Jon Jones
Picture your mind. What does it look like? How big is it? Is your thought about trees next to your thought about churches, or across the room? These all seem to be silly questions. Of course no one knows what their mind looks like, or where thoughts are. However, each of these properties are physical properties, properties which any physical object would have. The fact that the mind doesn’t seem to have shape, size, or distance seems to indicate that the mind is not a physical object. This, however, causes a problem. It seems strange to think that a non-physical thing could affect a physical thing, yet that is precisely what we believe the mind to be doing. How could this be?
One rather simple way to answer this problem is to deny that it exists. That is, you could merely deny that the mind is not a physical object. This theory tends to say that all things are physical things, including minds, and thus there are no non-physical things to worry about, or how they could affect physical things. This theory is adopted by almost all scientists, and is almost a necessity for a study of psychiatry.
What, then, is the mind? The mind is just a part of the brain, or rather a function of the brain. The mind is just what we call a collection of brain cells that work together in a certain way to produce consciousness. However, in order to prove that this is the case, or even to show that it is plausible, it would be very helpful to have some model of the mind that is completely physical, and yet can completely mimic all mind functions. This is where computers come in.
As computers become more and more advanced, many attempts at designing an artificial intelligence have been done. Essentially, they are trying to take a physical object and imbue it with intelligence, and a mind. These attempts have focused on such things as human game playing ability, such as chess, to solving problems of logic, to understanding language. Each new artificial intelligence seems closer and closer to accurately mimicking the human mind. It would appear that if an artificial intelligence was ever completely successful in mimicking the human mind, we would have to acknowledge that it is at least possible for all of our mind functions to be the result of something physical, e.g. our brain.
But this doesn’t seem like much of a success, really. If all that can be proved by the computer model of the mind is that it is possible that the mind is formed by a physical thing, why bother? Even if everything turned our correctly and the computer brilliantly mimicked a human mind, nothing would be proven, and all that time would seem to have gone to waste. However, even this mediocre success may be well out of the reach of cognitive scientists.
What method could possibly be used to test the artificial intelligence that seems to mimic the mind so well to determine just how well it mimics the mind? Physical tests, of course, since we don’t haven any non-physical ways of performing tests. But what would this prove? All it could possibly prove is that a physical model might successfully mimic the physically measurable portions of the mind. In other words, there may very well be some other parts that the model does not account for, and which cannot be measured physically. Which means that, at the very best, an accurate artificial intelligence could show that it is possible that the physically measurable portions of the mind could be produced by a physical object. This doesn’t seem like much of a success at all, especially because it does not pin down whether the mind is only a physical thing.
I believe I have now shown that it is folly to build an artificial intelligence to try to prove the mind is just a physical thing, because it just won’t prove anything. Of course, there are plenty of other reasons to build an artificial intelligence; my point is that it really has little place in cognitive science as anything more than an example of the way things could be. Thus, it is necessary that any proof that is done for the mind as a physical object must be done a priori. Any empirical proofs would have exactly the same problem as the artificial intelligence “proof”.
At this point the reader may be wondering what possible other theories could explain the mind-body problem. One is that the mind uses some connector that can connect both to the physical world and the non-physical world. However, this just places the problem onto some other object, and isn’t very helpful. Another theory is that the mind does not affect anything physical; it just seems to. When I think to move my arm, it is a mistake for me to believe that I am actually moving my arm with that thought. Instead, my brain issues a command to my arm to raise. As it so happens, my thought and the brain command happen at precisely the same time. However, this doesn’t actually mean that they are related in any way.
If that is not immediately obvious to you, take a similar situation in which two things happen simultaneously, and yet neither is the cause of the other. At a particular beach, as ice cream sales go higher, deaths by drowning also increase. Would anyone really say that the cause of the increase in drowning deaths was the sale of ice cream? Of course not. As it turns out, they are both caused because there were more people on the beach. More people means more ice cream sales, and more deaths by drowning. However, drowning has nothing to do with eating ice cream.
In exactly the same way, mind activity doesn’t necessarily have to be connected with brain activity. All thoughts could be caused by non-physical things, while all brain activity could be caused by purely physical things, such as stimulus response. In fact, scientists theorize that, after enough study, they will be able to predict and describe all brain activity purely based on all physical occurrences to that brain. In other words, our minds could easily just be observers, completely helpless to do anything at all to change the situation, but not worrying about it because what is done is precisely what the mind wanted to be done anyway.
This theory really has some strengths. The first is that it allows for non-physical things to exist. It also allows us to keep our view that the mind is one of these non-physical things, and that our thoughts have neither shape, size, or location. It also allows us to explain how we can predict behavior based solely on brain activity. In other words, it allows us to keep our idea of the mind intact despite the enormous success of such sciences as psychology.
As might be expected, that are weaknesses as well. One of them is that it destroys all control and responsibility over our actions. Free will is impossible when you are unable to make decisions over your own actions. To use a rather strange parallel, this theory would make the mind Controller 2 in a one player game. The analogy is in relation to a video game in which there are two game pads available to use. Two people pick up the game pads, and start to press buttons. Because the character on the screen seems to be doing what they tell it to, they assume they are in control. However, only one of the game pads actually controls the character, and thus only one of the players is controlling the character. The other just blindly presses buttons, totally feeble yet totally convinced he is in control.
Most people would not want to give up the idea of free will, at least if the only benefit was to keep their notion that the mind is a non-physical thing. Another disadvantage appeals to the notion that everything that is in the universe has some sort of purpose, some reason for being there. My opposable thumb is there so I can pick things up. My ear is there so I can receive and interpret sound waves. What purpose would the mind have in a universe where it has no control over the body? It seems like it would be good for nothing. It seems like it would be completely expendable, and therefore the universe would be best served in removing all minds. Is that really the conclusion we want to draw? Do we really want to think that we would be better off without our minds?
This theory, then, seems to be unappealing at best. It doesn’t really help model the mind, and it brings with it all sorts of unwanted conclusions. What, then, is there left for people who want to continue believing that the mind is separate from the brain, and yet want control over their life? I’d like to propose a theory at this point which, for lack of a better term, I shall call the “same thing but different” theory.
According to physics, there are three main forces in the universe: electro-magnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces. These three forces make up every other force in the universe. Now that scientists have narrowed the forces down to these three, they search ever harder to discover the one force which is responsible for the creation of these three main forces, which are responsible for all other forces. In other words, they’d like for all forces to be explained by some one force. In the same way, it is possible that all non-physical things and all physical things are created out of the same thing, and therefore are able to affect one another. A rock, being solid and not liquid, can nevertheless affect the flow of a river. Wind, being gaseous and not solid, can knock over a tree. Why? Because at their core, they are all made up of atoms. Perhaps non-physical and physical things are really created out of exactly the same material, which is neither physical nor non-physical. Since they share that common bond, it doesn’t seem too strange to suppose that one could have an effect on the other.
We don’t know what this common material is, but that is hardly an argument against the concept of the argument. Probably the only real disadvantage would be if scientists were indeed able to predict every thing that happens in the brain based solely on physical evidence, since this would seem to make minds worthless, as per the previous theory. Until that is determined, however, free will remains intact, as does our idea of a non-physical mind. In other words, the only real problem with the theory is that it might very well be proved wrong. If this does not occur, however, no real sacrifice needs to be made, except that it would push scientists to go further and further to find out what makes up these physical atoms, and what makes thoughts, and what could possibly make both.
As you can see, there are many things that are uncertain about the mind-body question. Many theories have been produced, but none without some cost involved. While the computer model of the mind can help, it only really deals with the physically measurable parts of the mind, which doesn’t seem to be the whole picture in many cases. The mind is a mysterious thing, and will probably continue to mystify and amaze us for a great deal of time to come.