Mind Over Matter – Matter Over Mind?
The
so-called mind-body problem is one of the major philosophical old chestnuts.
What is the ‘mind’, exactly? Where do thoughts come from and do they have some
kind of ‘space’ of their own? Are dreams real portents or only caused by having
had some cheese before bedtime?
Religion is fundamentally based on the
mind-body duality, or dualism: the mind is implanted by God and could be called
another word for ‘soul’, which survives the body after death. Descartes, the
great 17th-century ‘father of modern philosophy’ thought that the
mind resided in the pineal gland. (He also believed that only human beings had
minds, or souls: animals were automatons of nature, like furry or scaled
machines. So we need not mind about killing or maltreating them since they
cannot think or even feel very much.)
An equally great if much misunderstood
philosopher of the 17th century was Benedict de Spinoza, of
Amsterdam. His view was entirely different from that of Descartes, and it is
largely from Spinoza that the following is drawn. But any faults in the
following are mine, not Spinoza’s – one of the greatest thinkers so far who
ever lived.
Thinking in relation to the brain
might be considered in the light of an analogy with walking in relation to the
legs. Legs are obviously made for walking (and kicking and running and jumping
and stretching etc.) but walking as such is not in the legs. The product of
walking is a certain distance covered, which is entirely outside the whole body
of the legs that walked that distance. This product, or result, is quite
outside the brain, outside the head and even outside the body of the walker.
Spinoza wrote much of substance.
Substance is everything material that there is. Thus substance, amongst other
things, can think, because human beings are part of substance and they do
indeed think: they are thinking substance, so far the only substance in the
universe that we know that thinks. And what’s more humans think all the time,
even in sleep, when they dream. There is no sharp division between thinking and
a reflex action, but a gradating continuum between the two.
The human brain is indeed the most
complex organ or structure that we know of. It is hundreds of billions of times
more powerful than the most advanced computer. Yet a minute physical
examination of a human brain will not reveal a ‘thought’ residing inside it.
You would look in vain for such a thing. And what could a thought possibly look
like, even through the most powerful of microscopes?
This would appear to make the act of
thinking something miraculous, non-material, and so many believe that God or
gods or spirits of one kind or another have something to do with it. In fact, a
thought is a very material thing, which is not to say physical.
There is no thought without content. Try
thinking of nothing: it is impossible. Even a mental relaxation exercise that
invites you to think of nothing usually suggests some kind of mental focus on a
real or imagined object. You can’t think of nothing at all. Thought is
materially determined by objects whether these be in front of you or whether
they are recalled from the past or even conjured up by the imagination (itself
relying a good deal on memory and past experience). In sleep the mind continues
to think in various images, and not without logical progression – indeed, very
much with logical progression even if
the logic is Wonderland logic. Sensations in sleep derive from wish fulfilment,
anxiety, past experience recent or distant or both, sexual desire and sexual
antipathy, films or TV movies seen (or amalgams of them) or imagined scenes
from literature, whether real literature or an imagined literature, myriad
other sources. One thing is certain: dreams do not come from nothing at all.
If you focus solely on ‘brain’ you get
nowhere. If you focus solely on ‘mind’ you get nowhere. You only get somewhere
if you see the one in terms of the other, inseparably. The brain ‘does’ thinking just as the legs ‘do’
walking. But the thinking is focused constantly outside the physical person who
thinks (we don’t normally and certainly not instinctively think of the internal
workings of the brain itself whereby we do our thinking: everything has an
outward focus). Thinking would atrophy and disappear altogether without a
brain; likewise a brain that had no thoughts, however rudimentary (and
connected, as suggested above, also to reflex actions) would be a dead brain.
If the legs are never used, they too will atrophy and grow too weak for walking
or much of anything else. And walking does not get done without legs to walk
it. Such is the relationship between mind and brain that a usual question is: ‘What’s
on your mind?’ not ‘What’s in your brain?’ That would be more for the
neurosurgeon to query. And of course an impaired brain hampers thought just as
a broken leg hampers leg exercise. But source and activity in both these
examples are wholly and necessarily and constantly reciprocal.
Thus half of your bodily existence is
outside you. Your mind does not reside in the head, but in the head and in
everything outside the head that causes thinking and includes such
indispensably social things as languages. Language can only come into existence
between and among human beings. If there was no one to communicate with there
would be no language because of no use for it. And it is from the use of
language invented for social reasons that we have learned to verbalise our
internal thoughts: our thoughts are expressed, if silently, through words. But the word is, if you like, a social organ.
And so is your mind. We would do well to
reflect on the half-part of each of us that actually exists outside our bodies
and in the world around, of things, people, ideas. These in turn are the
necessary food for the mind operating through the body. Physically, 40% of the
oxygen we take in goes to the brain, an enormously expensive organ to keep up.
As we breathe air (which climate change deniers are in danger of forgetting
when they declare their intention to burn down oxygen-producing rainforests)
and die after only perhaps at most about a few minutes without it, so we ‘think’
what is around us and our thoughts contribute to that outer part of ourselves,
in a reciprocal relationship.
In view of the way much of the human
world treats its children, who have growing brains and minds to feed, it is
time that people were made more aware of how much we all live outside our
physical bodies, in so many daily ways.
