Questions: The Mind-Body Problem

Question 1

Descartes held that mind and body are two entirely distinct substances. What is the 'interaction problem' this creates?

• A. It is impossible to distinguish mental states from physical states without a brain scanner
• B. If mind and body are radically different kinds of thing, it is unclear how they could causally affect each other
• C. Mental states cannot be measured or quantified by any scientific instrument
• D. The brain is too complex to map onto the contents of conscious experience

Answer: (B)

Descartes' substance dualism posits that the mind is immaterial (res cogitans) and the body is material (res extensa). The problem is that causation between two things normally requires they share some medium of interaction. How does an entirely non-physical mind move a physical limb? Descartes himself never satisfactorily resolved this, and it became the central objection to his view.

Question 2

Identifying which brain regions activate during conscious experience dissolves the philosophical mind-body problem.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

Neuroscience can establish correlations between brain states and mental states, but correlation is not the same as explanation of how or why the physical gives rise to the mental. The philosophical question — whether mental states are identical to, constituted by, or merely correlated with physical states — remains open regardless of how precisely we map brain activity. This is sometimes called the 'hard problem.'

Question 3

Physicalism avoids the interaction problem that dualism faces. What new difficulty does physicalism encounter in its place?

Model answer: Physicalism faces the explanatory gap: even if mental states are physical states, it is unclear why or how purely physical processes give rise to subjective experience. There is also the problem of mental causation in a different form — how do mental properties (as distinct from the underlying physical properties) do any causal work?

Dualism struggles to explain how two radically different substances interact. Physicalism struggles to explain why physical processes feel like anything at all — the so-called explanatory gap or hard problem of consciousness. Physicalism also inherits a version of the mental causation problem: if everything that happens is determined by physical causes, what role do mental properties play in causing behavior?