What is the mind-body problem?
T Nagel
Ciba Foundation symposium 1993 DOI: 10.1002/9780470514412.ch1 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Brain Animals Humans Behavior Mental processes Consciousness Perception |
| Key points | Argues that the mind-body problem is theoretical rather than empirical: no present explanation could render the experience of color perception fully in physical terms without residue. Contends that philosophical attempts to resolve the problem generally rely on implausible, behavioristically inspired reductionism, and asks whether mental phenomena can be unified with objective reality without a narrow standard of objectivity. |
Abstract
The mind-body problem exists because we naturally want to include the mental life of conscious organisms in a comprehensive scientific understanding of the world. On the one hand it seems obvious that everything that happens in the mind depends on, or is, something that happens in the brain. On the other hand the defining features of mental states and events, features like their intentionality, their subjectivity and their conscious experiential quality, seem not to be comprehensible simply in terms of the physical operation of the organism. This is not just because we have not yet accumulated enough empirical information: the problem is theoretical. We cannot at present imagine an explanation of colour perception, for example, which would do for that phenomenon what chemistry has done for combustion--an explanation which would tell us in physical terms, and without residue, what the experience of colour perception is. Philosophical analyses of the distinguishing features of the mental that are designed to get us over this hurdle generally involve implausible forms of reductionism, behaviouristic in inspiration. The question is whether there is another way of bringing mental phenomena into a unified conception of objective reality, without relying on a narrow standard of objectivity which excludes everything that makes them interesting.