The hypothesis that the soul and the body
are separable is as old as the dream of an afterlife. In early Greek days, the
soul was identified with 'pneuma' or breath. Watch someone die and you will see
a last exhalation. People believed that
the soul of the dying departed the body with the last breath, and, just
perhaps, went somewhere else. The fear of death, literally the fear of 'nothing', seems to be
the other side of loving life. It is an animal fear that finds here a
characteristically human response. Entertaining hopes of an afterlife is very
understandable, especially considering that death is mysterious and we cannot
know with absolute certainty what happens after we die.
In Western philosophy and religion, the
soul-body split is maintained as an article of faith for many centuries. With
Descartes, in the early modern period, the soul morphs into a 'mental
substance'. Mind becomes 'cognitivized' and identified with 'thinking' and
immediate 'self'-awareness'.
Descartes' way of distinguishing mind and
body has a certain plausibility, otherwise, we would not have taken his theory
seriously. The mind, and things mental, do not exist in space or have parts
with spatial dimensions. Mental objects exist without doubt in our subjective
appreciation of them. He adds that each mind is a true individual, while bodily
things have no absolute identity, being just
thicker or thinner parts of one huge material substance. Minds and
bodies are bearers of completely incompatible properties, and thus refer to
separate metaphysical substances.
From this high point, there can only be
questions, and Descartes, himself, started the process. For example, he said
that the soul is not in the body the way a captain is in his ship. There is
some kind of substantial unity of mind and body. In addition, we are all aware
of thoughts causing physical reactions, and bodily events causing changes in
thinking. Thinking, here, involves everything of which we have direct
awareness, like our perceptions, sensations, feelings, thoughts, mental images,
etc.
The famous problem with Descartes's theory
is that there seems to be no way to explain the substantial unity or the
interaction of mind and body. He undermines his own theory by attempting to
explain the connection in terms of 'animal spirits' that are based in the
pineal gland but spend their time taking messages from the body to the mind or
vice versa.
Opposed to this dualism are various forms
of monism that claim that there is really only one reality that we describe in
different ways. However plausible this reaction may be, there is something
missing from an approach that starts from the position that dualism must be
overcome with a theory of direct reconciliation or identification of mind and
body. Of course,working from the naturalistic principles common today, we
cannot have the soul flying off somewhere after the death of the body.
Aristotle is reasonable about this. Mind (Nous Patheticon) is the idea of a
living body of a certain complexity. Without that living body, the individual's
mind is gone. Naturalism is incompatible with an after life.
This is reasonable, but we would do well to
shift to another way of thinking about the mind-body problem. Instead of
looking at it as a problem of separate entities that must be reconciled, we
might try looking at the mind and body as a system. This system includes more
than cognition and bodily properties. We are speaking of human beings here, and
we need a systematic and dynmic understanding of them, not one that can be
captured in a still picture.
Humans exist in time and history. We cannot
abstract their 'minds' and their 'bodies' from the complex and interactive
world in which they live. The concepts
of 'mind' and 'body' are too bare to support a systems approach. I therefore
propose to jump over the arguments about the sameness or difference of mind and
body, to formulate a way of conceiving a human being as a dynamic system.
Philosophy, psychology, behavioral economics and neuro-physiology will each
play a part in deepening our understanding of what it means to be human. The
systems approach attempts to understand how sensations, perceptions, thoughts,
feelings, emotions and predictable changes in body chemistry all feed into the
complex physical, emotional and conceptual processes of life.
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