WAB
Veteran Member
In my many discussions of the mind/body problem, extending to off and online activity over the past 20 years, I have (kinda) resolved only recently that there is no mind/body problem. The duality, mind and body, only exists insofar as we have an objective existence as a physical body which can be observed and analyzed by others, and a subjective existence which is internal and private, and cannot be literally shared with another person. We can share our subjective experiences by way of communication: conversation, philosophy, and poetry, for example, but we cannot literally allow someone else to experience what we experience inside ourselves.
This duality is sometimes embraced wholesale, as it was by Descartes (I think?) and by people who believe in a soul as distinct from but operating in conjunction with a body. For some this soul is God-given, or in some manner transcendent, and does not arise by any biological process that can be remotely identified or understood; and yet to others the soul, or spirit, refers simply to consciousness and its abstract, intangible content, its workings and motivations.
I have come to consider that a good way to approach the mind/body problem is to understand that a whole person, a sentient, intelligent human being, is the consummation of its objective and subjective components, its quantitative and qualitative "parts". ie: 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.'
It is not the mind and body operating in some distinct and/or independent fashion; it is both, operating together to form a unified entity or being. In this sense it can be thought of as a trinity, or triunity. See obscure C19 philosopher James Haig, if you can find him, but it's probably better to think of it as a single unified whole, or "substance", as, perhaps, the way Spinoza meant it (I could be wrong. I'm wrong a LOT).
This triunity, or union of three, just to entertain the notion, not commit to it, can be observed in so many different things, not just organisms. Take a chair. A chair is at first an object made up of parts in an organized fashion. It has quantitative parts: wood, nails, varnish, leather (and these extend to statistical properties which are not material but nonetheless objective and not subject to opinion: size, weight, height, breadth); and it has qualitative parts or properties: it is pleasing to observe, as a piece of art or design; it has a function, a utility; it has a name, a purpose.
The chair is neither its physical, or concrete parts alone, nor its abstract parts (which could not exist without the ordered design of its material parts, except as concepts in the mind [there's that god-awful word again] about a thing called a chair, which would require by necessity having seen a chair or having invented the idea of a chair), but is all of these material and non-material components and properties taken together to form a whole.
If we extend this way of looking at things (and I admit that is all this is, a way at looking at things) to something like the Christian concept of the Trinity, it can be more than a little illuminating.
Or a pain the collective tushy.
Just throwing this out, since I've got a few days before they throw the net over me.
This duality is sometimes embraced wholesale, as it was by Descartes (I think?) and by people who believe in a soul as distinct from but operating in conjunction with a body. For some this soul is God-given, or in some manner transcendent, and does not arise by any biological process that can be remotely identified or understood; and yet to others the soul, or spirit, refers simply to consciousness and its abstract, intangible content, its workings and motivations.
I have come to consider that a good way to approach the mind/body problem is to understand that a whole person, a sentient, intelligent human being, is the consummation of its objective and subjective components, its quantitative and qualitative "parts". ie: 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.'
It is not the mind and body operating in some distinct and/or independent fashion; it is both, operating together to form a unified entity or being. In this sense it can be thought of as a trinity, or triunity. See obscure C19 philosopher James Haig, if you can find him, but it's probably better to think of it as a single unified whole, or "substance", as, perhaps, the way Spinoza meant it (I could be wrong. I'm wrong a LOT).
This triunity, or union of three, just to entertain the notion, not commit to it, can be observed in so many different things, not just organisms. Take a chair. A chair is at first an object made up of parts in an organized fashion. It has quantitative parts: wood, nails, varnish, leather (and these extend to statistical properties which are not material but nonetheless objective and not subject to opinion: size, weight, height, breadth); and it has qualitative parts or properties: it is pleasing to observe, as a piece of art or design; it has a function, a utility; it has a name, a purpose.
The chair is neither its physical, or concrete parts alone, nor its abstract parts (which could not exist without the ordered design of its material parts, except as concepts in the mind [there's that god-awful word again] about a thing called a chair, which would require by necessity having seen a chair or having invented the idea of a chair), but is all of these material and non-material components and properties taken together to form a whole.
If we extend this way of looking at things (and I admit that is all this is, a way at looking at things) to something like the Christian concept of the Trinity, it can be more than a little illuminating.
Or a pain the collective tushy.
Just throwing this out, since I've got a few days before they throw the net over me.
