by Jonah Wilberg

Created on: January 19, 2011

1. Descartes and the mind-body problem

It might seem obvious that your mind and your body are two fundamentally different sorts of things. After all, your mind includes things like pain, or your experience of a beautiful sunset, but if you were to look inside your body all you would find is material stuff, like the 'grey matter' that makes up the brain. It seems possible for this material stuff to exist without the mind, and also, at least in principle, for experiences to exist without a material body.

This simple argument for the distinctness of mind and body was first made by the French philosopher René Descartes. But since Descartes, almost all major philosophers have thought his view - often called 'dualism' - to be seriously problematic. Perhaps the biggest problem was outlined in a letter to Descartes by Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. The princess pointed out that our experiences and other states of mind, like beliefs and desires, cause our bodies to move in a certain way. But if our minds are purely immaterial things, then we can't explain how this causation is possible: how can an immaterial thing have any causal impact on a material thing?

This, in a nutshell, is what philosophers call 'the mind-body problem'. Over the years many philosophers have come up with theories about how the mind is related to the body, hoping to solve this problem. These theories fall into two main categories: 'materialist' theories and 'idealist' theories. Let's look at each type in turn.

2. Materialism

In the twentieth century, particularly in the english-speaking world, materialism was the dominant view on the mind-body problem. Essentially, materialism is the view that the mind is itself a material thing. The rise of materialism in the twentieth century was influenced by the development of empirical sciences of the mind, such as behaviorism, neuroscience and cognitive science, which seemed to show how the mind was bound up with both physical behaviour, and the brain and nervous system.

2.1 Behaviorism

According to behaviorist theories, mental states like beliefs or experiences are logically connected to bodily behavior. For example a behaviorist would say that to be in pain is just a matter of being disposed to say ‘ouch’, to wince, hop about holding one’s foot, etc. This solves the causation problem, in effect, by saying that there is no causation here: the relationship between mind and behaviour is so close that it is not so much a matter of causation

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