The cul-de-sac of debating the identity of the mind and the brain

This post is just toying around with some ideas. I haven't worked mainly on the philosophy of mind or on folk psychology, although I have read a few bits and pieces (Sellars, McDowell, the functionalist folks, Smart, Davidson, etc.). I'm not committed very strongly to the view but it did seem fun to try and write it up quickly as a draft to help me think more on it. Comments are welcome.


There has been a really bad tendency in the last 50 years exemplified by scientists, psychologists - and some philosophers - to debate whether recent discoveries about how the workings of our bodies influence behavior (including hormones, heart and digestive mechanisms, the neural system, etc.) are really discoveries about what our mind is and how it works. This was a bad tendency in my view because it strengthened the idea that the right answer is either 'yes' or 'no'. Whereas in fact the question was misconceived and as such it has no correct answer. The result was fruitless debate in which scientists - not all of them of course only the not-so-smart-ones - were trying to show that a) when they understood how something in the body correlated reliably with some behavior they understood what has been traditionally called the mind, and b) that this showed that the mind is a bodily thing, some even saying that it is identical with the brain. Some even more impatient people added c) that due to these discoveries the job of the philosopher and the psychologist is obsolete now.

Charge c) is of course easily dismissed: besides trying to understand (human) behavior, action, the explanation and motivation of behavior, minds, etc. psychologists and philosophers - who are not the same - study a host of other things. Psychologists study group behavior, social interaction, the development and learning of children, language acquisition, and many-many other topics. Philosophers study the way in which science works, what counts as knowledge and as evidence and whether it should count as such, what is good reasoning, how we can come to know things at all, what exists, what are good rules of living together, what happiness means and what it is, and so on. What the mind is, has not been solved by any disciple yet, and even if the answer to this question would have been uncovered psychologists and philosophers would still be busy.

Of course, the question I'm criticizing was not a bad one for the reason that some people made the jump to c). Rather, it was a bad one because it made the assumption that what was meant by 'mind' was ever exactly identical with what neurology, psychology, and other behavioral sciences are giving us insight into right now. My claim is that we are understanding something new. We are getting genuinely new information, new ideas about what influences (certain specific aspects) of our behavior and how we should think about these influences and our behavior. Claiming that mentalistic terms like 'intention', 'will', 'thinking', and so on, were ever intended to describe the same as what recent research in the sciences is about is confused. Our new insights are not insights about some object which philosophers posited in earlier times. They never posited anything like that.

This confusion is easy to see if we think of the free will problem for a second. Some philosophers and scientists - again: the not-so-smart-ones - are locked in a debate. How can the will be free if there is universal determinism? If the will is not free nothing can be free, not even our will. On the other hand: if the will is not determined then does it just work randomly? That is not what freedom means either. Headache, headache either way. The least careful reasoners not only deny that there is no free will but that there is no will at all.
We have all experienced willing something and doing it. Whether that was free or not, willing is a distinctive capacity that we humans - and maybe other beings - posses. It is also certain that this capacity related to our biology - our evolution and specific material constitution - and it is different from other mechanisms which make us behave in certain ways. Nothing in this picture of having a 'will' makes it incompatible with naturalism, natural science, science in general, or even determinism. Average lawyers and judges, doctors and writers, and even compatibilist philosophers and psychologists have long ago recognized this and made use of the insight. Thanks to their hard work we now understand much more about the intricate maze of connected influences on our behavior which is human motivation, and one part of which is willing something.

Drawing an analogy with the confusions surrounding the will can help clear up the dazed picture some people have about the relation of the mind and the brain.

My hunch is - but this would require good work by historians - that the misguided debates about whether the mind is identical with some part of our body or a distinct thing, are the results of the long crusade on religion by popular scientists, such as Huxley (the older). Theses debates which go back to the 1850's, and even before that, have primarily aimed at undermining the authority and credibility of figures of the church who tried to rely on their position to justify obsolete views, and keep out of employment and influence those who disagreed with them, many of them young and talented researchers in (what became) the natural sciences. This situation resulted in a debate which had many fruitful effects. For example, it led to widespread secularization and the destroying of many harmful religious taboos, as well as a general awareness of knowledge of the natural world.
And it sadly also had a stifling effect on the mind of many scientists, philosophers, and  lay people. Many people thought as a result of these debates that all mistaken, old, obsolete ideas were de facto held by the Church or most Christians. Whenever they get the chance they try to attribute the worst and weakest positions to religion and then go on to show that those are improbable in the light of new scientific discoveries. Of course most of these champions of science don't know much about the actual work or views of either religious people now or earlier, nor about the views philosophers and other scientists hold or held in earlier ages. Some people lead their intellectual lives as if publish or perish also applied to the quality of their thoughts, and hence the more and the faster they go through ideas, the better results they would achieve.

This infatuation with the fight against religion that some science-fans are carrying on can be partly seen to be responsible for trying to adopt some primitive materialism about the mind. This impulse drives views which claim that talk about the mind is always talk about an object - whether bodily or not. This view is as rude folk-materialist-physics can get. (Funnily enough, such views show remarkable similarity to the pre-socratic views according to which everything was just earth, or just water, etc. I doubt that many pop-scientists are happy about this fact, but that's the position they've maneuvered themselves into.)
If one adopts such a view then the mind can be seen as something to be grasped similarly to the way crystals are studied by people interested in their atomic structure. Habermas pointed out a good 50 years ago that there will be a point when science will take over the role of religion. There are fans, who don't understand much actual science, or anything else, and don't like to think, and who, at the same time, love to think that they own the truth, they are the educated, the up-to-date ones, the intellectuals. Such folks have successfully swapped one ideology for the other and would probably have been the most zealous religious bigots 200 years ago. Just as some believers have very simple view about God, picturing him as some sort of caring father sitting among the clouds, many science-fans think of science as one holy method solving all problems and leading always to a single objective view. This has of course not much to do with how science is practiced. Objectivity is aimed at and desirable, but everyone knows that debate, constant advancement, a plethora of practices and methods, and piecemeal arguments and testing is what brings things forward.

Now we are getting to the good bit: there surely was a mistaken folk approach to free will which held that the will's freedom is directly opposed to determinism. And there surely was at least one one view of the mind proposing that the mind is something immaterial floating around and carrying out all the cognitive functions and maybe is the place of emotions, and so on. But being hellbent on showing that such views are wrong only shows that one can't even understand the more interesting alternatives. And vulgar pop-scientists are trying to do exactly that.
What I propose instead is to take the meaning of 'mind' to be more like the meaning of 'will'. We talk about the will when we exercise certain capacities. We also talk about willful actions, acting out of one's free will, and we have a good idea that this means that we acted accordingly to our preferences, to consciously experienced motives, after deliberating, and so on (there are many criteria and some contextual factors also matter).
We can safely venture the claim that we use mentalistic terms like desired, wanted to, intended, aimed at, hoped that, and so on if and when certain features of the situation and what we know about the agent warrant this. We rely on behavior, sometimes on knowledge of the agent or other similar agents under similar circumstances (or knowledge or ourselves), we rely on observation and what we hear about (and maybe from) the agent, and so on. There are many sources that influence whether or not we call an action intentional, deliberate, whether we say someone hoped something, or planned something, or that A believed that p.
An idea that there is some free floating mind that does this thinking and causes the body to move isn't the basis of saying these things. We don't need to postulate any entity - bodily or not - which is the mind to understand how we talk and explain each others' behavior. What we need to understand is that thinking, talking and explaining each others' behavior is a complex system of qualifying specific instances of behavior in specific situations. And this is very much coherent with the natural sciences, with determinism, with advances in sociology, anthropology and psychology and our ordinary practices of holding each other responsible.

The view I propose leads then to the conclusion that the seeming contradiction between holding that people 'have' minds is perfectly coherent with making discoveries about all sorts of bodily processes having influence on the our behavior. These two types of explanation of behavior are not in competition. The bodily explanations can help us understand something entirely new about what is going on before, during, and after our behavior. They are not the same as the brusk but functional and useful everyday explanations that we normally make use of. And their area of application is much more specific in most cases.
The everyday folk explanations use 'reliable' categories because they work and have worked now for thousands of years. We get along, manage to coordinate our behavior - we managed to establish good scientific practice, mass societies, run cities, food and other resource chains, and to confess love and tell jokes. Alone for these reasons it would be surprising to find out that the way we qualify each others' behavior using mentalistic terms is wrong.
It would be equally magical if the mentalistic qualifications that we use - many of them having been around for thousands of years - would capture exactly certain specific bodily states or things. These qualifications are applied to complex instances of behavior in specific settings. If we look at someone while they behave, find that he behaves exactly as we already knew he would, and we also find that something went on in his brain, that does not mean that what went on in his brain was what we have meant all the time by the mental terms we applied to the person. We weren't talking about brain states in medieval Europe. We were talking about behavior in context.We weren't getting right neuroscience in advance, we were engaged in a different practice. It follows, that neuroscience isn't getting right 'what'  the mind is, it is just giving us info of what is going on in the nervous system in situations which we already know how to call and to explain. What neuroscience provides us with is a very deep and valuable information of some processes sustaining what we already know, namely human behavior. The new info we get from the sciences has tremendous clinical and therapeutic potential. But this still doesn't entail that there would be anything - bodily or not - that is 'the' mind.

What we are learning now about our brains, our bodies, our behavior is fascinating and new. It is not an old, crude theory of mind, it is not a different explanation of what the mind is, or whether or not it is material or not. Anyone still thinking in these terms is embedded in an outdated and misguided discussion that was fueled by the war for resources and positions between scientists and the men of church. What is happening now is something much more interesting and stunning: we are acquiring the elements of a new way of seeing what feeds into all the actions we perform from our nervous system and other parts of our bodies. This is not understanding in the sense in which one understand another person when we grasp their motivations for what they did after they explain their reasons to us. After all, learning that a certain hormonal reaction is going on when we fall in love doesn't change the fact that we fall in love. We didn't gain a new explanation of why we fell in love. What we did gain an explanation of is what processes in the body are going on when we fall in love.

Knowing that something in the brain contributed or partially constituted the causing and sustaining of an instance of a behavior - an action of waving goodbye for example - should not come as a surprise. Exactly the opposite. Most of us always knew that our body influences our behavior in many ways. When we are tired we are impatient, when we have a bad stomach we are grumpy, when we are near someone we are attracted to we become excited, and so on. What we did not know were the details, the specific steps of processes going on. We don't learn anything knew in terms of understanding someone else and their mind when we learn that their kissing us was preceded by certain chemical reactions. Still, we learn something about what happens in our bodies when someone who loves us kisses us. And that is also very interesting and a perfectly valid subject of study.

So, one might ask, what about the mind then? How do we learn about it? Well, there is not much to learn. It is our thinking about what to eat, our deciding to go out in the evening with out friends, our focusing on which words to use in the birthday message for granny, our remembering our childhood dog, or our cooking a pasta. These are all our exercising some of our abilities. We know these abilities well. Thinking, concentrating, remembering, feeling, deliberating, weighing up, imagining someone else's reactions and so on are familiar. Science doesn't add to this list or retract from it. It can tell us a lot more about what goes on when we say that these abilities are used by someone, nor when we say that someone acted in a situation freely.
My conclusion is that there is no need for debates about whether the brain is the mind, or whether science is giving us new explanations of our behavior, or whether we have a mind, and so on. We have a mind in as much as some of our behavior and the abilities involved in have mentalistic names, and what is going on when we think these terms apply is what we learn a bit more about with the help of science. Sadly, nothing more, but luckily, this is something enormous and exciting, and this is what we should emphasize. We are learning something new.