The
mind-body dichotomyA dichotomy is any splitting of a whole into exactly two non-overlapping parts.In other words, it is a partition of a whole into two parts that are:* mutually exclusive: nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts, and...
is the view that "
mentalMind is the aspect of intellect and consciousness experienced as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will and imagination, including all unconscious cognitive processes. The term is often used to refer, by implication, to the thought processes of reason. Mind manifests itself...
" phenomena are, in some respects, "non-
physicalThe term matter traditionally refers to the substance that all objects are made of. One common way to identify this "substance" is through its physical properties; a common definition of matter is anything that has mass and occupies a volume...
" (distinct from the
bodyWith regard to living things, a body is the physical body of an individual. "Body" often is used in connection with appearance, health issues and death...
). In a religious sense, it refers to the separation of body and
soulThe soul, in many religions, spiritual traditions, and philosophies, is the spiritual and eternal part of a living being, commonly held to be separable in existence from the body; distinct from the physical part. It is typically thought to consist of ones consciousness and personality, and can be...
(Paul, Letter to the Romans 7:25; 8:10). The mind-body dichotomy is the starting point of
DualismIn philosophy of mind, dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, which begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical.Ideas on mind/body dualism originate at least as far back as Zarathushtra...
, and became conceptualized in the form known to the modern Western world in
René Descartes'René Descartes , , also known as Renatus Cartesius , was a French philosopher, mathematician, physicist, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic...
philosophy, though it also surfaced in pre-
AristotelianAristotelianism is a tradition of philosophy that takes its defining inspiration from the work of Aristotle. Aristotelianism is understood by its proponents as critically developing Plato’s theories. Most particularly, Aristotelianism brings Plato’s ideals down to Earth as goals and goods internal...
concepts and in
Avicennian philosophyAvicennism is a school of early Persian Islamic philosophy which began during the middle of the Islamic Golden Age. The school was founded by Avicenna , an 11th-century Persian philosopher who attempted to redefine the course of Islamic philosophy and channel it into new directions...
.
This view of reality leads one to consider the corporeal as little valued and trivial.
The
mind-body dichotomyA dichotomy is any splitting of a whole into exactly two non-overlapping parts.In other words, it is a partition of a whole into two parts that are:* mutually exclusive: nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts, and...
is the view that "
mentalMind is the aspect of intellect and consciousness experienced as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will and imagination, including all unconscious cognitive processes. The term is often used to refer, by implication, to the thought processes of reason. Mind manifests itself...
" phenomena are, in some respects, "non-
physicalThe term matter traditionally refers to the substance that all objects are made of. One common way to identify this "substance" is through its physical properties; a common definition of matter is anything that has mass and occupies a volume...
" (distinct from the
bodyWith regard to living things, a body is the physical body of an individual. "Body" often is used in connection with appearance, health issues and death...
). In a religious sense, it refers to the separation of body and
soulThe soul, in many religions, spiritual traditions, and philosophies, is the spiritual and eternal part of a living being, commonly held to be separable in existence from the body; distinct from the physical part. It is typically thought to consist of ones consciousness and personality, and can be...
(Paul, Letter to the Romans 7:25; 8:10). The mind-body dichotomy is the starting point of
DualismIn philosophy of mind, dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, which begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical.Ideas on mind/body dualism originate at least as far back as Zarathushtra...
, and became conceptualized in the form known to the modern Western world in
René Descartes'René Descartes , , also known as Renatus Cartesius , was a French philosopher, mathematician, physicist, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic...
philosophy, though it also surfaced in pre-
AristotelianAristotelianism is a tradition of philosophy that takes its defining inspiration from the work of Aristotle. Aristotelianism is understood by its proponents as critically developing Plato’s theories. Most particularly, Aristotelianism brings Plato’s ideals down to Earth as goals and goods internal...
concepts and in
Avicennian philosophyAvicennism is a school of early Persian Islamic philosophy which began during the middle of the Islamic Golden Age. The school was founded by Avicenna , an 11th-century Persian philosopher who attempted to redefine the course of Islamic philosophy and channel it into new directions...
.
This view of reality leads one to consider the corporeal as little valued and trivial. The rejection of the mind-body dichotomy is found in French
StructuralismStructuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field as a complex system of interrelated parts. It began in linguistics with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure...
, and is a position that generally characterized post-war French philosophy.
The absence of an empirically identifiable meeting point between the non-physical mind and its physical extension has proven problematic to dualism and many modern philosophers of mind maintain that the mind is not something separate from the body. These approaches have been particularly influential in the sciences, particularly in the fields of
sociobiologySociobiology is a synthesis of scientific disciplines which attempts to explain social behavior in animal species by considering the Darwinian advantages specific behaviors may have. It is often considered a branch of biology and sociology, but also draws from ethology, anthropology, evolution,...
,
computer scienceComputer science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems. It is frequently described as the systematic study of algorithmic processes that create, describe and transform...
,
evolutionary psychologyEvolutionary psychology attempts to explain psychological traits—such as memory, perception, or language—as adaptations, that is, as the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system,...
and the various
neuroscienceNeuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Such studies span the structure, function, evolutionary history, development, genetics, biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology, informatics, computational neuroscience and pathology of the nervous system.The International Brain Research...
s.
Plato
PlatoPlato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world...
argued that, as the body is from the material world, the soul is from the world of ideas and is thus immortal. He believed the soul was temporarily united with the body and would only be separated at death, when it would return to the world of Forms. Since the soul does not exist in time and space, as the body does, it can access universal truths. For Plato, ideas (or Forms) are the true reality, and are experienced by the soul. The body is for Plato empty in that it can not access the
abstract realityPlato's theory of Forms or theory of Ideas asserts that non-material abstract forms , and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. When used in this sense, the word form is often capitalized...
of the world; it can only experience shadows. This is determined by Plato's essentially
rationalisticIn epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...
epistemologyEpistemology or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge...
.
See also
- Philosophy of Mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of modern analytic philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
- Sacred-profane dichotomy
French sociologist Émile Durkheim considered the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane to be the central characteristic of religion: "religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden." In Durkheim's theory, the...
- Chinese room
The Chinese room argument comprises a thought experiment and associated arguments by John Searle , which attempts to show that a symbol-processing machine like a computer can never be properly described as having a "mind" or "understanding", regardless of how intelligently it may behave.-Chinese...
- Descartes' Error
Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain is a book by neurologist Antonio R. Damasio, in which the author presents the argument that emotion and reason are not separate but, in fact, are quite dependent upon one another....
- John Searle
John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher and presently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Searle began his college education at the University of Wisconsin, and subsequently became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University where he earned an...
- Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language...
- Jackie Pigeaud
Jackie Pigeaud is a retired French professor of Latin and historian of medicine. He occupied a chair at the University of Nantes and is a member of the Institut universitaire de France....
- Philosophy of artificial intelligence
The philosophy of artificial intelligence attempts to answer such question as:* Can a machine act intelligently? Can it solve any problem that a person would solve by thinking?...
- Dualism (philosophy of mind)
In philosophy of mind, dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, which begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical.Ideas on mind/body dualism originate at least as far back as Zarathushtra...
- Bodymind
- Namarupa
Nāmarūpa is a dvandva compound in Sanskrit and Pali meaning "name and form ".Synonyms:*名色 Cn: míngsè; Jp: myōshiki; Vi: danh sắc*Tibetan: ming.gzugs-Nāmarūpa in Buddhism:...
— the Buddhist concept of "Mind and Body"
- The Mind's I
The Mind's I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul is a 1981 book composed and arranged by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett...
, A book on the subject.
- Strange loop
A strange loop arises when, by moving up or down through a hierarchical system, one finds oneself back where one started.Strange loops may involve self-reference and paradox...
, A conceptual framework of thoughts about the self.
External links