The following readers’ answers to this central philosophical question each win a random book.
How are the mind and brain related? Several different but overlapping kinds of relationship obtaining between mind and brain are evident in recent literature:
1. Straightforward causality – Brains cause minds. This relationship is disconcertingly unproblematic. It is very clear, especially from neuroscience, that brains are entirely capable of causing minds, and do.
2. Direct correspondence – Minds consist in or are the same as brain activity. With this option, the question doesn ’t really arise – what occur in brains, amongst other events, are minds. It seems at the moment that the kind of language we typically use to discuss minds will increasingly be supplanted by that which describes brain events – ultimately perhaps brain algorithms.
3. Neural correlation – Neural activity correlates with consciousness. This seems to be about hedging bets. Not prepared entirely to accept a direct equivalence of mind and brain (2), a comfortable position is correlation. Neural activity correlates with consciousness and its characteristic patterns generate mind. This means for every mind state there is also a brain state.
4. Overwhelming incompatibility. This can be the result of two diametrically opposed positions:
a) The brain and the mind are different types of entities – physical and mental.
b) The extraordinary complexity of brains succeeds in persuading us to believe that minds are metaphysical when they are not.
Proposition a) is supported by the use of the word ‘the’ in the question, presupposing the independent existence of ‘the mind’. Cartesian dualism provides a root for this way of thinking: there is no way that a material thing – the brain, can be related to the mind – a metaphysical or non-material thing.
Concerning b): our evolutionary history is significantly characterised by increasing capacities for intense, vivid experiences, etc, which represent profound survival value. The advantage of sense-perception and other mental abilities unavoidably entails the increase in human cognitive ability until we are unwittingly beguiled by our brains, so that now we are compelled to believe in a metaphysical self and mind somehow independent of the principal organ that has undergone this process of improvement – the brain. It seems likely that many existing accounts may well appear somewhat excessive, and in need of revision.
Colin Brookes, Woodhouse Eaves, Leicestershire