The mind and body problem dates back to Plato. Some would say Plato was the first dualist and Aristotle the first materialist. Descartes is perhaps the philosopher that most people reference when discussing the mind-body problem, for Descartes there are the two substances; mind, and matter each substance has a defining attribute. In the case of the mind it is thought and in the case of matter it is spatial extension. It is important to note that for Descartes, the two substances can have nothing in common, otherwise they would not be fundamentally different things. The mind-body problem arises out of this view, because if mind-body have nothing in common, then how do they interact.
One way is Dualism in regard to philosophy of the mind, dualism is a set of beliefs which begins with the claim that the mental and the physical have a fundamentally different nature. Dualism has been the driving force behind the mind-body problem and has been by far the majority view until recently partially due to the influence of Descartes. He claimed that the pineal gland was the interface between the mind and the rest of the brain. One way to explain how the mental interacts with the material is dualistic interactionism otherwise known as Cartesian dualism (Descartes, 1649). This is arguably the most popular and widespread version and it implies that mind events can cause physical events and vice versa. This leads to the most substantial claim against Cartesian dualism; the Cartesian gap. How can an immaterial mind cause anything in a material body? This is called the ‘problem of interactionism’. Descartes himself struggled to come up with a feasible explanation for the problem. One supporter of Dualism is David Chalmers he says, “Human kind has grown up with dualism, we are all naturally dualists: the mechanistic basis of our thoughts is invisible to our introspection and casual powers of observation” (Chalmers, 1990).
One of the ways in answering or avoiding the ‘problem of interaction’ comes under the name of Epiphenomenalism which is the notion that physical events have mental effects, but mental events have no effects of any kind. It was Thomas Huxley (1895) who coined the term in an article he wrote for the fortnightly review of 1874. In so doing Huxley willingly sacrificed the notion of free will as an illusion despite its deep embedment in our language and common sense. For the epiphenomenalists the brain was a machine like everything in nature and the mind no more than a passive reflection of its activity. During the present century various attempts have been made to refine the formulation of epiphenomenalism. Thus, the so called ‘mind-brain identity’ theory associated with Herbert Feigl in the USA and with Bertrand Russell in UK which flourished during the 1950’s insisted that the mental events we associate with consciousness are just the relevant brain events but viewed, as it were from the inside rather than the outside. Another supporter of epiphenomenalism is John Searle he said if your theory results in the view that consciousness does not exist, you have simply produced a reductio ad absurdum (reduction to the absurd) of your theory.
Another theory is known as Materialism which is that everything is either made only of matter or is ultimately dependent upon matter for its existence and nature. One of the first materialists to emerge was Aristotle, later on Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi represented the materialist stance in opposition to Rene Descartes. Key materialists included Karl Mark And Friedrich Engels who twisted the idealist’s dialects of George Heigl and provided materialists with a view on processes of a quantitative and qualitative change called Dialectal materialism and with a materialist account of the course of history known as historical materialism. In recent years Paul and Patricia Churchland have advocated an extreme form of materialism known as eliminative which states that mental phenomena simply do not exist at all, that talk of the mental reflects a totally spurious ‘folk psychology’ that simply has no basis in fact, something like the way that folk science speaks of demon-cursed illness. Eliminative materialism is an extreme reductionist theory, which appears to discount the possibility of a scientific psychology.
Another theory is functionalism which proposes that if an object is created under the style of functionalism that means that its artistic beauty cannot be separated from its function. Functionalism is the dominant theory of mental states in modern philosophy. Functionalism was developed as an answer to the mind-body problem because of objections to both the identity theory and logical behaviourism. According to functionalists the mental states that make up consciousness can essentially be redefined as complex interactions between different functional processes. Because these processes are not limited to a particular physical state or physical medium they can be realized in multiple ways, including theoretically within non-biological systems. This affords consciousness the opportunity to exist in non-human minds. It has been shown that the human brain has ‘functional plasticity’ such that people with as much as half their brains removed during early infancy apparently can develop into adults whose behaviour cannot be distinguished from other adults with their original brain intact.
Functionalism is similar to behaviourism but differs from it in allowing the existence of mental states. From a functionalist viewpoint consciousness and intelligence is a matter of the patterns and structures that are formed by complex physical processes, such as can go on in a brain or a computer memory. One thinker who has been particularly influential in presenting mental processed as being computational and formal is Jerry Foder. In general, the functionalist approach sees mental operations as being like the software that is running on the computer, while the brain itself is the hardware. This is known as the ‘computational model of mind’. This view was contested by John Searle in his well-known ‘Chinese room’ thought experiment, his argument is that with suitable programming instructions it would be possible for the correct answers to be given to the questions without the person who gives those answers actually understanding anything other than the application of the programmed rules (Searle, 2004).