Mind Body

There is no mind-body problem any more than there is a program-computer or software-hardware problem. The original mind-body problem was that of early philosophers inability to reconcile the apparent immaterial nature of the mind with the physical nature of the body.

Now we 'know' that, like computer software, there are different ways to view the same thing. Software running on a computer can be though of either the way we programmers usually think of it, just as a running program 'in' the computer, or as electrons running around transistor gates on a chip.

For evidence of this nature consider the various methods of brain scanning that indicate that different specific areas of the physical brain are active during specific kinds of activities. This indicates that particular activities by the so-called nonphysical mind have a predictable (to a degree) and repeatable effects on the brain.

In the reverse direction, there are many methods of brain stimulation (ranging from transcrainial magnetic to direct, open-skull electrical and chemical stimulation) that have repeatble and (somewhat) predictable effects on both the body and the mind of the subject.

One could postulate that there is some unknown mechanism that forms a link between the substance of the brain and the 'nonphysical' mind, and that this mechanism translates causes between the two seperate entities, however, there isn't any experimental evidence that leads us to that conclusion. Our experiments pretty clearly point to the brain being, in part, the physical substrait of the mind, in the same sense that a computer chip can be the physical substrait of a computer program.

This is not to say that we understand in detail how what we call the 'self' arises from the activity of the brain, or even that we know most of the details about how the physical processes in the brain function. Just that there is evidence that the 'mind' is one aspect of the functions the brain provides.