I’ve been writing for decades about the mind-body problem, the deepest of all mysteries. And yet, only recently have I realized that few people outside philosophy and mind-related scientific fields are familiar with the phrase “mind-body problem.” I also realized that I knew nothing about the origins of the phrase. I cobbled together the information below with the help of Google and David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of mind.
A Google N-gram on “mind-body problem” shows the phrase spiking from 1910 to 1925, dipping for a couple of decades and then rising again beginning in the 1950s. The earliest reference I can find on Google Books is an 1879 lecture of the American scholar Felix Adler. Adler probably borrowed the phrase mind-body problem from German scholars. By the mid-19th century, Germans were referring to the “Körper-Seele Problem,” “Leib-Seele Problem” and “Psychophysisches Problem,” all of which roughly translate to mind-body problem. (“Körper” and “Leib” mean body and “Seele” means soul.)
Scholars pondered the mind-body problem, of course, well before the phrase was coined. Descartes often gets credit for being the first thinker to worry about the connection between mind and matter. According to the Oxford Reference, Descartes only appreciated the problem “after he received a letter in 1643 from Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia (1596–1662), the daughter of King James I of England and VI of Scotland, pointing it out.”
Socrates, via Plato, posed the mind-body problem much earlier, in the 4th century B.C. Talking to his students in his prison cell, Socrates complained about philosophers who explain the world in terms of physical things, such as “air, and ether, and water, and other eccentricities.” How, Socrates asked, would such a philosopher explain what he is doing in this prison?
Well, Socrates replied to his own question, the philosopher might point out that he, Socrates, “is made up of bones and muscles… and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I am sitting here in a curved posture.”
But that would be a lousy explanation, Socrates pointed out, because the “true cause” of his situation “is that the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence.” Socrates continues:
It may be said, indeed, that without bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I cannot execute my purposes. But to say that I do as I do because of them, and that this is the way in which mind acts, and not from the choice of the best, is a very careless and idle mode of speaking.
To my mind, that is a clear expression of the mind-body problem, and the limits of physical explanations. Yes, we’re bodies, physical things subject to physical forces. But we also have minds, which have causes — such as our sense of right and wrong, of “the best” — that cannot be reduced to physiology. Viewing ourselves as nothing but bodies leads to what Socrates called a “strange confusion of causes and conditions.”
Science has come a long way since Socrates, and we explain our minds in terms of brain cells, neurotransmitters, and hormones. Yet the mind-body problem still provokes “strange confusion.” Or, worse, indifference. One of my goals as a writer is to get people to care about the mind-body problem, to make them realize that it is the central mystery of existence, the one toward which all other mysteries converge. It really asks, What are we? But getting people to understand and care about the mind-body problem is another mind-body problem.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one originally published on his Scientific American blog, “Cross-check.”
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