Mind and Body
Lena walks into the kitchen in bare feet and stubs her toe on the table leg. "Ouch!" She feels a sharp pain. The toe is a part of her body: you can see it, touch it and weigh it. The pain is a feeling: nobody else can see it or touch it, and it weighs nothing. Yet the knock on her toe made the pain. How can a body make a feeling?
What a mind is
The part of you that thinks, feels, wants and remembers is called your mind. Your pain is in your mind; so are your thoughts, your memories, your wishes and your dreams. Everyone agrees that minds and bodies are closely tied together. A knock on the toe makes a pain; a wish to wave makes your hand move. The question is what a mind is, and so how the tie works.
Two answers
The mind is something other than the body. In 1641 the French philosopher René Descartes tried to doubt everything he could. He could doubt that he had a body - he might be dreaming, as Mei was in the What Is Real? lesson. But he could not doubt that he was thinking, because doubting is a kind of thinking. So, he argued, he was first of all a thinking thing, and his mind was something other than his body. Some people also connect this answer with the soul; this course doesn't take a side on that.
The puzzle for this answer: if the mind is not part of the body at all, how can a stubbed toe make a pain in it, or a wish in it move a hand? A young princess, Elisabeth of Bohemia, asked Descartes exactly this in a letter in 1643. He never gave an answer that satisfied her.
The mind is what the brain does. A mind is not a separate thing, but the work a living brain does, the way digesting is what a stomach does. There is a lot of evidence for close ties: a knock on the head can change how someone thinks, tiredness slows thinking down, and some medicines change feelings. The puzzle for this answer: scientists can describe the brain cells that are busy when you taste chocolate. But the taste itself - what it is like - doesn't seem to be in that description anywhere. Why does any of the brain's work feel like something?
Try it at home
- Write down five things that happened in your mind today: a thought, a feeling, a wish, a memory, a worry.
- For each one, write something your body did that went with it.
- Which came first each time, the body or the mind?
Words to know
- mind - the part of you that thinks, feels, wants and remembers
Big idea
A knock on the toe makes a pain, and a wish moves a hand. Whether the mind is something other than the body, or what the brain does, each answer leaves a puzzle about how the two fit together.