Metaphysics and the Mind-Body Problem
Is the mind essentially different from the physical body? In his
autobiography Bertrand Russell (1967) stated that he heard this
clichéd refrain over and over from his family (until he became quite
bored with it): “Mind? No matter. Matter? Never mind!” This idea,
that mind and body are separate kinds of entities, each with its own
laws, is called dualism. By contrast, monism is the idea that there is
only one basic substance or reality. Materialism is the idea that all
substance is material or physical; hence materialists are necessarily
monists, but the reverse is not necessarily true; Bishop Berkeley
believed that all reality consists of ideas – a philosophy known as
idealism. Democritus was a very early materialist who first proposed
that matter was made of atoms, and that nothing else exists apart from
these basic building blocks.
Thomas Hobbes, a materialist, believed that the mind was merely
an epiphenomenon, or something that arose as a kind of byproduct of
the underlying physical reality. Baruch Spinoza’s dual-aspect theory
was not the same as dualism; Spinoza believed that both mind and
body were, as the term implies, two aspects of the same underlying
reality, which was divine in origin.
Parallelism refers to the belief that the mind and body are
separate (dual) systems, but that they do not interact. In contrast,
Descartes was not just a dualist, but also an interactionist who agreed
that mind and body were separate but interacting entities. Descartes
believed that the pineal gland was the organ at which the two forces
met, so to speak, to interact (perhaps because there was no other
known function at the time for this gland).
Today most evolutionary psychologists, behavior geneticists, and
cognitive neuroscientists, tend to be materialistic monists. A mind, a
self – or a soul, for that matter – that is something in addition to or
beyond the physical brain itself, they consider a “ghost in the
machine” (Pinker, 2002). This doesn’t invalidate the concept of a
“mind” or of a “self,” so long as such terms do not imply any surplus
meaning. If the mind is indeed be an epiphenomenon then it is a very