The Philosophical “Mind-Body” Debate. What is the Fundamental Nature of Reality? Is it Mental or Physical? Technical philosophers go into immense detail to justify their positions on the mind-body problem, but over the last 25 centuries there have only been three main positions.
At the beginning of the 20th century analytic philosophers, inspired by the achievements of physical science, generally argued that reality was ultimately physical, a matter of “atoms and the void,” as Democritus put it so well. The power of that conviction lasted about as long as behaviorism did in psychology, about 70 years. Philosophers like Bertrand Russell often thought they could pick and choose the metalanguage of psychology by fiat; it was Russell who anointed John B. Watson as the foremost psychologist of his time, because Watson’s beliefs could be reduced to physical events.
ONE. Reality is mental, consisting of conscious moments, either individual events, in our own minds, or in some universal mind. Today that position is represented by philosopher David Chalmers, under the label of “panpsychism” (that is, “universal mind”). Panpsychism goes back to the beginnings of written thought, the Vedantist and Buddhist thinkers in Asia, along with Plato and the Pythagoreans in ancient Athens. If you take panpsychism as a premise, you can make sense of everything else.
TWO. The opposite position is called materialism or physicalism, where fundamental reality is thought to be “atoms and the void.” Many scientists are physicalists, whether they know it or not. Using molecules or neurons you can come close to explaining the observable world. Philosophers continue to debate how physicalism can explain subjectivity.
THREE. Dualism. The third ancient position is an uncomfortable compromise between mentalism and physicalism.
Common sense is a kind of practical dualism. It flips freely from physical aspirins to conscious headaches. Swallowing a physical pill somehow helps the pain disappear from consciousness. Common sense is therefore dualistic — generally by ignoring mind-body debates. Most people don’t worry how it is that the little white aspirin pill can jump the metaphysical divide to the conscious world, and causes changes there.
The philosophical challenge to our commonsense dualism is: How does the conscious world relate to the physical world? Is it just floating above our heads, or what?
Interestingly, an analogous debate took place in the Vedanta tradition, in which dualism is called “dvaita” (from the same root as “dual”), and non-dualism is called “advaita.” Descartes felt compelled to make a case for dualism, suggesting that the tiny pineal body might be the point of contact between the unified soul and the two-sided brain.
Physicalism, mentalism, and dualism are the three basic chess openings in the mind-body game. Every philosopher knows dozens of variations on them, but none are ever settled permanently.
When I started as a college student in psychology in the 1970s all my professors claimed to be behaviorists. Several decades later, famous philosophers like Chalmers claim to be panpsychists. Historically these debates are never settled for long. They flip back and forth like a giant Necker Cube, with two perfectly consistent interpretations that keep alternating. The last 25 centuries of written philosophy can be described by the dominant metaphysics of the time, either mental or physical.
The classical Necker Cube can be seen in two different ways, and alternates between them.
It is one of thousands of ambiguities — such as the words of natural language. You can find Necker Cubes in any standard room simply by looking at the corners through a narrow tube that excludes external cues (called a “reduction tube”). Ambiguities are not accidental, but rather fundamental to all sensory systems. Part I has a discussion of ambiguities.
Yet, scientists have a perfectly good answer when someone demands to know our position on the mind-body problem. That answer is “I don’t know.”
Good scientists use it all the time.
Isaac Newton used it to answer a challenge from George Berkeley about gravitational action at a distance. Einstein and his generation gave that answer about the proposed universal ether. Richard Feynman gave that answer about quantum speculations, when he told his students at MIT, “Just shut up and calculate!”
It was Karl Popper, a famous empiricist philosopher, who pointed out that any viable scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable by observations in the world. The proper scientific answer to the mind-body question must be: How can I ask this question in a falsifiable way? What kind of evidence could give us an answer?
And if there are no testable questions and answers, we happily leave those problems for others to debate.
Learn more & purchase your copy of ON CONSCIOUSNESS: Science & Subjectivity – Updated Works on Global Workspace Theory.
Global Workspace Theory (GWT) began with this question: “How does a serial, integrated and very limited stream of consciousness emerge from a nervous system that is mostly unconscious, distributed, parallel and of enormous capacity?”
GWT is a widely used framework for the role of conscious and unconscious experiences in the functioning of the brain, as Baars first suggested in 1983.
A set of explicit assumptions that can be tested, as many of them have been. These updated works by Bernie Baars, the recipient of the 2019 Hermann von Helmholtz Life Contribution Award by International Neural Network Society form a coherent effort to organize a large and growing body of scientific evidence about conscious brains.
