THE CONCEPT OF MIND
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Giulia Colombo
IMAGES
Francesco Mereu
It is quite easy to understand what the body is made of, but it has always been challenging to outline the nature of our individual existence, that strange phenomenon from which I am me and not you. But who has tried to answer this open question? And how?
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MIND AND BODY, ABOVE AND BELOW
The 17th century gave birth to experimental science and crystallized Descartes' first modern theory of mind. Referring to a tradition that dates back to ancient Greeks, Descartes affirms that the immaterial essence that governs our body is like an immortal software: an absolute and divine king and an immobile engine of the admirable machine that is the human body. [1]
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THE PILOT OF AN ADMIRABLE MACHINE
The Cartesian dualism (1642)
While Descartes thought the mind was transcendent, the Idéologues of the age of Enlightenment propose that the mind is nothing more than a physical byproduct of the organ that creates it, more or less like the breath is produced by the lungs. Pierre Jean Cabanis, a medical doctor, suggested that mental phenomena should have been investigated with the same scientific methods as natural ones, giving thus birth to psychology. [2]
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PSYCHOLOGY AS SCIENCE
Enlightenment materialism (1802)
We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and Sigmund Freud proved it by killing our belief that we are aware of what goes on in our minds. What we think we are is nothing more than a social function regulated by unconscious drives, not very different from animal instincts. [3] The unconscious is a new territory to explore with the means of experimental science, and Freud moves the flag a little further down the road of the research opened by Cabanis.
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THE UNKNOWN WITHIN
Freud's unconscious (1923)
Herbert Feigl updates the materialist theories of the Enlightenment, maintaining that mental states correspond to precise states of the brain, in the same way that a point on a map corresponds to a specific latitude and longitude. Each brain region is now attributed to a specific cognitive function. [4] The current use of neuroimaging, which allowed discoveries such as the REM sleep phase follows this approach.
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Our mind’s GPS?
Positivist physicalism (1958)
Hilary Putnam [5], Jerry Fodor [6] and Daniel Dennett [7] formulated the functionalist theory, according to which the same state of mind can be realized thanks to different but equivalent neural activities, exactly as a computer can calculate 2+2 in different ways. The mental state is, therefore, an operation: it cannot be described with neural activity only, exactly like the electrical signal does not explain the information it is processing. The mind is the software, but it needs a hard disk - the brain - to run.
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THE CONNECTIONS THAT GENERATE THE MIND
Functionalism (1963)
Karl Raimund Popper formulates interactionism. The theory maintains that the mind is a product of the body that allows humans to communicate through a language and to modify reality. In this view, a book on how to build a house is an object capable of modifying reality, because it has a content that comes from and is intended for the human mind. For Popper, it is the interaction between reality and language that generates the mind. [8]
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COMMUNICATING TO DO
Interactionism (1977)
Gerald Edelman formulates neural Darwinism, according to which the brain has nothing in common with computers, but it is the product of the selective survival of some neurons during development and experience. [9] Jean P. Changeux, on the other hand, argues that the adaptability of the brain is due to epigenetic variation. [10] The mind becomes the butterfly contained in the chrysalis Homo.
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THE STRONGEST NEURON
Evolutionary models (1978)
Margaret Boden [11] and Douglas Hofstater [12] develop the brain-computer comparison and assume that the mind is a function for computation. The mind from software becomes hardware, and the brain is the laptop hosting it. The consequence is that a sufficiently sophisticated machine could recreate human capabilities outside of a brain. This is the basis of current AI technology and of several episodes of Futurama.
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THE MIND AS A FUNCTION FOR CALCULATION
Computational Models and AI (1979)
Today no one has any doubt that the mind is not just moving a finger or imagining the meaning of a word, yet there is no scientific consensus on what are the best definitions of mind, emotion, attention, and so on. The interpretation of what experiments show varies depending on the theory and this irremediably changes the hypothesis on what is the cause and what is the consequence of a phenomenon. Interpretations are useful because they can guide the theories of the future, but without a general theory of brain functioning, we cannot go much further than that. Neuroscience still lacks the maturity of other sciences such as genetics. The science of the mind still moves in a sea of doubts - and for this reason it is one of the most fertile fields of innovation in contemporary science.
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CONCLUSION
Wanderers on a sea made of fog
GLOSSARY
MENTAL STATE The condition in which the mind is, regardless of its content; it is like an empty horizon within which thoughts, emotions, reasoning, planning of movements, etc. are placed. Examples of mental states are sleep, dream, the state of excitement you find yourself in when you are scared or happy, attention when you listen to the music you like. EPIGENETIC It is said of any non-inheritable variation of the genome, i.e. of all the information contained in a cell, for example the DNA molecule; the causes of the epigenetic changes come from the environment.
GIULIA COLOMBO
is a biologist, passionate about neuroscience and electrophysiology. She is a PhD student in Molecular and Translational Medicine at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, deepening her research background in neurological diseases, without ever forgetting her interest in all non-human life forms. She has a not-so-secret love for art and writing - especially poetry - and seeks to combine such passion using science communication as a tool.
is a communication designer from Sardinia, passionate about publishing and the world of printed paper. He is especially interested in projects where visual communication intersects with social issues and civil commitment. In his spare time he accumulates books and magazines that he will never read, but that look great in his library.
FRANCESCO MEREU
BIBLIOGRAPHY
[1] Cartesio, R., Meditationes de prima philosophia, (Parigi, 1642); trad. it. Meditazioni metafisiche, a cura di S. Landucci (Laterza ed., Bari, 2019) [2] Cabanis, P. J., Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme (Crapart, Caille et Ravier ed., Parigi, 1802) [3] Freud, S., Das Ich und Das Es (Internationaler Psycho-analytischer Verlag, Vienna, W. W. Norton & Company, 1923); trad. it. L’Io e l’Es, a cura di C. Musatti (Bollati Boringhieri ed., Torino, 1978) [4] Feigl, H., The ‘Mental’ and the ‘Physical’ (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1958) [5] Putnam, H., Brains and Behavior (Ronald J. Butler ed., Analytical Philosophy: Second Series. Blackwell, Oxford, 1963) [6] Fodor, J., Modularity of Mind (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1983); trad. it. La mente modulare, a cura di R. Luccio (Il Mulino ed., Bologna, 1999) [7] Dennett, D., Brainstorms (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1981); trad. it. Brainstorms, a cura di L. Colasanti (Adelphi, Milano, 1991) [8] Popper, K.R. & Eccles, J.C., The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism (Springer International ed., Berlino, 1977); trad. it. L’Io e il suo cervello, a cura di G. Minnini (Armando ed., Roma, 1977) [9] Edelman, G. & Mountcastle, V. B., Mindful Brain: Cortical Organization and the Group-Selective Theory of Higher Brain (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1978) [10] Changeux, J.-P., L’homme neuronal (Fayard ed., Parigi, 1983); trad. it. L’uomo neuronale, a cura di M. Malcovati (Feltrinelli ed., Milano, 1993) [11] Boden, M., Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man (Harvester Press, Hassocks, Sussex, 1979) [12] Hofstater, D., Gödel, Escher, Bach (Basic Books ed., New York, 1980); trad. it. Gödel, Escher, Bach, a cura di Veit B. et al. (Adelphi ed., Milano, 1990) [13] Putnam, H., Brains and Behavior (Ronald J. Butler ed., Analytical Philosophy: Second Series. Blackwell, Oxford, 1963) [14] Fodor, J., Modularity of Mind (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1983); trad. it. La mente modulare, a cura di R. Luccio (Il Mulino ed., Bologna, 1999) [15] Dennett, D., Brainstorms (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1981); trad. it. Brainstorms, a cura di L. Colasanti (Adelphi, Milano, 1991) [16] Boden, M., Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man (Harvester Press, Hassocks, Sussex, 1979) [17] Hofstater, D., Gödel, Escher, Bach (Basic Books ed., New York, 1980); trad. it. Gödel, Escher, Bach, a cura di Veit B. et al. (Adelphi ed., Milano, 1990)