The Incredible Shrinking Man

July 31st, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Brain, Descartes, Rene, Dualism, Mind |

Descartes is known for most clearly articulating a distinction which later became known as the ‘mind/body problem’, that is the radical dualistic distinction between mind and body. Prior to Descartes (and his contemporaries and immediate predecessors), dualist was very much in place (being, apparently a human universal), but this was a dualism of matter and (individual) spirit or soul. In other words, the corporeal body was part of the material world and it was this entire materiality which was contrasted with the soul/mind. Today’s dualism, 400 years after Descartes, tends to be located around a brain/mind distinction, or even a part of the brain; those tissues and circuits holding the ‘correlates of consciousness’, which is held in opposition to phenomenal self of the mind. History, then, has preserved the longstanding dualist term of of mind/soul/spirit, but has radically reduced its corresponding term in the material world. Whereas once the mind/soul was balanced by, and the equal of, the entirety of physical creation, now it finds itself reflected in a few ounces of grey meat.