The process of understanding the invisible has always been interesting to the philosophers of the epochs preceding the development of science and medicine to the extent when the miracle of thinking could have been explained physiologically. Descartes’ vision of the concept of mind and body and their interconnections is still widely discussed in the philosophical circles as the basic misconception that had been present back then.
Descartes thought that the human mind should be something intangible and invisible as opposed to the human body. He expressed the idea that mind was capable of existing without the physical body, and that their functions (of body and mind) were very different. In “Meditation VI”, the philosopher says that the concepts of the body and mind are substantially unlike (Roger & Watkins 47). In other words, God could have created only minds without bodies and bodies without minds. In this case, both entities can exist apart from each other. However, Descartes meant that it was essential for God to create bodies and minds having the natural interconnection to create these two entities so that they could exist separately.
Regarding the indivisibility, Descartes provided the following reasoning. According to the philosopher, body and mind are two distinct entities since each of them possesses distinct properties. The focal point of Descartes’ reasoning was the idea that mind was impossible to divide while body could have been divided into different parts. He argued that while he considered his mind as a whole and could not distinguish any separate parts, the entire mind was able to think, have desires, doubts, and other intangible things (Roger & Watkins 62).
The mind cannot be devised; only the ways of thinking can be different. On the other hand, human bodies have parts that can be easily divisible. Based on this assumption, Descartes believed that mind and body are absolutely different types of entities. This concept was the cornerstone of the dualism of substances. The peculiarity Descartes’ position was the fact that he defended the concept of dualism using metaphysics as well as epistemology to support his arguments instead of theology.
Thomas Nagel in the article “Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness” provided clear proof of the inconsistency of Descartes’ ideas about the indivisibility of mind. Nagel presented the data about the patient’s brain that had two hemispheres disconnected. During the course of observations, he managed to discover that patients with surgically severed corpus callosum (the substance that connects the hemispheres) were unable to use the entire brain in full. In other words, the following experiment took place: people were asked questions that could have been answered using both parts of the brain.
The results were astonishing since these questions could not have been answered appropriately because the brain centers responsible for the different functions of the patients’ bodies (language center, for example) were in different parts of the disconnected brain. The experiment clearly showed that mind was divisible as well as the body. It has interconnections that can be broken to make the entire brain partially dysfunctional, which could not have been imagined by Descartes and the followers in the seventeenth century.
Introspection is one of the human activities that allow people to understand the reality of the mental. The thing is in the following: mental processes can affect human bodies as positively as well as negatively. Reflection can be used to discover the problems that the subconscious part of a brain hides from a person but influences his or her life negatively. It is necessary to have introspection as the activity that can help to understand oneself better and become better, using this understanding as the tool to improve one’s behavior, attitude towards something or somebody and do many other things a human mind is capable of.
The reality of the mental can be proven in the light of introspection use if to think about the following activity. When a person thinks about someone he or she loves or is attracted by, it clearly affects the mood and physical condition. It can be as positive as well as negative considering the actual state of the relationship between the “thinker” and the object of attraction or love. The feeling of happiness or sorrow is provoked by the hormones that are produced and released into the blood stream by the appropriate organs.
The process of the hormones’ production and releasing is controlled by the brain. The associations and images that emerge in the conscious part of the introspection process are stored in the brain. It means that the body of the person during the introspection is affected by the physical outcomes of the mental process like remembering, imaging, dreaming, and the other similar processes.
When a body is under the influence of hormones, it causes the change of the blood pressure, skin color, heart rate, and similar outcomes. It should be enough for a person to understand that introspection makes the mental to be a rather real, physically present power. Additionally, there is no evidence that mind can exist without a body but there are many facts that support the idea that mind cannot exist without a body. Body produces everything that is needed to a brain to exist.
A damaged brain can support body even in the situation when the conscious part of the human self is not present anymore. Descartes tried to explain the dualism concept using metaphysics and epistemology, but it did not work well because back then, the medical science and other sciences about human body and mind were not developed enough to understand the processes that are present in both body and mind.
Summing, the efforts of Descartes were innovative and advanced considering the development of the relevant scientific areas of that time. On the other hand, Thomas Nagel clearly proved that brain is divisible and can function (yet not in full) even being divided to the certain extent. It is also clear that introspection is one of the important activities of a human being that allows to understand the mental better and realize that it has physical influence.
Human body is a very complex and interconnected system of systems and brain is the ‘control center’ of these systems and subsystems. It has a great influence on each cell in a human body, sending signals to the organs that keep the body alive and well. It is not possible to imagine the existence of a mind without a body. However, this area is undiscovered yet to the extent that would allow being sure that it is possible or not. Future studies in this area should help to understand this area better and someday maybe some of the future philosophers will say that mind can exist without a body, having enough empirical evidence to make such claims.
Works Cited
Ariew, Roger, and Eric Watkins. Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2009. Print.