Body Mentalism

Body Mentalism

We are all too familiar with attempts to describe the mind in terms of the body, the better to integrate the two. Behaviorism and materialism spring to mind (in both senses). These attempts are seldom if ever convincing, at first glance or after many glances. They seem to put the mind where it is not. But we never hear about the converse procedure: describing the body in terms of the mind. Is it possible, and what would it show? We might think of this as reductive mentalism—reducing the physical (bodily) to the mental. What would it look like? A behaviorist view of the mind would say that seeing is what eyes do; a mentalist view of the eyes would say they are the organs of seeing. The bodily behavior corresponding to seeing is eye-centered; the mental process corresponding to using the eyes is seeing. Definitionally, seeing is eye behavior, or eyes are the organs of seeing. In these definitions we ignore the intrinsic properties of the defined thing in favor of its extrinsic relational properties: we don’t refer to the phenomenological properties of seeing, and we don’t refer to the physical properties of the eyes. The eyes and seeing are clearly connected, so we exploit this connection to give a reductive definition: seeing is what the eyes do, and the eyes are what is used to see. The inner becomes the outer and the outer becomes the inner. Hey presto, we have a reduction. Occam is a happy man. Pushing further, we can give a similar treatment to the other sense organs: the ears are the organs of hearing, the nose of smelling, the mouth of tasting (etc.), the skin of feeling. We could replace, in a spirit of reduction, our familiar terms for sense organs with these contrived mentalistic definitions: the ears are the organ of hearing, the nose the organ of smelling, etc. If we are very scrupulous, we can stipulate that the word “organ” doesn’t mean “organ of the body” as a physical thing, but rather whatever plays the right role vis-à-vis the mind. We call this word topic-neutral. We have thus mentalized the sense organs of the body. We have re-conceived the body as the embodiment of mind, where “embodiment” is understood neutrally as “whatever realizes the mind” (it could be immaterial).

Following this general pattern, we can move on to the limbs. The hands are defined as organs of desire satisfaction: they serve to relieve hunger, among many other things, all psychological (produce aesthetic pleasure, keep us feeling warm, etc.). The arms are part of this general organ of mental well-being. The legs take us to other places that give us new experiences, or enable us to enjoy a game of football, etc. As for the internal organs, they enable us to live long happy lives, maximize pleasure, be living conscious beings. The body is conceived as the servant of the mind, its ancillary. We think of it from this psychological perspective, which is by no means unnatural—though somewhat exclusionary corporeally. But isn’t this precisely what troubles us about the converse attempt at reduction? The mind no doubt is connected to behavior, but it isn’t just behavior—it has its own intrinsic nature. We can re-describe each in terms of the other and succeed in referring to the thing in question, but the exercise strikes us as ignoring what is essential—the materiality of the body and the mentality of the mind. The same trick can be performed with respect to the brain and the mind: we can describe the brain as “the organ of the mind” and C-fire firing as “the correlate of pain”—we don’t haveto describe them by their usual names. The pre-frontal cortex can be described as “the place where thought takes place” and not fail to refer to the corresponding part of the brain. Thus, we can mentalize the brain; we might even venture to claim that we have reduced the brain to the mind—and certainly we have subtracted a lot from the brain by this maneuver (“reduced” it). Similarly, we can describe the mind by the brain, as in “the mental state realized by C-fiber firing”, and again the feeling is that we have missed the essence of pain. We have referred to pain, but not as pain. A simple verbal trick has been converted into a metaphysical vision, all too easily. The truth is that such re-descriptions are just that: they establish precisely nothing of metaphysical (ontological) significance. In effect, they misinterpret correlation (causal or not) as constitution. When you feel pain, C-fibers fire in your brain, and when C-fibers fire in your brain you feel pain, and we can describe one by reference to the other—so what?[1]

[1] The same reasoning applies to functionalism, as elementary reflection will reveal. I have never heard of anyone trying to define the body by the mind in the way described, and it must surely strike us as bizarre. Why is describing the mind in terms of the body any better?