Can Mind Affect Body?

How would you have us define "mind"?

If we take "mind" to be some emergent aspect of our physical body, specifically of the brain, then of course the mind can affect the body because the mind is part of the body.

That is, basically, my view and way to reconcile mind-body problems.

Human consciousness manifested especially in thought, perception, emotion, will, memory, and imagination.

Body is the result of Desire of Mind.

Each is the other....

Brett.

Well, unless there is some reason to think these are not aspects of our physical body, I'm not sure what the problem is.

Of course, we could take Brett's spin on things - that notions of a physical body are emergent features of our mind. The problem here is people who do not seem to have a "mind". Imagine the poor fellow who, after some terrible accident, does not have thought, perception, emotion, will, memory or imagination. He has no "mind" from which the physical body could emerge.
If his body is then merely the result of someone else's mind, then we have, in essence, reasoned this poor fellow out of existence entirely.

But ... what if he really didn't exist? ::Twilight Zone music:: :eek:


Supplemental questions:

1. I wonder how we could prove that we had minds?
   
2. When Descartes says, "I think therefore I am," what in the world does he mean?
   
3. What is thinking; what is that which thinks; and, pray tell, what is being?

1. What do you mean by prove? Do you think, for some reason, that we do not have minds?
2. That thinking is a sufficient condition for him to exist
3. a function of the brain; debatable, Descartes quote attempts to shed some light on this particular question; being what?

I don't know what it means to "prove" something. That's a very good question. And indeed, as strange as it may seem, I am open to the possibility that we do not have minds.

But what does it mean to "think" or to "exist"? If we don't know what these terms mean, Descartes' declaration is reduced to "I x therefore I x." And what does "I" mean? Now we're left with "x x therefore x x." (And then there's the question of what meaning is.)

To say thinking is a function of the brain certainly seems to explain its origin (i.e., the brain). But is an explanation of the origin of thinking an explanation of its nature or essence? (And then there's the question of what an explanation is.)

"Being what?" Excellent question. The being that belongs to a thing, and the thing itself--are these the same, or are they different?

I realize I haven't been very constructive. My apologies.

Here is something we can work with more easily. The "ghost limb" phenomenon: a person loses a limb but on occasion will "feel" it as if it were still attached. This suggests that the sensation of the limb is mental.

Another suggestion that material sensation (if not matter per se) is mental comes from a common observation: when the mind is completely unconscious, it does not appear to have any sense of the body.

So a limb that does not exist materially can occasionally be felt, and a limb that does exist materially can at times not be felt. Is the body, or at least a bodily sense (assuming that this sense is different from the body itself), therefore mental?

Exactly. It's a late night college dorm type of philosophy that really needs to dwell on whether things truly exist outside of our consciousness, i.e. the tree in the forest conundrum. Well, that's being cruel, I mean that philosophy does exist quite sincerely in some Buddhist philosophy, but I don't think the original question was posed under Buddhist assumptions.

The mind is a physiologic function of the brain, and specifically the telencephalon / neocortex. Some mental states are beneficial to the health of other parts of the body, whereas other mental states are deleterious. But as in Thomas' example, even the absence of a mind, i.e. anencephaly (a neural tube defect in which babies are born with only a brainstem and midbrain), or brain death (like from head injuries or drowning or anoxia), the body goes on. Well, it goes on with some life support -- but if you put someone on a ventilator, keep them hydrated, and keep them nourished, the body can go on for years and years and years.

In other words, most physiologic functions of the body are completely autonomous from the brain's direct control (let alone the mind). The mind works so that the body will do things like eat, sleep, avoid danger, etc.

I hate to be concrete, but in what way is, say, your common bile duct or your transitional epithelium "the result of Desire of Mind"?

Buddhism also has to account for the experiences of practitioners.

Back to the topic though, what you describe Aedes is as far as I can get with this. I'm certainly familiar with other views, but I just haven't seen any good reason to think of mind as being something other than the result of physical processes.

If science allows us such a firm response to mind-body issues, why do other schemes still receive adherents? Chalk it up to ignorance/desire for things to be other than they are?

Mind-Body Medicine: An Overview

Professor William C. Nelson - Mind Medicine

Mind-Body Medicine: State of the Science, Implications for Practice

TIME Magazine - Mind over Medicine

I wonder what it is that decides whether and when a certain physiological function is controlled by the mind or by the body. If I can use my mind to move my leg deliberately on one occasion, while on another occasion, my leg twitches on its own, it would seem that both mind and body are competing with one another for the title of "leg mover." Yet if the body can move the leg on its own, what need does it have of mind? And if the mind can control the body on some occasions, why can't it control the body on EVERY occasion?

Another question: if a healthy brain is conscious and a rock is not, then what is it about the brain's material configuration that makes it less material than the rock? I.e., what is it about certain material configurations that produces this quality called "mind" or "mentality"? Although brains seem no less material than rocks, they do seem more structurally complicated. Yet what is structural complexity anyway? Why can't mind exist in simple structures? Or can it? ...

There is indeed a strong and reciprocal relationship between mind and body. People with illnesses become depressed, and people who are depressed get illnesses, for instance. But this is different than The Matrix where the body has no autonomy at all and the mind controls everything.

How do you separate mind from brain? I think mind simply encompasses the self-aware part of the brain. And we know it originates from the brain, because you can injure and destroy just about every other part of the body and still have a mind, but if you injure or impair the brain (even temporarily) then the capacity for consciousness (let alone self-consciousness) is lost. And there are specific parts of the brain that are responsible for mental (as opposed to more generically neurologic) functions.

As to why people believe things that are either negated or (at least) not supported by medicine, it's because medicine has evolved into a very mechanistic and evidence-based domain, and this makes it relatively inaccessible to patients. And when something is inaccessible, and they cannot understand it, it's very easy for them to become highly cynical about medicine. This drives people to alternative ideas and practices, because it allows them to re-internalize the locus of control.

Dustin --
You need to read those articles closely to see the evidence that is actually being offered. There are three critically important points for you to keep in your mind when you read this type of literature.

First, many of the outcome measures in these studies are subjective things, like pain and disability, as opposed to objective things like serum sodium level, or tumor size, or granulocyte count. It almost goes without saying that a symptom that is assessed by interviewing the patient is one that will be most amenable to therapies directed at "state of mind", because the outcome measures are measured through the patient's state of mind.

Second, remember that people's behaviors affect their health. Physical activity, nutrition, compliance with medications, etc. State of mind is absolutely essential to people's vigilance with these things. As I mentioned in the other thread, I usually cannot get depressed people to quit smoking, reliably come to doctor's visits, or do anything else for their health until they're on an antidepressant. When their depression is better (whether from a drug or from just a natural, cyclic improvement), their health-promoting behaviors are MUCH better.

Third, even when there IS an objective outcome measure, like blood pressure or risk of heart attack, you have to realize that there are endocrine effects of stress like secretion of cortisol, catecholamines, antidiuretic hormone, etc, which are physically measurable intermediates between mental state and a particular health outcome.

The upshot of all of this is that there IS, without a doubt, a relationship between mental state and health outcomes. But it's an erroneous and misleading reduction to summarize that as "the mind controls the body". That is just not true. The mind, via conscious behaviors and via neuroendocrine effects, modulates various subjective and objective health outcomes.

But things in the body happen largely autonomously from the mind. Why do 95% of people with lung cancer die within 5 years of diagnosis? It's because will to live has a trivial effect on cancer cells with an aggressive, invasive, and treatment-resistant biology. Why does viral meningitis get better without treatment but bacterial meningitis is fatal without treatment? Because of biological and immunologic differences between the two disease states, which one's state of mind cannot control.

Your telencephalon can override things like twitches by sending coordinated neurological input. It's not a mind versus body issue. Imagine taking a bicycle and just letting it roll down a hill. Now imagine riding it down a hill. You can impose physical functions on that bike that override what happens when it's on its own.

This is a very contrived question. An apple tree grows apples and an orange tree grows oranges. The biology of an apple tree allows it to produce apples, the biology of a healthy human brain allows it to produce thoughts. There is a biology behind it, from the biochemical and molecular level on up, but you can probably take it for granted that the frontal lobe of the human brain is materially and ontogenically different than a chunk of basalt or sandstone.

I wonder, though. What is it that imposes physical functions on the bike? What is this "you"? Is it mental, material, both, neither?



Are thoughts then composed of matter--like apples? (I am open to the possibility that they are.)

This is plain old mechanics, and I'm not sure it needs a metaphysical analysis. Things outside your conscious control, like your weight, affect the bike; things that are subconscious like your ability to balance on a bike (with experience) determine the way your body moves to keep it upright. And conscious things like pedaling and steering also mechanically control the bike, but there is self-conscious volition that makes it happen.

These are all mechanics here that Newton would have understood some 400 years ago. Your brain can tell your muscles to contract, which exerts mechanical force on the bike. And with voluntary nerves and skeletal muscle, your conscious self commands your muscles to contract, but it's all got a biologic mechanism. There isn't a point at which the ethereal "self" somehow speaks to the base physical "thing" -- the self is physical as well.

A thought is a process, not a thing. But yes, it's a process that has wholly material constituents. It so happens that from the point of view of self-awareness, our resolution regards the whole experience of a thought rather than its neurochemical constituents -- but that's true for us regarding an apple as an apple rather than merely the sum of its parts.

This is all quite possible. But here is what I would like to know: does the "ethereal" self differ in any way from the "base" physical thing? (Or are the two really one and the same?) And if they do differ, then how do they differ? In other words, what qualities do they share and what qualities distinguish them?



We're getting delightfully deep here, and I certainly do not claim to have any answers. Only questions, many, many questions. For instance, let us assume that a thought is nothing more than a conglomeration of neurochemical constituents--a purely material thing. Can this material thing have consciousness of itself, or does something else have consciousness of it?

Or ... God forbid ... is a thought neither something that is conscious of itself, nor something that anything is conscious of?

Aedes,

I think I'm starting to understand a little about your beliefs. This is probably a bit off of subject, but I have a quick question for you.

What do you believe happens to what we call the mind / self when the body dies?

What this boils down to is the great human conundrum. How can we think of ourselves as things? We inhabit a universe full of other things, our very bodies can be reduced to interacting things, so how can our very special self-awareness be that... that mundane?!

If you think about it, all philosophical questions pretty much boil down to that conflict between being a human being and being a thing.

But I'm afraid that the special nature of our thought does not somehow lift it out of thinghood any more than photosynthesis gets lifted out of the "thinghood" of green plants. Why should it?

It dies along with the rest of you. I've had patients who were in prolonged comas, or who were sedated in the ICU for prolonged periods of time. This whole stretch of their lives -- weeks or months in some cases -- was gone in terms of mind and self. And I don't say this from looking at them -- I say it from talking to people who have been through it, who have a 6 month stretch of their lives with no experiences, no memories, nothing.

Why should death be any different when the brain stops firing once and for all?

Now Dustin, don't interpret me as saying that a scientific understanding of things is all that's important. I don't believe that. I think that there is a certain amount of allegory that our cultures just need for our emotional and communal health, and beliefs about death are extremely important to us. Having hope in a heaven, or picturing a lost love one in heaven, has value even if there is no such thing in the end.

This is definitely the great human conundrum. All of human existence is a complete mystery, and the existence of Soul is as questionable as anything is. If the universe is purely material, what then? If there is no mind, no consciousness, what then? If matter is conscious, then it must be partly mind, unless one changes the meaning of words. Yet semantics cannot erase the fundamenal confusion we face every day, unless one prefers to ignore his or her ignorance. (Which I would sometimes prefer to do.)

Matter is perceived, and it seems to perceive. It is conscious of itself, and consciousness is material. Mind is matter. I am a thing. How now?

If matter is non-intelligent substance, and mind intelligent substance, how can they meet? How can they coexist? If non-intelligence is intelligence, then perhaps even All can be Nothing. Yet if there is an All, it cannot be anything other than what it already is. But even more, it cannot have parts. It cannot have parts--think about that for a moment. :eek: