Mind–body problem
Clearly, a good deal rides on a satisfactory solution to the problem of mental causation [and] there is more than one way in which puzzles about the mind's "causal relevance" to behavior (and to the physical world more generally) can arise.
Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia puts it forcefully to him in a 1643 letter: how the human soul can determine the movement of the animal spirits in the body so as to perform voluntary acts—being as it is merely a conscious substance.
For the determination of movement seems always to come about from the moving body's being propelled—to depend on the kind of impulse it gets from what sets it in motion, or again, on the nature and shape of this latter thing's surface.
Now the first two conditions involve contact, and the third involves that the impelling thing has extension; but you utterly exclude extension from your notion of soul, and contact seems to me incompatible with a thing's being immaterial... Elizabeth is expressing the prevailing mechanistic view as to how causation of bodies works.
[3]Contemporary neurophilosopher Georg Northoff suggests that mental causation is compatible with classical formal and final causality.
Proponents of this approach have expressed the hope that it will ultimately dissolve the Cartesian divide between the immaterial mind and the material existence of human beings (Damasio, 1994; Gallagher, 2005).
[10][page needed] The neural correlates of consciousness "are the smallest set of brain mechanisms and events sufficient for some specific conscious feeling, as elemental as the color red or as complex as the sensual, mysterious, and primeval sensation evoked when looking at [a] jungle scene..."[12] Neuroscientists use empirical approaches to discover neural correlates of subjective phenomena.
Non-human analysis such as this, in combination with imaging of the human brain, have contributed to a robust and increasingly predictive theoretical framework.
Brain arousal level fluctuates in a circadian rhythm but these natural cycles may be influenced by lack of sleep, alcohol and other drugs, physical exertion, etc.
Arousal can be measured behaviorally by the signal amplitude required to trigger a given reaction (for example, the sound level that causes a subject to turn and look toward the source).
[24] Many nuclei with distinct chemical signatures in the thalamus, midbrain and pons must function for a subject to be in a sufficient state of brain arousal to experience anything at all.
Conversely it is likely that the specific content of any particular conscious sensation is mediated by particular neurons in the cortex and their associated satellite structures, including the amygdala, thalamus, claustrum and the basal ganglia.
Psychophysical parallelism is a third possible alternative regarding the relation between mind and body, between interaction (dualism) and one-sided action (monism).
[26] An explicit rejection of the dichotomy is found in French structuralism, and is a position that generally characterized post-war Continental philosophy.
[33][34] This theory has changed throughout the years, and in the 20th century its main adherents were the philosopher of science Karl Popper and the neurophysiologist John Carew Eccles.
[32] This viewpoint explains that while one's body may react to them feeling joy, fear, or sadness, that the emotion does not cause the physical response.
Furthermore, this viewpoint states that both mental and physical stimuli and reactions are experienced simultaneously by both the mind and body, however, there is no interaction nor communication between the two.
[46] His explanation of pre-established harmony relied heavily upon God as the external agent who coordinated the mental and bodily events of all things in the beginning.
Leibniz's pre-established harmony attempts to answer this puzzle, by saying that mental and physical events are not genuinely related in any causal sense, but only seem to interact due to psycho-physical fine-tuning.
Under pre-established harmony, the preprogramming of each mind must be extremely complex, since only it causes its own thoughts or actions, for as long as it exists.
His conception of the relationship between God and his normative nature actualized in the existing world recalls both the pre-established harmony of Leibniz and the Deus sive Natura of Baruch Spinoza.
[51] The problem was popularized by René Descartes in the 17th century, which resulted in Cartesian dualism, also by pre-Aristotelian philosophers,[52][53] in Avicennian philosophy,[54] and in earlier Asian traditions.
[28] The components that make up the mind are known as the five aggregates (i.e., material form, feelings, perception, volition, and sensory consciousness), which arise and pass away continuously.
Ultimately, the Buddha's philosophy is that both mind and forms are conditionally arising qualities of an ever-changing universe in which, when nirvāna is attained, all phenomenal experience ceases to exist.
[56] According to the anattā doctrine of the Buddha, the conceptual self is a mere mental construct of an individual entity and is basically an impermanent illusion, sustained by form, sensation, perception, thought and consciousness.
He believed the soul was temporarily united with the body and would only be separated at death, when it, if pure, would return to the world of Forms; otherwise, reincarnation follows.
[62] Working in the Aristotelian-influenced tradition of Thomism, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), like Aristotle, believed that the mind and the body are one, like a seal and wax; therefore, it is pointless to ask whether or not they are one.
The first formal concept of a "mind–body" split may be found in the divinity–secularity dualism of the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism around the mid-fifth century BC.
These ideas later seem to have been incorporated into Galen's "tripartite soul" [64] that led into both the Christian sentiments[65] expressed in the later Augustinian theodicy and Avicenna's Platonism in Islamic Philosophy.
[70]Alfred North Whitehead advocated a sophisticated form of panpsychism that has been called by David Ray Griffin panexperientialism.
