When I touch something, the nerves in my hand come under pressure and transmit corresponding information to my brain, where a wave of electrical signals is set off. This is all physics. Now, parallel to all this, I felt the object. This is metaphysics. All our sensations and conscious brain activities have this dual form: the physical and the metaphysical. In spite of our not being sure about the linkage (the mind/body problem) it seems certain to me that the two are perfect correlatives of each other. Acceptance of this mind/body correlation is an essential part of any meaningful metaphysical investigation.
Does anyone have any objections to the above paragraph? It feels very simple to me, yet I seldom see things like it here. Am I stating something that was obvious to everyone, or are people just more interested in other things?
I’m planning to start a thread about the four senses that is built on the idea presented here, so this thread is effectively a ground-paver.
Most people would agree that the mind is correlated with our physical body, but that isn’t the “problem” in the mind body problem.
The problem is in how the physical systems of the body could give rise to the quality experiences people feel, like heat. To answer the question “How do I feel heat when I touch a hot oven?” with “I feel heat because if the responses of the neurons in the somatic area of my brain.” may prove unsatisfying to many because this implies a physical description of how the brain works to produce experiences, that would force you to consider computational systems in a computer could feel heat or if you don’t believe that, to explain how the human physical system is above computational explanation. The latter case being the brunt of the mind body problem.
There is an interesting paper by a philosopher I can’t think of at the moment that thought to fill the explanatory gap by taking experiences as atomic units of experience that are correlated to physical events. This may be a campaign that would interest you. I will see if I can’t find the paper’s name for you because, although he doesn’t flesh out the idea very far, he does give an account of how his thesis could oversome the contradictions of the explanatory gap.
Yes, I suppose I am kind of dodging the crux of the MB problem, but even so, this idea of correlation does yield interesting (theoretical) results in AI in particular.
In evolutionary biology, this is lunch money. We (and by “we” I understand us, the biped citadels of cells), have evolved cellular structurs that are specialised in receiving external sensory data, plus a big hulk that processes them. It’s absolutely vital that we learn to distinguish the helpful, may be said “positive” sensations, from the harmful, pernicious ones – so it was bound to happen. We live in somewhat of a “middle world”, a strand of reality that connects the very small with the very large, so we’ve been naturally selected to suppose only what we need to suppose in order to survive in it.
I disagree. It’s true that we don’t currently have a thorough explanation for how the phenomenon of perception is accounted for by the brain - but there’s no reason to expect that the explanation lies anywhere other than the brain. Just because we don’t know something doesn’t mean that the explanation has to come from somewhere other than normal science.
It’s still an interesting question, but it’s more a question of neurobiology than one of metaphysics. The notion of mind-body correlation is a useful one, pragmatically, in philosophy, and even in everyday thought - but it will prove inferior to a more precise, neurological view of the phenomenon, when it comes to drawing any hard conclusions.
Four? I’d say six (#6 = balance). I assume you’re excluding taste as being the same as smell? They’re not the same sense, as the input is processed in different parts of the brain, even though they do overlap in some important ways.
Yes there is a difference between mind and body and they are obviously related. But I do agree that it is very closely related to neurobiology. If we can somehow distinguish how things are in their metaphysical form (such as our neurons) then we can have an idea of how these things work.
Twiffy: I was deliberately brief and general in that section because I don’t think the exact physical process is important. What’s important is the fact that a physical process takes place, which maps to a metaphysical one. Even if the full (if it’s possible) explanation involved a whole new scientific paradigm, this correlation would remain intact in the context of this thread.
Yep, four senses. The suggestion that balance is a sense is an interesting one (new to me!) but I would subsume it under “feeling”, and re smell and taste, I would (and will, later) argue that they’re the same metaphysically, and so even though they have two distinct physical correlatives, they should be taken as one.
Socratic: I’d say that a single neuron in itself has no metaphysical “side” and that metaphysical experiences come when certain suitable structures are created.
met‧a‧phys‧i‧cal /ˌmɛtəˈfɪzɪkəl/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[met-uh-fiz-i-kuhl] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–adjective
Philosophy.
a. concerned with abstract thought or subjects, as existence, causality, or truth.
b. concerned with first principles and ultimate grounds, as being, time, or substance.
You see I would say that neurons are metaphysical. They do exist in time and space and carry substance (mass) don’t they? If everything is made up of atoms then the key to understanding anything metaphysical would be neurons, protons, and and electrons (atoms).
I’ve been informed that I am not to post philosopher’s quotes that illustrate/illuminate the discussion at hand, that I must contribute something in addition to quoted material that is some way explains it to others, argues a particular point, mixes it up in some way or other, so let me say in all honestly Spinoza founds his philosophy on exactly your point, and that this is called parallelism, and that philosopher Donald Davidson picks this up in his theory “Anomalous Monism”, and that quite a number of very interesting things are related to this, and that I wish you the very best on your journey. Now for the vital quotations:
Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Dunamis. It reminds me of something Schopenhauer said: “The body is the objectification of the will.”
Socratic: I think you’re working with too broad a definition of metaphysics. If everything that’s physical is actually metaphysical, then what does “physical” mean?