Mind–body problem
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Revision as of 18:07, 4 February 2011
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The mind-body dichotomy is the view that "mental" phenomena are, in some respects, "non-physical" (distinct from the body). In a religious sense, it refers to the separation of body and soul (Paul, Letter to the Romans 7:25; 8:10). The mind-body dichotomy is the starting point of Dualism, and became conceptualized in the form known to the modern Western world in René Descartes' philosophy, though it also surfaced in pre-Aristotelian concepts and in Avicennian philosophy.
This view of reality leads one to consider the corporeal as little valued and trivial. The rejection of the mind-body dichotomy is found in French Structuralism, and is a position that generally characterized post-war French philosophy. The absence of an empirically identifiable meeting point between the non-physical mind and its physical extension has proven problematic to dualism and many modern philosophers of mind maintain that the mind is not something separate from the body. These approaches have been particularly influential in the sciences, particularly in the fields of sociobiology, computer science, evolutionary psychology and the various neurosciences.
Plato
Plato argued that, as the body is from the material world, the soul is from the world of ideas and thus immortal. He believed the soul was temporarily united with the body and would only be separated at death where it would then go back to the world of forms. As the soul does not exist in time and space like the body, it can access universal truths from the world of ideas. For Plato, ideas are the true reality, (in terms of the Platonic forms) and are experienced by the soul. Experience is not relevant to this, so the body is given no real part in reality. The body is for Plato empty in that it can not access the abstract reality of the world; it can only experience shadows. This is determined by Plato's essentially rationalistic epistemology.
See also
- Philosophy of Mind
- Sacred-profane dichotomy
- Chinese room
- Descartes' Error
- John Searle
- Mikhail Bakhtin
- Jackie Pigeaud
- Philosophy of artificial intelligence
- Dualism (philosophy of mind)
- Bodymind
- The Mind's I, A book on the subject.
- Strange loop, A conceptual framework of thoughts about the self.
