The Mind–Body Problem

Human beings, and perhaps other creatures, have minds as well as bodies. But what is a mind, and what is its relation to body, or to the physical in general? 1. Mind‐Body Dualism The first answer to the mind‐body question proposed since medieval times was that of Descartes, who held that minds are wholly distinct from bodies and from physical objects of any sort. According to Cartesian dualism, minds are purely spiritual and radically non‐spatial, having neither size nor location. On this view, a normal living human being or person is a duality, a mind and a body paired (though there can be bodies without minds, and minds can survive the destruction of their corresponding bodies). Mysteriously, despite the radical distinctness of minds from bodies, they interact causally: bodily happenings cause sensation and experiences and thoughts in one's mind; conversely, mental activity leads to action and speech, causing the physical motion of limbs or lips. Cartesian dualism has strong intuitive appeal, since from the inside our minds do not feel physical at all; and we can easily imagine their existing disembodied or, indeed, their existing in the absence of any physical world whatever. And until the 1950s, in fact, the philosophy of mind was dominated by Descartes's " first‐person " perspective, our view of ourselves from the inside. With few exceptions, philosophers had accepted the following claims: (1) that one's own mind is better known than one's body, (2) that the mind is metaphysically in the body's driver's seat, and (3) that there is at least a theoretical problem of how we human intelligences can know that " external, " everyday objects exist at all, even if there are tenable solutions to that problem. We human subjects are immured within a movie theatre of the mind, though we may have some defensible ways of inferring what goes on outside the theatre. Midway through the past (twentieth) century, all this suddenly changed, for two reasons. The first reason was the accumulated impact of logical positivism and the verification theory of meaning. Intersubjective verifiability or