Why there is no mind/body problem: Joe Cruz at TEDxWilliamsCollege

[Music] hi everybody thanks for being here today I know you'd prefer to be outside on this snowy sub-zero williamstown weekend but I appreciate your time what would it take for you to think that there's a mind-body problem it would take you thinking of yourself in two different ways you'd think of yourself and you do think of yourself as a being in this world taking up space having a shape having that shape interact with the shapes around you having a body that you understand intimately that medicine can understand that science can investigate that you can be more or less familiar with as it undergoes changes but that is with you throughout your time in this world you'd have to think in order for there to be a mind-body problem that you're to and one of those two is this this thing that moves this thing that is you'd also have to think that you're a second thing also known intimately also known maybe it's not even the right thing to say that it's known maybe it just is you this other thing this locus of sensations your emotions your loves your ability to see the color red your sensation as you taste chocolate the love you feel for your family members in order for there to be a mind-body problem you have to think of yourself as two and the second thing is that mental life that thinking life that rational life that self that defines your hopes and aspirations for yourself for there to be a mind-body problem there must be a kind of dualism so what's the problem it's 1643 Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia a daughter of Frederick the fifth and Elizabeth Stewart herself a kind of liberal arts prodigy interested in philosophy psychology physics and of course politics at her own initiative right - the great philosopher Descartes whom she had heard in a court in Hanover and she writes that she has some questions about his philosophy she studied the work carefully she's digested it and she has a humble inquiry as it were and her humble inquiry is this her humble inquiry is how did the two interact how did the two meet each other there's a mind there's a body what are the rules what are the laws what's the manner of causal interaction as she puts it between the mind and the body because after all if these two things really are separate if the body takes up space has extension as she says and if the mind instead is this pure locus of your consciousness if these are really two different things then it's hard to see what kind of science is going to be appropriate to the way that they work together now she writes that in her letter but she also writes a number of other things apologizing about how ignorant that she is about how she's wasting the great philosophers time about how she hopes very much that he might see his way to taking some of his precious time to respond to her which for us the reader is I suppose a little bit of amusement as we read her objection and we realized that she is not they caught on to his derriere after all Descartes had written in the meditations that he knows with complete certainty that these two are separate that he knows with complete certainty that the mind and the body to be distinct substances must have different laws associated with them must be part of our essential duality and Descartes impressed with Elizabeth's correspondence respectful of her genius does take it upon himself to spend time in answering her first in the preliminary way by saying that maybe the interaction between them is a new kind of causation unto itself a different set of laws a third set of laws that must be regarded as a primitive of this universe that's his first try but then he gives it an even better go he's inspired to write further on the topic by his correspondence with Elizabeth and you wonder to yourself you wonder to yourself what is it that that drives Descartes to try to preserve this sense of duality is it just the bare fact of the duality is it just that we know it is it just that its manifest to us well there's a little of that for sure but I want to say there's something else going on in the Cartesian refusal to give up on dualism and it has to do with our conception of ourselves in this modern world we want to understand ourselves in terms of a self we want to understand ourselves in terms of the capacity for will and rational action we want to grasp the certainty of our own emotions and sensations as we look inside ourselves they seem essentially private they seem unique to the person having those sensations and viewed in that way viewed in a broader perspective than the intramural philosophical debate I think everybody in this room can recognize that there's been a substantial commitment to the Cartesian view culturally historically socially politically for us we think of ourselves as self-reliant as moving into the West solitary individuals pressing ourselves against the world hoping maybe against hope that we can be resilient against the forces that come against us so it's a part of a a bigger narrative if you will and in a way we can view descartes as trying to hold on to this bigger narrative or maybe he's at the front end of it so he's trying to he's trying to prop it up at its foundations and Elizabeth has pointed out that there's a mind-body problem in that he doesn't seem to have any good way of accounting for the interaction between the two but this is important stuff important stuff to us socially and culturally the problem in a nutshell is based on what looks like a kind of you'll forgive me if I put it this way what looks like a kind of asymmetry between your knowledge of your self of your mind and my knowledge of you and your mind it looks like you know yourself from the inside with certainty with a confidence that can't be rivaled by the people around you you know what it tastes like to taste chocolate you know what the color red looks like to you you know how your emotions feel to you don't let anyone else tell you otherwise probably in seventh grade you wondered to yourself whether your red notebook look the same to everyone else as it does to you versus the possibility that they just used the same word red and it looks quite different to them so it looks like the mind-body problem is a problem having to do with an asymmetry between your knowledge of yourself and my knowledge of you and some of the most famous arguments in the 20th century that produced the mind-body problem or if you like rehearse the mind-body problem because it's quite old problem have to do with thought experiments like whether you could know what it's like to be a bat just by knowing something about the bats nervous system that's notoriously guided by echolocation specialized structures in their nervous system guiding them through this world perceptually they're mammals so they're probably a great deal like you but on the other hand you can't know what it's like to be about no matter how much you might flap your arms and scream into the night or consider the thought experiment having to do with Mary the super neuroscientist who grows up in a black and white and but knows everything there is to know about the color visual system of human beings the claim is that when she leaves her black and white environment and moves out into the colourful world if her vision is normal that she'll learn something new that there's something that can't be known about experience just by having a description having a neuroscientific description of how the visual system works so there's this idea of an asymmetry between your knowledge of yourself and my knowledge of you my knowledge of myself and your knowledge of me that seems to be at the root of the mind-body problem and it looks like it has considerable cultural importance for us move forward through time almost exactly 350 years a lot happens in philosophy though perhaps not as much as you might think we like to take our time 350 years after the correspondence of Elizabeth and Descartes a team working in Italy is studying monkey nervous systems and what they've done is they've placed electrodes in the premotor cortex of a monkey in order to in order to investigate how the nervous system of the monkey gets ready for manipulating objects in its environment how it might pick up a peanut or how it might grasp a branch and so they're measuring the firings in the premotor cortex and quite accidentally while they're setting the apparatus up what they discover is that there are some parts of the monkey nervous system some parts of the premotor cortex that are responsive not just to the act the thing that they might act on the peanut or the branch that they're gonna grasp but instead a responsive to other individuals actions so the researchers themselves the Italian researchers themselves might be grasping a coffee cup and suddenly they get a reading on the device that is the monkey premotor cortex is registering the grasping behavior they realized something's up so they grasp the the human beings in the lab grasp the peanut on the table and what they find is that there are parts of the monkey premotor cortex that are responsive to this grasping as opposed to this grasping it starts to look like there is a part of the monkey nervous system that's designed to be in a kind of sympathy or kind of resonance with the actions of beings that are shaped like them when those beings perform actions themselves these are now called mirror neurons there's been a kind of cottage industry on mirror neurons over the last thirty years and certainly the jury remains out this is science this is not philosophy so we wait for the empirical data whether there are mirror neurons in us is controversial although the data seems favorable the extent to which those mirror neurons are responsive to actions in our world performed by others is controversial but the way of the evidence looks like it's in favor of an idea that there's something about you there's something in you in your nervous system that responds that makes your body ready to do the same thing that you observe someone shaped like you is doing so as I raise my hand as I make grasping motion as I make a different grasping motion your body is getting ready is pre mode or firing if you will to do that same thing you're in a kind of sympathy with me and that shouldn't be not surprising I mean consider other evidence from psychology or cognitive neuroscience consider evidence having to do with emotional contagion where when you observe the emotions crossing my body and face when you observe the position of my shoulders the changes that happen in my and jaw and mouth as my emotions change so too you feel in some small measure those emotions so too you feel in some small measure that way of being unto yourself or consider the imitation that infants perform when they're facing their mother consider the ways that their faces change in light of the facial changes that they see and the ways in which they might take on some of the internal states some of the consciousness of their mothers so it shouldn't be surprising maybe that there's a part of our nervous system that is responsible for being in tune with one another now pair that up with this fairly homie maybe quasi philosophical observation and that is sensations in you your sensations aren't the same as my descriptions of your sensations are the same as the words I might use to describe your love or your jealousy or your rage the sensations aren't like that for you nor are your sensations any kind of scientific description of your capacity for having sensations so a textbook on your ability to see red is not the same as your ability to see red a fairly straightforward philosophical observation though on the other hand we can get closer than you might think a great master like Virginia Woolf changes the world in creating a narrative creating a stream of consciousness tale that brings us closer to her characters that has her characters give their emotions to us give their sensations to us I had the privilege of working on some of these topics with my student Rachel Kneebone in 2009 as a follow-up to a tutorial we did together she wrote a senior thesis on the way in which narrative very good narrative the sort that you might find in Faulkner that you might find in Woolf might be a way for bringing consciousness to you the reader consciousness from the fictional characters to you the reader and the idea as powerful as it is that descriptions are not the same as the sensations themselves the idea I think points a way for us to think about the mind-body problem differently so words aren't the same as the sensations that you feel no description of the sensations you feel are going to be adequate to it so why should it be a surprise that my understanding of you in words is going to fall short of your understanding of you why should it be a surprise that your understanding of me in words should fall short of my understanding of me if what you wanted in order to solve the mind-body problem if what you wanted was some adequate description of someone else's mind if the source of the problem is a kind of epistemic asymmetry an asymmetry between what you know about someone else's mine versus what you know about your own mind if that was the source of the problem then you're never ever gonna find a solution where the solution has to do with you giving a description of someone else's mind with you writing a textbook on someone else's mine even if you're Virginia Woolf but if on the other hand you view the problem in terms of your bodily sympathy in terms of your capacity to be in a resonance with someone else in terms of your nervous system being primed to be in the position in the shape in the bodily composition of the beings that you're around then maybe just maybe you make progress on the mind-body problem in a way that was unthinkable to Descartes and Elizabeth so I want to offer this idea that the future of the mind-body problem is for you to reconfigure your expectations about what it means to know someone else's mental life to know someone else's consciousness your expectations shouldn't be to have a description of else's mental life but instead it should be an expectation to be in a kind of sympathy a kind of resonance a kind of knowing what it's like to be them because you are the same kind of being and because your nervous system is ready to be them and this is going to be not based on some Theory not based on some story not based on some scientific measurement it's going to be from looking at the movement itself understanding what it means to be in this push-pull relationship with the beings around you even in a fake boxing match at the beginning of stop-motion photography knowing something about what it's like to be in a kind of interaction with someone else so I urge you to change your expectations about what it means to solve the mind-body problem you won't solve it in terms of knowing some description of someone else's mind but you might well know how they are you might know well I know how they are because you are the same way you're made of the same stuff and I think this is going to make a difference I think this is going to reorient your political social cultural conception of yourself toward concepts that were always there - or at least always should have been there - alongside self and rationality and certainty and will it's gonna orient you around a different set of concepts one's having to do with empathy Community Action being with one another understanding one another thanks for [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 119,734

Keywords: ted x, Liberal Arts Education (Field Of Study), tedx, Williams College, ted talks, Williamstown, ted, TEDx, tedx talks, United States Of America (Country), USA, English, tedx talk, ted talk

Id: luJqHjqOBsM

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 07 2014