PHIL 201PROPOSED SOLUTIONS TO THE MIND/BODY PROBLEM TRANSCRIPTS1:Hello, and welcome to another presentation for Philosophy 201: Philosophy and Contemporary Ideas. I’m Dr. Mark Foreman. In our last presentation, we introduced the mind-body problem. This problem of how does this mind, which is immaterial, causally relate to the body which is material. How could it cause material things to happen when it can’t come into contact with them? That’s the basic problem we were looking at. In this presentation, I want to look at some proposed solutions to that problem that have been suggested throughout the history of philosophy. As I do so, I want to remind you of some important distinctions.First of all, we need to make sure we understand the distinction between the mind and the brain. The mind is a non-physical thing that has thoughts and ideas as its properties; it has mental properties called thoughts and ideas. The brain is a physical substance that has physical properties. It has shape, it has size, has weight, it can be physically observed. We can look inside your skull and see the brain. The mind doesn’t have physical properties; it doesn’t have any physical properties at all. I want to keep those two distinct for now, although we’re going to see down the road that some people are going to try to bring them together and say that there’s only one substance, the brain, and that there is no such real thing as the mind apart from the brain. Butfor now we’re going to keep them distinct, as mind and brain.Another distinction I want to make sure we understand is the distinction between a mental state and what we might call a physical state or a brain state. A mental state is simply an idea, a thought that you might have. Maybe it’s a propositional thought like, Christopher Columbus discovered America. Or it might be an emotion that you’re feeling that you have, like fear or wonder or love for something. Or it might be a sensation that you have, like pain for example is amental sensation. Those are mental states. A physical state or a brain state is simply described in physical terms. Certain synapses firing when the neural junctions of our brain come together. Certain things occurring within our neural system, neural impulses, things like that. Those are physical or brain states. And I want to keep those two distinct as well as we talk about the distinction between the mind and the body. We’re going to continue using our same illustration that we used in our last presentation. And that is, I’m going to use a bold figure to represent the body or the brain, and I’ll use a dotted figure to represent the mind. Let’s look at some of the solutions we have to offer.S2:The first proposed solution I want to look at is called interactionism. And I choose it first because, first of all, historically, it’s the earliest idea around out there. It comes from Renee Descartes. He was a French philosopher, and really was the first person to look at the relationship between the mind and the body. And he proposes as a solution, interactionism. Also want to mention it first because I think it’s the one that seems to be the most intuitive for us. Interactionism basically says that the mind and body interact in some way or another. That my brain can causally affect my mind, and my mind can causally affect my body, make my body do things. And that’s basically what they do, there’s just an interaction that goes on. Now, Renee Descartes believed that this interaction took place in the center of the brain, in a small gland Page 1 of 7PHIL 201there in the center of the brain. That’s where he thought the interaction took place. In his day, they didn’t know exactly what this gland did in the brain, and so they simply assumed, well this must be where the interaction takes place. And so he just simply suggested that the solution of the mind-body problem is that they interact. Well, the strength of this view is of course that it seems to go along with our intuition and our experience. It does seem like there’s a causal relationship between my mind and my body. That my mind causes my body to do things, and mybody can have a causal effect upon my mind. That’s a good strength for it. What about a weakness? Well the problem with this view is, while it seems good, it doesn’t really seem to solve the mind-body problem. In fact, it just kind of restates it. If we ask Descartes, how do the mind and body relate together, he says, O, well they interact. And we ask him, Ok, well how do they interact? That’s what we really want to know. Descartes says, Well, they causally relate together. Well the problem is, that’s our original question. We want to know how do they causallyrelate together. And he can answer simply by saying they interact. It’s an interesting idea. It doesn’t mean interactionism is wrong, but it does mean that it doesn’t give us any sort of explanation. And we’re looking for an explanation for the problem, a solution to the problem, notjust simply a restatement of it. So, we’re going to leave interactionism behind for now.S3:Our next proposed solution is called parallelism. Now parallelism proposes that the way to solve the problem is to simply acknowledge that for every physical state there exists a corresponding mental state, but there’s no causal relationship between them. You’ll notice in our illustration here, we have our two figures, our bold figure to represent the brain and our dotted figure to represent the mind, but we don’t have the arrows between them like we had with interactionism. There’s no causal relationship between them. This view wants to say, Well there’s a correspondence between them, my physical states and my mental states, but one does not cause the other to happen. For example, if I was to come up to you with a pin, for example, and shove it into your arm, you would have a physical state of a pin going in your arm, but you would also have a mental state of something we call pain. Pain is a mental state, it’s a mental sense that we have. Well, we certainly see there’s a relationship between that: pin going in arm causes pain. But the question we want to ask of course is, how do we account for that? And that’s the problemwith this. The strength for this is that of course it gets rid of the causal problem. Well that’s good,we don’t have to worry about the mental causing the physical or the physical causing the