The Mind-Body Problem

Carl H. Flygt

October, 2005

The cortex has no ability to model the brain itself because there are no senses in the brain. Thus we can see why our thoughts appear independent of our bodies, why it feels as though we have an independent mind or soul.

Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the basic solution to one of the deepest and most intriguing problems in philosophy, the mind-body problem. In that problem are contained all our hopes and fears about what we can know, about how we should act and about how our society should be governed. Mind, as we know it, is brain function. To know the mind, we need to know brain function. To decide whether or not the mind really is connected to something immortal and cosmic, as religion would universally have us believe, to decide whether our actions have an actual cosmic sense and significance, as morality suggests, and to decide how best to comport ourselves in the presence of others, given everything we know about ourselves and the world, we need to know how the brain is regulating its representations of the body and the world. In fact, we need to play a role ourselves in regulating those representations, because to make those decisions about immortality, morality, cosmo-mechanicality and law, we can’t afford to consign any part of the mind to unconsciousness.

Future neuroscience, and particularly theoretical neuroscience, will need to involve the investigator- subject. That is the way to get at the deep questions of neuroscience, questions about fundamental ontology, and ultimately neuroscience is or should be about those questions, and not so much about medical questions. Neuroscience should be geared to give insight into questions about experience, about phenomenology, about human intentionality, human energy and human morality and freedom, and ultimately about society and socialization. To set up that framework, moreover, which is essentially political, I think we will need a general theory of conversation and language use, because conversation and language use set all the important frames for the possible deployment of the human nervous system.

For the brain, there is no world independent of the body. For the brain, both world and body consist in sequences of patterns in neurons. There is thus no a priori reason to think that the life of the brain, which is already a part of the body, should be in the least bit separate from anything else in reality, such as an independent world outside the body. Perhaps it is merely our socialization practices that make it seem so overwhelmingly to be so, and by a sort of logical extension that we have a spiritual destiny after death to enter another dimension incommensurable with this one, or perhaps to enter into nothing at all. Perhaps if our social comportment were a little bit more like that of the angels of heaven our minds would find it altogether natural to think there was nothing in the world and in the body but a profound and tremendous unity of experience both during the interval between birth and death, and also, if we could learn about it, in the period after death and before birth.

These are hypotheticals only, and I do not propose to push them at the outset. At the outset I only aim to exploit the potential that a theory of conversation, presupposing as it does a necessary unity of mind and world, would have on neuroscience, both theoretical  and experimental. Here the premise is simple. Anything that leads to synchrony and stability across nervous systems can only aid experimental protocols. Any theory that homogenizes self-conscious expectation and prediction, particularly among neuroscientifically trained investigator-subjects, should be quintessentially useful in getting at phenomena and data that matter. There are two types of theory that can do this – theories about the brain as such, and theories about what brains as such are for.

My theory of conversation of course falls into this latter category. It is ambitious in the extreme, but I think it works. Couple it to objective neuroscience (first however, try it with some simple physiology like the GSR or heart rates) and you get a program for human evolution. Implement that program and you write political and intellectual history. Write political and intellectual history, and be prepared either to become lionized as a hero and champion of the ages, or shunned as an historical screwball, like Hegel or Marx or Lenin.

I do not take my theory of conversation to be particularly dangerous, or even particularly controversial. It does not foment crowd consciousness; it is not demagoguery. It is neither pretentious nor abstruse. It is about what happens, about what can happen and logically about what must happen when properly prepared people get together in a room for forty-five minutes at a time and exercise spiritually. It is about what happens deep in the body when clairvoyant intuition opens and the human being appears for all the world properly to be a member of a hierarchy of supersensible cosmic beings. It is about the occult significance of the blood, which is etherized and made fertile for intuitions and dreams that display an intelligence which is simply classes beyond what we are accustomed to in the average everyday. And it is about the mystery of sex and love, which will in the future be as intelligent and sublime as the great inventions and cultural artifacts whose creation today merely serves the human need for food, for comfort and for the satisfaction of curiosity.

With the solution to the mind-body problem comes the Problem of the Social Organism, the question of how to institutionalize the unity of brain, body and world. Clearly the way in general to do this is through art, but specifically I think we need to assess conversation as a phenomenon, as a datum, to derive a set of universally acceptable propositions about it, and to set out this theory as a Social Contract. This is what I do in my forthcoming book, and what I will be doing through lectures, workshops, my website and whatever applications of New Media I can adapt to my purposes. But if in addition, or better if first and foremost I can get the interest and endorsement of neuroscience, theoretical and otherwise, then I think we can begin to expect some real and positive change, in our lifetimes, in the ways in which human intelligence is comported in the world and in the ways in which human energy is deployed.