Dualism, Descartes and Deities

How the Mind-Body debate came to the modern world

The mind and the brain are used interchangeably by people who have not been trained in psychology and philosophy, sometimes even graduates struggle to understand the difference between the two.

I ran a poll on my Instagram ID @_knightofsteel last week and asked my followers the question, “Are the mind and the brain the same thing or different?”

An overwhelming 97% said that they think the mind and the brain are different. Of course, the sample is biased. My followers mostly include people either studying psychology or enthusiastic about it. If I were to ask my followers what these differences between the two are, this is what I would hear most often - The mind is the software and the brain is the hardware.

It makes sense at face value but not so much when you think deeply about it. If I was to smash the screen of my computer at this moment, the hardware would clearly be affected (And I would get some beatings from my parents for wasting their money ) but the software inside would still be working fine. I just wouldn’t be able to see it.

This is not the case when it comes to the brain and the mind.

An injury big enough on the brain would seriously affect a person’s ability to think or speak or a lot more. Clearly, there is a connection between what we call the mind and what we call the brain. But what is this connection? How does it work?

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Dualism and Monism

Psychologists and philosophers have been trying to answer this question for thousands of years.

It was Rene Descartes who brought this problem to the forefront of modern psychology in the Enlightenment period.

Descartes believed that the mind and the body were separate entities that interacted with each other through the pineal gland in the brain. This school of thought is called dualism. It believes that the mind is a separate immaterial entity that interacts with the material body.

The opposite viewpoint is called monism. It believes that the mind is nothing but a product of brain activities and every question can be answered on a biological, physical basis.

If you cannot visualize what the two schools of thought are, I will give you a situation which should help you understand which side of the debate you stand on.

Imagine there are a pair of cloning machines. One is the input and the other is the output. You step into the input machine and an exact replica of every single cell of your body is recreated in the output machine. This person is an exact clone of your body. The only downside is the ‘you’ in the input machine is killed so as to maintain only one of ‘you’ in the world.

Is the person in the output machine really ‘you’?

If you are a monist you would think, “Obviously it is you! Every single cell of your body is the same. How could the person be any different?” but if you are a dualist you would say, “Well, the two people won’t exactly be the same. There will be something different about the person in the output. I don’t know what exactly…but something will be different.”

Now, this article is not going to be a discussion on the merits and demerits of the two schools of thought. The point of this article is to understand the modern origin of this debate.

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A Religious Scientist

The question you must ask here is, why did a mathematician-physicist-philosopher like Descartes insist that the mind and body were separate?

Descartes is one of the greatest thinkers of the western world. Every field that he dabbled in, he left an indelible mark on. Psychology was no different, but the question is, why did he leave it in the mystery of the mind and the body?

For someone who valued rationality so much, it is strange to see the same person leave the problem of the mind to a mystic, immaterial space called the mind.

That was because before being a mathematician, a philosopher and everything else that he was, Descartes was a Christian. A reformist, sure, but still a Christian. He could not fathom something as basic as the human soul being consumed by material rationalism that was prevalent in the science of that time. And thus, he drew a boundary.

The body may be studied by a materialist but the soul (or the mind) was out of bounds for material science. It was a holy concept for him. He could not visualize the human soul being reduced to its components by a science.

And thus, we were left with the problem of dualism. Descartes did plan on writing a scientific explanation of the experience of the mind but decided not to publish it because he was concerned about retributions from the Church. After all, Galileo had just been jailed for suggesting that the earth might not be the centre of the universe!

The questions Descartes proposed have still not been answered nearly 400 years after his death and it doesn't seem like they will be anytime soon either.

Every monist will say that the experience of the mind we have is an illusion. It is a result of activities in the brain since something that does not have physical material (the mind) cannot influence physical objects.

Every dualist continues to say that the reason we do anything is because it is a product of our mental desires and thoughts. I am writing this article because my thoughts want to.

As you are reading this article, there is a voice in your head that is reading it out for you, isn’t it? Where does that voice come from? Why does it have to exist? These thoughts we have don’t exist in a physical form (that we know of so far), where do they come from then? And how do they affect us so much?

And so the debate never moves ahead. Everyone is fixed in their own camps. Neuroscientists and psychologists are at constant odds over this simple question - Are the mind and the brain the same, or different?

The only reason this question is so important today is because Descartes didn’t want to have his Christian faith questioned.

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Question of The Week

Where do you stand on the debate?

Are the mind and the brain the same or are they different?

Does knowing how the school of dualism became mainstream change your views?

You can let me know by replying to this email :)

And don’t forget to share this with your friends as well!