The Nature of the Mind: Exploring the Relationship Between the Mental and Physical World

“Man is a thinking reed.” Pascal, a modern philosopher, summarized the position of humans in the world as follows: To Pascal, humans are a part of the world, as weak and insignificant as reeds, but they are also special beings compared to the rest of the world because they have the ability to think. The idea that such abilities are unique to humans, not plants or animals, is one way of expressing the broader, older idea that only humans have a ‘mind’. The idea that humans have a mind, spirit, reason, and consciousness that is distinct from the body has been consistently discovered for a long time. Christianity talks about the soul, and Plato argued that the soul must escape the prison of the body to see the best world of ideas. Descartes argued that the ‘thinking me’ is the foundation of all knowledge separate from the body, while animals are ‘automatic machines’ that move as the mainspring is wound without consciousness.

However, in modern times, many people have come to doubt that people have minds independent of their bodies. Although these ‘materialistic’ thoughts did not exist in the past, the development of modern science has fueled these thoughts even more. Neurophysiology seems to have revealed that the majority of problems we see as mental are actually physical or physical in origin. For example, short-term memory loss is associated with damage to the hippocampus, and psychopathy is associated with frontal lobe function. The search for relationships between mental and physical phenomena has achieved tremendous success until recently. Furthermore, it favored the argument that everything related to the mind is related to the body and the physical natural world.

Let’s assume that the word ‘mind’ is an expression that means everything that can be classified as a mental state or activity, such as feeling and thinking. Philosophers call the claim that the mind depends on the body, or even something physical, physicalism. Those who support physicalism are largely divided into two groups in the process of embodying the idea that the mental depends on the physical.

First, stories about the psychological are actually just stories about the physical. For example, although a painful feeling may seem mental, the feeling is actually just a physical event, such as a facial grimace or C-fiber activation. The task of completely replacing a mental story with a physical story is called reduction, and people who try to provide such a story are called reductive physicalists.

However, reductive physicalism faces the objection that there is more to the mental than the physical. For example, if the feeling of pain is nothing more than a grimace on the face, should we say that a person who endures pain without showing any signs of pain is not actually in pain? If the feeling of pain is nothing more than C-fiber activation, is it impossible for an octopus without such nerve fibers to feel pain in the first place?

These difficulties led physicalists to take a second position, taking a step back from the position that the relationship between the mental and the physical is as strong as reduction. They say that even if the mental is not reducible to the physical, the mental cannot be different when the physical conditions are the same. In other words, something cannot change mentally if it has not changed physically. To help you understand, let’s say there is a clone of me who is identical to me down to the atomic level. According to physicalists, I and my clone are bound to have the same intelligence, personality, etc. In other words, the mental cannot change regardless of the physical. The relationship that the mental can also change only when the physical changes is called supervenience, and people who claim that mind and matter have this relationship are called non-reductive physicalists.

Is this claim really true? One philosopher proposed a zombie thought experiment to prove that the mental does not supervene on the physical. First, let’s understand what philosophers call zombies. Zombies in movies are generally aggressive, eat people, cannot communicate, and tend to walk awkwardly (of course, there are many works that depict zombies differently. Even in the movie ‘Warm Bodies’ (2013), a male zombie He also has a romantic relationship with the female protagonist!).

However, the zombies that philosophers talk about are hypothetical creatures with the following characteristics. First, the body of a zombie is identical to the human body down to the smallest detail and behaves in the same way as a human to the extent that it is seemingly indistinguishable from that of a human. They are literally the same as humans in every physical way. But secondly, zombies lack any kind of consciousness. To be more specific, zombies do not have the unique feelings that we experience when we experience a color, sound, or taste.

The zombie thought experiment goes like this. First, we can imagine what philosophers call zombies. Second, if zombies are imaginable, zombies are actually possible. This is not just a fantasy; it can also be realized in reality. The artificial intelligence (AI) robot ‘Eva’ can not only converse like a human, but also make facial expressions such as smiling and frowning.

Moreover, if biotechnology advances and robots can be made from organisms rather than pieces of metal, it will be possible to create zombies that are physically identical to us. If zombies were actually possible, this would be a counterexample where some things are physically the same but mentally different. Zombies are physically the same as us, but they are mentally different, that is, they do not have the consciousness that we have. Zombies can eat delicious food and pretend it’s delicious, but they can’t feel the taste. In the end, if zombies are really possible, then the mental-physical supervenience is wrong.

Recently, with the rapid development of AI technologies such as ChatGPT, humanity seems to have gained a much better understanding of how the mind works. However, the zombie thought experiment suggests that consciousness is a realm we can never reach no matter how much we physically imitate it. It will be interesting to see which side is right.

[한충만 대원여고 인문학 강사]
2023-12-14 07:06:37

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