Jenna asked:

What exactly is the mind-body problem?

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The mind-body problem is about how non-physical mind is connected to or arises from physical body.

The problem really arises because we make the assumption that the mind is non-physical in the first
place but it is difficult not to do this give the nature of consciousness. The 17th century philosopher,
Descartes, is often accused of starting this problem in his Mediations.Descartes asserted that while
physical body was extended, the subjective 'I', or the mental was not. Through a thought experiment
Descartes found that he could doubt that physical things exist, including that he had a body, so he
could not be identified with his body. Unhappily, the argument relies on the assumption that the
mental is different from the physical. Just because you can perform the psychological act of doubting
you have a body, it doesn't follow that you are spatially distinct from it, unless you already prepared to
make a distinction between the mental as non-extended and the physical as extended. But the
Meditationsis quite fascinating for many reasons, and is to be recommended. A far as the mind-body
problem goes the difference between the mental and physical remains a problem because our
conscious awareness of ourselves, or our mental life, doesn't seem to be spatial. We can divorce the
mental from physical time and space in many ways.

But the problem arose much earlier than Descartes philosophy and persists today.

The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, thought that there was a part of the intellect that was separate from
the lower capacity to form images derived from perception of the world, and 'it is this alone that is
immortal and eternal'. While Aristotle saw man as fundamentally a biological organism, this sentence
can only read as expressing a belief in a soul. If there is such a thing as a soul, then the problem of
how it is connected to body arises. Aristotle couldn't account for this. He analysed man into a
hierarchy of capacities, each dependent on the one below, but this bit of eternal intellect, he just
leaves as 'separate'.

The problem of mental/ physical interaction is still with us today as it is widely claimed that the mental,
which is non-physical cannot causally interact with the physical. What sort of causal laws would allow
this to be the case? It does seem that by making a decision, which is a mental event, we can bring
about something physical in the world, but science cannot explain this because science deals with the
physical. The answer seems to be that there is no soul, no thing that is mental, but the mental is just
an aspect of the physical world. However, there are philosophers who believe in mental realism and
the possibility of psycho-physical laws holding between mind and body, so the mind-body problem
hasn't been settled.

With scientific advance it is now understood that the mind is dependent on the brain but the problem
remains about how the brain gives rise to consciousness. While it remains the case that philosophers
with a bent towards neuroscience cannot explain this, and cannot find a theory that reduces
consciousness or subjectivity to physical theory, it is still possible to hold that the mental could exist
without the physical (and, for sure, it could logically in that we can imagine that it could) or that it has
a separate reality.

Rachel Browne