The Mind-Body Problem

Abstract

This chapter is included in the book because questions about the relation between mind and brain are highly relevant in disciplines such as psychology and psychiatry. I give an overview of the main positions in the debate, first distinguishing between dualism and monism. Then I present identity theory, functionalism, eliminative materialism and anomalous monism and the main criticism against each.

One may be a monist without believing that a reduction of the mental to the physical is possible, because reductionist theories about the mind confront three profound difficulties. The first is how to reduce the intentional aspect of mental states to a biological property. The second is qualia, the purported fact that experiences have an irreducible phenomenological property. The third is the purported fact that the individual person has privileged access to her own mental states, whereas others have to rely on behavioural evidence when attributing a particular mental state to another persons.

The problem of accounting for mental causation is discussed and Davidson’s solution, that a token of a mental event is identical to a token of physical event, but that no reduction at the type level is possible, is presented and tentatively accepted.

‘O blithe little soul, thou, flitting away,

Guest and comrade of this my clay,

Whither now goest thou, to what place

Bare and ghastly and without grace?

Nor, as thy wont was, joke and play.’

Hadrian, on his deathbed (Translated by A. O’Brien-Moore)