George
The smartest and greatest thinker the world has ever known was George. He invented the game of chess, which still quite popular. It has never achieved such rave reviews as George’s greatest hits: fire and the wheel.
Despite he amazing contributions, George has never been a household name. Partly due natural shyness, part due to the lack of pen and paper, the accomplishments of George have gone unheralded.
As George shows, not every great thinker is well known. No one knows who founded Hinduism. It’s the world’s third largest religion but its origins are obscure. similarly, no one knows when Abraham, father of Judaism, was born.
As it turns out, history had to be invented. A lot of living occurred before people started writing down events that happened, or described people they knew or event that happened.
And even then, only the rich got mentioned. Sure, only the rich could afford a scribe. And only the rich really mattered, at least to other rich people. But the reason you can trace your ancestry to some king and not to some horse thief is that the horse thief couldn’t afford a press agent. Slaves and surfs had relatively little social media presence.
Progress is not linear. Ideas hopscotch through history. One idea may be popular and then jump to another century. It might start in religion, zigzag to science, hop to philosophy and land in computer science. There may be a grand scheme but ideas seem to show up by chance.
Consider the nature of man, as a case in point.
Judaism proposed a bipartite nature. People are composed of body and soul. God created man out of the dust of the earth, and breathed into it the breath of life (Genesis 2:7). Much later, Greek philosophers continued this body-soul dualism.
In contrast, some early Christian writers held a trichotomous view of human nature. A third part was added. According to this view, individuals are composed of body, soul and spirit. Justine Martyr and Clement of Alexandria held this view. But both of these were greatly influenced by the writings of Saul of Tarsus (aka, the Apostle Paul). The tripartite view appears to not have been popular until the Apostle Paul.
Three separate components seems like a problem to decide what survives death. But most trichotomonists believe the soul and spirit survive; only the body dies. In general, this formal three-part theology is converted to a daily dualism when needed.
As history progresses, dichotomy becomes trichotomy becomes dichotomy. Jumping forward a thousand plus years, Descartes reaffirms dualism. This gave him two great advantages.
First, Descartes could study nature. At a time when the Catholic Church was in one of its anti-science moods, Descartes could study the body and physical nature of things without impinging on the soul. If God put the universe in motion, one could study how the system works without questioning God’s rule. Descartes was simply explaining how God did things, not why.
Second, a dual nation allowed Descartes to differentiate between reflex (body) and voluntary actions (soul). This voluntary-involuntary dualism continues to today. Voluntary behaviors are the result of the cerebral processes of the brain. Involuntary behaviors are the result of the subcortical processes of the Limbic system. Think and do with the brain; react and do with the structures under the brain.
In addition to dualism (and tripartitsm), there is monism. Monism is not a new idea. Hinduism and Indian philosophy have long maintained that the body and mind are inseparable. One influences the other reciprocally. If one dies, so does the other.
Hobbes, Spinoza and La Mettrie were all physical monists.
Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)
Although he was skilled at both Latin and Greek at age 15, as a philosopher Hobbes was a late bloomer. He was 40 when he read Euclid’s Elements and turned his attention to philosophy. Hobbes was 63 when he published his greatest work (Leviathan), and 88 when he translated the Iliad into English.
He was born in Malmesburg, England, where his father was a vicar. Malmesburg, built in 640, is in western England, along the Avon river. It’s closer to Bristol than to London, and the surrounding region of Wiltshire is best known for the Stonehenge megalith. When Hobbes was quite young, his father deserted the family, leaving them to fend for themselves. Fortunately, Hobbes was supported by his uncle, a wealthy glover, who paid for the boy’s education in private school and at Oxford. After graduation, a wealthy family hired Hobbes as a private tutor and he traveled widely with them.
In 1636, at the age of 47, Hobbes visits Galileo in Florence and comes away convinced that the universe is composed only of matter and motion. For him, man is a machine whose mental activity was reducible to the motion of atoms in the brain, and free will, spirit and mind are illusions.
Although Hobbes was friends with Francis Bacon (and served as his secretary for a short time), he rejected Bacon’s inductive reasoning in favor of the deductive methods of his other friends (Galileo and Descartes). He builds his case as a chain of deductive proofs.
Thomas Hobbes is best known for his “trains of thought,” his Laws of Nature, and his emphasis on social contracts. According to Hobbes, ideas tend to follow each other, like cars of a train. These “trains of thought” are often unguided and rambling but they become orderly when two ideas are similar. One association leads to another, like train cars all coupled end to end, forming trains of thought. Although the metaphor was new, the concept of association dates back to ancient Athens. Hobbes reintroduced Plato’s and Aristotle’s explanation of learning by wrapping it in an undated package.
Hobbes proposed that there are Laws of Nature that govern human interaction. These laws are society’s way of countering the essential selfishness of people. Although these laws coincide with God’s commands, they can be discovered by reason alone and should be obeyed for purely secular reasons. For Hobbes, people are motivated by selfishness. Even good behavior is the result of personal selfishness. Good behavior leads to good internal feeling. Consequently, we do good things because we derive some internal benefit. Nature’s laws, which include the laws of peace, duty, and gratitude, are to be followed because it is in our best interest to be at peace. Moral laws are social contracts we make with other people for our mutual benefit.
For Hobbes, one thing leads to another. Just as one idea is linked to another to form a train of associations, one principle leads to another, like proofs of mathematics. Laws of Nature are connected to social contracts. Hobbes maintains that because people are basically selfish, they enter into social contracts with others out of self-preservation. Morality is a matter of convenience and survival. Nature is in a constant state of war and quarrelsomeness, so people form contracts (I won’t steal from you if you don’t steal from me) in order to survive. It is these social contracts that form the basis of civilization.
Hobbes’ ideas were quite radical. He combined the British empiricism of Bacon and the continental rationalism of Descartes. He emphasized the importance of sensory perception and experience but used the deductive reasoning and mathematical forms of geometry more characteristic of the continental thinkers. Because of his ideas, Hobbes was often at odds with those in power. From 1640-1651, he fled to France, fearful for his life. In 1667, the British House of Commons was readying a bill outlawing blasphemous literature. Hobbes had the dubious distinction of having his work Levianthan cited as an example of what should be banned.
Spinoza, Baruch (1632-1677)
In contrast to Descartes’ separation of God, mind and matter, Baruch (Benedict in Latin) Spinoza proposed an integrated view. Not three separate entities; three aspects of one substance. Although raised in the predominantly Christian city of Amsterdam, and contrary to the teaching of his parents who were Portuguese Jews, Spinoza was basically a pantheist (God does not exist as a separate entity but is in everything). He believed that mind and body can’t be separated because matter and soul are the same thing but viewed from different points of view. Spinoza’s double-aspectism (mind-body are two sides of the same coin) was in contrast to the dualism of Descartes and others. Dualists held that the material mind and spiritual mind were independent but had to meet somewhere. Spinoza’s monism eliminated the conflict by reducing mind and matter to the same substance.
La Mettrie, Julien (de) (1709-1751)
Born on December 25, La Mettrie was encouraged to become a priest but turned to medicine instead. Quick-witted and quick-tempered, La Mettrie wrote pointed and often satirical articles on medicine and its practice. During the war between France and Austria (1742), La Mettrie caught a high fever. During his recovery, he considered the relationship between the mind and body, and concluded that they are more fully intertwined that Descartes had proposed. Indeed, La Mettrie’s solution was to disavow any spiritual aspect of the mind. Like Hobbes, La Mettrie was a physical monist: all that exists is matter. Matter could be rearranged, which explained humans as being more complex animals, but there is no qualitative difference between them.
Physical monism is quite popular today. With all of the research on the brain, it is easy for people assume that brain activity explains all human behavior. Psychology can’t define, let alone study, the soul And it has no idea what survives death, if anything. Consequently, there is little hypothesizing of dualism explanations.
One theory often overlooked in the mind-body debate it’s spiritual monism.
Berkeley, George (1685-1753).
Born in Kilkenny, Ireland, Berkeley waseducated at Oxford, spent several years in Italy and America, and served for 18 years as the Anglican Bishop of Cloyne, Ireland.
In psychology, he is best known for his work on vision, his emphasis on associations and his belief that complex perceptions are composed of simple mental elements. In philosophy, he founded idealism and challenged Newton’s concepts of time and space. In 1866, Berkeley, California was named in his honor.
Berkeley’s 1709 book on vision explained how we perceive 3 dimensions with eyes which can only see in two dimensions. According to Berkeley, we perceive depth by associating the convergence of the eyes with other sensations (e.g., the size of an object is smaller as distance increases). His interest in perception also tied to Berkeley’s philosophy. He maintained that perception is the essence of being. In an attempt to counter what he perceived to be attacks on God, Berkeley proposed an imaginative argument against dualism and materialism.
Materialists reasoned that matter is all that exists so God cannot exist. Dualists maintained that this world is a bad copy of a separate world of ideas. Berkeley started with the premise that God exists and argued that without Him nothing would exist. Berkeley’s argument rested on 2 premises: (a) nothing can be perceived without a mind and (b) there are things the human mind can’t perceive. His conclusion was that there must be a mind that perceives everything seen and unseen: God. It is not so much that we perceive therefore we are (to paraphrase Descartes) but that we are, therefore someone is perceiving us. Although Berkeley’s philosophy was not widely accepted, his criticism of materialism and dualism founded a new approach called idealism.
Psychology’s Current State
In psychology, the mind-body problem continues to be debated. Even physical monists have trouble with this issue. If you assume all human behavior and experience is brain generated, there is more to consider.
It is difficult to study subjective experiences using objective methods. Consciousness is inherently subjective. It is unique for each person. Science is not particularly gifted at dealing with internal experiences.
you also have the problem of why. David Chalmers calls this the hard problem of consciousness. The easy problem of consciousness (how consciousness works) hasn’t been solved but the hard part is why. Why do we experience consciousness. Why does consciousness exist? Even if we figured out the structures and processes which produce consciousness, we are still left with the harder question of why we are conscious.
The mind-body problem is still an open issue. No solution has been found. Even George couldn’t solve this one.
