The Mind and Body of a Mouse

[I have for the most part this week neglected my blogging duties. The reason does not trace entirely to jet lag. Tomorrow I am to perform as a Unitarian-Universalist minister, "preaching" to the congregation of the UU Fellowship in Fredericksburg, VA. I have spent the most productive hours of the past few days honing the words of my "sermon." [I also had a lot of neglected grass to mow.] The following few paragraphs appear somewhere around the middle of my talk. They follow the section where I make it "as clear as the light of day" that the truth of science constitutes a critically inseparable part of the religious man’s truth (and presumably, religious woman's too). The subject addressed here is by no means "settled science," as I indicate, and I welcome any contributions any of you may wish to make to a deeper understanding of the unity of mind and body -- or their separation, as the case may be.]

We can assume that the human brain – a physical thing – operates in accord with physical laws. We may not yet know those laws, but if Spinoza was right such laws do exist.

Now consider that the ideas we have about the physical world operate by mental laws. One such law might be the law of association. We’re able to associate similar ideas. We may for instance see a blue sky, and be led to connect the blueness of the sky to Paul Bunyon's big blue ox, Babe. We may then associate the ox to a man plowing a field with an ox-driven plow, and from that image be reminded of Edwin Markham’s poem, The Man With the Hoe, which images the man as “brother to the ox,” and from that recollection of the leftist poet’s work be led to think of the color “red.” So blue and red are related in the mind by the law of association, that is, by a series of mental causes and mental effects.

But nowhere in the physical brain – looked at and analyzed only as a physical thing – nowhere can we find anything that resembles the series of associations by which blue and red were “logically” connected. We may see and completely understand the interactions of neurons and glial cells, we may analyze, name, and describe the functions of every physical part of every one of the billions of neurons and their axons, we may map the connections of every one of the trillion or so dendrites, we may know and be able to assign functional roles to every chemical flowing in every synapse . . . but we cannot conceive that any of what we have thus come to know of the physical brain will contain anything like the experience of joy or sorrow, nothing like a picture or a feeling or a color or a sound or an aroma. We will know nothing of the world of human experience. To quote a famous linguist, “The map is not the territory.”

Earlier I spoke with a measure of disdain of a mindset we associate with Lynchburg, Virginia. I could just as scornfully speak of the level of disdain held in certain scientific circles of the Spinozistic conclusions I just expressed. Modern scientific dogma holds that all effects can be reduced to physical causes. That is, that what we refer to as consciousness is “nothing but” an effect of a physical brain. Once we take seriously the fact that a disagreement exists between physicalism and Spinozism, an esoteric debate ensues, one far too complex for me at any time, and certainly too technical for an assembly in a religious fellowship. If you’d like to follow-up on that subject, just google “hard problem” and “Chalmers” and follow the thousands of links. Finally, you’ll see that the physicalists conclude that the problem associated with the mind and consciousness is just another one of the unknowns that science will eventually make known, while the opposition, primarily David Chalmers, says the physicalists just don’t see the difference between “the hard problem” and the other problems science has dealt with. I hope my grandchildren’s grandchildren live long enough to see the end of that discussion.

In any case, Spinoza, in claiming that the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things, has said that, even though our ideas cannot be explained by reference to physical causes, there still is, for every idea, a physical counterpart. We may explain the physical operation of the brain by referring to physical laws, but to understand the order and connection of ideas, we need to refer to mental laws. Psychological causes and effects can be studied separately from their physical counterparts. Most scientists agree. It also follows that any change in the physical brain will be accompanied by a change in mental activity. Scientists would certainly agree with that. But when we finally come to grasp Spinoza’s dual aspect theory – that changes in minds and bodies occur simultaneously – it necessarily follows that any change in either the mind or the body will be accompanied by a change in the other. The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things. . . .