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Mind-Body Problem
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The "Mind-Body Problem cartoon was originally drawn for "Australasian Psychiatry", a journal of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists. It was a kind of counterpoint to a serious psycho-philosophical discussion.
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[One] path by which the mind-body problem has been transcended is much trodden by the emergentists. It is the theory of evolution. The key point of evolution is its gradualism. At what point does mind appear? Animals evidently feel (though this was hotly debated in the wake of Cartesianism). Do they then think?
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Most of those working on the mind-body problem today believe that the mind is in some sense physical; but there is much disagreement about what this comes to. One view (the so-called mind-brain identity theory) is that psychological states are simply special physical states: for example, pain was once thought to be the firing of C-fibres. A more popular strategy is to identify mental features with functional properties: what makes something a pain is its characteristic causes (injury) and effects (groaning, worry, actions one believes will alleviate it) — much as what makes something a carburettor is the role it plays in the functioning of an internal combustion engine. Thus, pain might be a different state, as it were, in different creatures.
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While this is already quite "far out" for traditional philosphers of mind, there's another take on the mind-body problem that will be interesting to highlight in this context as well. Perennialism offers a fresh perspective on human consiousness, its embodiment(s) and the world(s) it belongs to. Naturally, this changes the status of the mind-body problem considerably! It ... helps clarify some of Wilber's statements regarding subtle energies, subtle "bodies" and subtle "realms", which feature in his more "esoteric" writings.[15]
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The author refers to the ‘mind-body’ problem in ways that in his other writing he sees as the problem of modelling consciousness. While there is not all that much agreement about the distinction between the two, the author should be clear about the position on this that he is recommending to the reader. As read at present, the article seems to blur the two. AUTHOR'S RESPONSE: This important deifinitional point has been corrected and in several places (sepcifcially the introduction and the conclusions sections)the 'mind-body problem' specified as being about the 'conscious mind' and brain (for reasons stated int eintroduction).
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The mind-body problem arises from an intuition that, somehow, the mind is fundamentally different than matter. If that is the case, then at least two questions immediately arise. First, if mind is different than matter, then what is its nature? Second, if mind and matter are distinct, then in what way do they exert causal influence over each other? How does the body affect the mind and how does the mind affect the body?
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Mind-Body Problem