Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> With the remark "My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a
> soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul." (PI p. 178),
> Wittgenstein is responding to a specific philosophical discussion and
> the way it presents our relationship with other human beings. The
> tradition he is mainly turning against is the Cartesian tradition
> which regards human beings as consisting of two parts, a material
> body and an immaterial mind or soul. Of these two, the mind is seen
> as the real person while the body is seen as a mere automaton, that
> does not grant that the other bodies I see around me also have souls
> and thereby are persons....
I have been struggling for a couple of weeks with a book that I can't quite make up my mind about, partly because I don't have the technical education to qualify me to make up my mind about it. Antonio B. Damasio, *Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain* (1994). Parts of it are presented as a series of hypotheses, but much of it seems to be
nothing more (*and nothing less*) than a summary of achieved knowledge in current neurology and neurological psychology. He does seem to present
very persuasively one point: that Descartes' error, referred to by Yoshie
above, is repeated even by those who refuse to separate mind from brain *but do separate brain from body*. The body is not merely the biological substrate of brain (as in those science fiction tales which show a brain being maintained in a bubbling fishbowl with tubes leading to and from it). Even the higher cognitive functions cannot proceed without continual interaction between the brain and the whole body. The following passage states the argument about as concisely as it can be:
**** The idea that the mind derived from the entire organism as an ensemble may sound counterintuitive at first. Of late, the concept of mind has moved from the ethereal nowhere place it occupied in the seventeenth century to its current residence in or around the brain -- a bit of a demotion, but still a dignified station. To suggest that the mind itself depends on brain-body interactions, in terms of evolutionary biology, ontogeny (individual development), and current operation may seem too much. But stay with me. What I am suggesting is that the mind arises from activity in neural circuits, to be sure, but many of those circuits were shaped in evolution by functional requisites of the organism, and that a normal mind will happen only if those circuits contain basic representations of the organism, and if they continue monitoring the states of the organism in action. In brief, neural circuits represent the organism continuously, as it is perturbed by stimuli from the physical and sociocultural environments, and as it acts on those environments. If the basic topic of those representations were not an organism anchored in the body, we might have some form of mind, but I doubt that it would be the mind we do have.
I am not saying that the mind is in the body. I am saying that the body contributes more than life support and modulatory effects to the brain. It contributes a *content* that is part and parcel of the workings of the normal mind. (pp. 225-26) ******
And:
****
There is a philosophical thought experiment known as "brain in a vat," which consists of imagining a brain removed from its body, maintained alive in a nutrient bath, and stimulated via its now dangling nerves in precisely the same way it would be stimulated were it inside the skull. Some people believe such a brain would have a normal mental experiences. Now, leaving aside the suspension of disbelief required for imagining such a thing (and for imagining all *Gedanken* experiments), I beleive this brain would not have a normal mind. The absence of stimuli going *out* into the body- as-playing field, capable of contributing to the renewal and modification of body states, would result in suspending the triggering and modulation of bodily states, would result in suspending the triggering and modulation of body states that, when represented back to the brain, constitute what I see as the bedrock of the sense of being alive. It might be argued that if it were possible to mimic, at the level of the dangling nerves, realistic configurations of inputs as if they were coming from the body, then the disembodied brain would have a normal mind. Well, that would be a nice and interesting experiment "to do" and I suspect the brain might indeed have *some* mind under these conditions. But what that more elaborate experiment woudl have done is create a body surrogate and thus confirm that "body type inputs" are required for a normally minded brain after all. And what it would be unlikely to do is make the "body inputs" match in realistic fashion when those states are triggered by a brain engaged in making evaluations. (pp.227-28)*****
Carrol