficulty: what is the mind, and what is its relation to everything else, to body? This is, as a matter of historical fact, how metaphysics and the Metaphysics came into existence: as arguments over Ideas, over what they were. Every reader of philosophy knows this much about Plato and Aristotle. What has been less clear is that the origin of this question, and of metaphysics, goes back a step further than this. It goes back to Parmenides, two generations before Plato, three before Aristotle. Parmenides' pronouncements about the unity of all being are famous. His "Being" ("estin," is) was the first recorded tenuous hold upon an abstraction. It is impossible now to confirm just how clearly he understood what he was doing, and it is plain that those who followed him did not. Generally Parmenides has always been understood to have meant that the whole universe is one rigid undifferentiated sphere in which nothing moves. Of course everyone knows that this is not so, and flatter ourselves for our perspicacity so superior to Parmenides', but one might wonder at the perspicacity in attributing such an absurdity to him. How could he have held such a doctrine? It might occur to us that he didn't, that he was after a quite different objective. He was probing history's first self-conscious abstraction, the abstract notion of "Being," pure "Being," not a being, not some being, not even all beings, just "Being." Thus philosophers were launched on the pursuit of problems of Being and abstraction, Ideas, Forms; form and matter; mind and body; what today people call the ‘Mind-Body Problem’. So this is called metaphysics, and this is a dilemma that has never been resolved to everyone's fulfilment. Plato openly admitted that. At the same time he too could have been misunderstood in more or less the similar way that Parmenides was. His Ideas were hypostasized too. In the first place, his dialogue, the Parmenides, was terribly difficult, and it was used in ways that he hardly seems to have had in mind, first by the Neo-Platonist, later by others. Then, secondly, the same thing happened to his Ideas (Forms) as had happened to Parmenides' Being. What Gives Rise to the Mind-Body Problem? Mental states are usually about something, that is, they have intentionality. For example, one may have a belief about something in the material world, say, that some left the oven on at home this morning. This belief could be false even though it points towards a particular object in the world and people’s beliefs can even point towards objects that do not exist, for example one may believe that John Major's daughter is an actress even if it turns out that John Major doesn't have a daughter. Now one might say that objects in the world can have intentionality in the same way to the way that one’s mental states have intentionality. One may say that rat poison has the intentionality to kill rats. But it doesn't have this intentionality outside of the way that people think about rat poison because of what someone has (again, intentionally) designed it for. The actual substance itself has no such thing as intentionality because it that is all it is, a substance, and it could easily fail to poison a rat that had become immune to it and it could just as easily kill something other than a rat. The subjective character of experience, consciousness, is another problem. For example, someone might ask what it is like to be a bat. This means that there must be something that it is like to be a bat, but what is this something? Because of the subjective character of consciousness, it is impossible to explain it in terms of the objective world; you have to experience it to know what it is like. (Thorne and Henley, 2007) Different Approaches towards Meta Physics There are many ways to approach the Metaphysics. There is for example the genetic approach of Werner Jaeger. How was the text composed and assembled, and how does it represent the stages of Aristotle's growth, his progress from being Plato's pupil to being an independent thinker and rival. People’s approach here is different. People consider Aristotle as one whole person, his platonism not as something shucked off at a certain age but as an enduring part of his personality. Thus also the Metaphysics is one whole, its evolution notwithstanding. The earlier parts of such a life and such a text are considered as integrated into the final product. At the ends of our lives you and I are what our whole lives have made us. So too with the Metaphysics. However it grew, what does it all signify as a whole? What conflicts, what contradictions does it conceal? What do they exactly signify? One might first ask themselves, why is this text so difficult? Of course the problems of language and historiography and textual criticism contribute to the difficulty still, in spite of the progress that has been made in identifying and solving these. But there is another, far deeper difficulty, embedded in the very nature of the subject itself. Whether or not that was the original reason for adopting the name, it has indeed become its meaning, denoting that aspect of reality that "`the feebleness of our spirit forces s to approach after the study of physical reality'" (Moraux, 2005). Proposed Solution to Mind Body Problem The mind and body problem is an elementary philosophical dilemma that even the supreme thinkers have pondered right through the history, but still have yet to offer a sufficient solution for. The importance of solving the mind body problem is crucial. Firstly, because if someone has to find an answer, the effect it will have on individual’s perspective of reality would be analogous to the collapse of the Newtonian world of physics, in the face of Einstein's relativistic world. Doors that were previously locked on philosophical issues such as artificial intelligence, free will, and immortality would be opened. This would also apply to issues in other academic fields such as theology, psychology, and cognitive science. Also, based on the solution one could conceive of another realm of academic study, which previous to the solution, was unconceivable. However, in spite of the great rewards that will come from solving the mind/body problem, one must come to the sad realization that no one have yet solved it; but thankfully, much progress has already been made. Functionalism is one of the major proposals that have been offered as solutions to the mind/body problem. This approach was developed in the United States around the 1800s. "It was an approach to psychology that focused on the purpose of consciousness." (Davis and Palladio, 2006) Basically they wanted to see how people use certain information to adapt to their environment. Functionalism and functionalist reached their peak around 1906. Over the course of all the work that has been done, two major schools of thought have been developed, which are dualism, and monism (specifically materialism). Dualism, which was founded by Rene Descartes, and outlined in his Meditations, is based on the fundamental claim that the mind is a metaphysical aspect, and thus cannot be described in a material sense; whereas, the body can. This implies their conclusion that the mind and brain are essentially two separate things. Materialists on the other hand take an opposing view, saying that the mind can be explained in a material sense because they claim that the mind and body are essentially the same thing. Even within these two schools, there are several subdivisions, each of which has their own individual unique approach to solving the mind/body problem. However, for this paper, this has been attempted to examine one particular solution, which is the one proposed by property dualism, and shall attempt to determine whether it is a satisfactory solution or not. Before property dualism can be fully understood, one must first understand the distinction between objects and properties. A book can be used as an example to illustrate this distinction. Everyone knows a book is an object that has various properties. Some of its properties are that it contains words, it is thick, and that is made of paper. These properties can then be instantiated in many other objects, such as a newspaper, which can also have words, be thick, and made of paper. Conversely, a property does not "have" objects, nor is an object instantiated in many properties (a word cannot have a book, nor can a newspaper be shared because it is made of paper). Given this distinction one can understand property dualism, which goes "The human person is a single, unified object, but that object has two radically different kinds of properties: mental properties and material properties" (Brooke & Stainton, 2000). Unlike substance dualism, which proposes that the human person consists of two separate substances, property dualism states that the human is a single, unified object and the dualist difference between the mind and body lies in their property. Thus, the mind is the mental properties of the human, while the body is the material properties of the human. One advantage of the property dualists' proposal is in the simplistic, common-sense answer it provides. The answer can be understood by simply taking any single object in our world that has two or more properties, and comparing the properties with one another. What one will find is that a property cannot be understood as another property. For example, a door, which is a single object, has a certain shape, and certain color, which are its properties. Now, if someone tries to understand colors in terms of shapes, this will be found as impossible, just as it is impossible to understand shapes in terms of colors, because the two properties are completely independent of each other. This coincides with the property dualist claim that mental properties can be separate from material properties. However, the property dualist's simple and elegant solution that seems to coincide with our common view of the world is not good enough to support it as a valid solution. This is especially true in the face of its many dissenting views, one of which does not attack substance dualism directly, but does so indirectly by attacking the very idea of dualism itself. The argument begins by looking at the question of how dualism became so popular. It claims that, firstly, it had to do with the fact that that the great majority of Western philosophers around the time when dualism was at its peak, were religious (specifically of the Christian faith). Thus, one aspect of their religious beliefs was to believe in immortality, and in order to reconcile their belief with their philosophy, they had to support dualism; the reason being that it was very difficult to believe in immorality without believing in dualism. However, currently the idea of immorality and religion itself are regarded as highly subjective, and most philosophers are no longer compelled by religious beliefs. Also, there has been an incredible decline of those who support dualism. Thus, the positive correlation between the decline of support for dualism, and the lack of religious beliefs in philosophers, supports the notion that dualism was based on subjective religious ideals. The second claim against dualism is in their use of introspection. Introspection involves looking into oneself, to become aware of mental aspects such as thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc. Dualists have held the position that this "self" that one perceive through introspection is utterly different from anything that could be made of matter, and thus cannot be explained in terms of matter. However, introspection raises questions such as how can one check another's introspection, or how do I know what I see when I introspect, is the same as what another person sees when they introspect. Indeed, no one seems to have the answers to these questions. Thus, one can conclude that introspection is an unreliable method in uncovering the true nature of the mind. There is no single metaphysics, nor any single solution to any of these problems which Aristotle raised here, is one of the great ironies of the history of human thought. For Aristotle himself, with considerable emphasis, proclaims near the beginning of his work that he has found the fundamental rule of metaphysics in the so-called law of non-contradiction. This law states that "the similar characteristic cannot at the same point belong and do not belong to the same subject in the similar respect," etc. Much has been made of this rule. But the irony is that this turns out to be just the opposite of the fundamental rule of metaphysics. Conclusion The central point of the two previous arguments against dualism was to show that the dualist idea of the mind and body as being two different things is an invalid view, due to the fact that it is based on false notions, and beliefs. Relating the previous arguments back to property dualism, if one recalls, the property dualist stated that the mind and body are distinct properties of the human. However, the previous arguments in opposition to dualism showed that argue that the mind and body are different from one another is invalid; and thus in the face of those arguments, the property dualist's claim falls. It is logical, and in fact, inevitable in the progressive advance of mankind, that some ideas from the past must be replaced by better ones in the present. That is where the fate of property dualism lies, based on the arguments proposed against it, and the better alternative in the materialists' approach to the mind/body problem. However, for a question so abstract and still unsolved after all these years, this paper gives little credit to the mind/body debate in its totality, and therefore agrees that there is still room for further argument, and debate. References Brook, Andrew, and Robert J. Stainton. (2000) Knowledge and Mind: A Philosophical Introduction. MIT Press, Pg 80- 85 Davis and Palladio, (2006), Psychology, Prentice Hall, pg 20-27 Michael Thorne and Tracy B.Henley, (2007) History And Systems Of Psychology, ISBN: 0547085788, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (hmh) Paul Moraux, (2005) Les listes anciennes des ouvrages d'Aristote, Louvain, p. 315. Read More