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The Mind-Body

Connection

Emotions and Health

Past Issues / Winter 2008 Table of Contents

A woman standing on a dock looking at the sky.

Photo: iStock

Doctors have pondered the connection between our mental and physical health for centuries. Until
the 1800s, most believed that emotions were linked to disease and advised patients to visit spas or
seaside resorts when they were ill. Gradually emotions lost favor as other causes of illness, such as
bacteria or toxins, emerged, and new treatments such as antibiotics cured illness after illness.

More recently, scientists have speculated that even behavioral disorders, such as autism, have a
biological basis. At the same time, they have been rediscovering the links between stress and health.
Today, we accept that there is a powerful mind-body connection through which emotional, mental,
social, spiritual, and behavioral factors can directly affect our health.

Mind-body medicine focuses on treatments that may promote health, including relaxation, hypnosis,
visual imagery, meditation, yoga, and biofeedback.

Over the past 20 years, mind-body medicine has provided evidence that psychological factors can
play a major role in such illnesses as heart disease, and that mind-body techniques can aid in their
treatment. Clinical trials have indicated mind-body therapies to be helpful in managing arthritis and
other chronic pain conditions. There is also evidence they can help to improve psychological
functioning and quality of life, and may help to ease symptoms of disease.

Read More "The Mind-Body Connection" Articles

Emotions and Health / How to Fight Stress / Stress and Your Brain / Can Prolonged Stress Affect
Whether Breast Cancer Returns? / Complementary and Alternative Approaches to Health

Winter 2008 Issue: Volume 3 Number 1 Page 4

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I. The Mind-Body Problem

There is an age-old problem in philosophy known as the "mind-body problem." One quick way to
state the problem is this: what is the relationship between the mind and the body -- between the
mental realm (the realm of thoughts, beliefs, pains, sensations, emotions) and the physical realm
(matter, atoms, neurons).

Are your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, sensations, and wishes things that happen in addition to all
the physical processes in your brain, or are they themselves just some of those physical processes?

This should be interesting to you for a couple of reasons:

(1) It's just an interesting philosophical puzzle -- belief in an immaterial soul seems kinda wacky, but
on the other hand it seems sort of mysterious how a physical system like a brain could give rise to
mental states.

(2) An answer to the debate between materialism and dualism is an answer to the question, What
am I? If materialism is true, then you are a physical object -- an organism. If dualism is true, then you
are a soul (or maybe it's better to say that you are a composite object-part soul, part body).

A. Cartesian Dualism

Cartesian Dualism is the conjunction of the following five theses (I have underlined the technical
terms and defined and discussed them below):

CD: (a) Each person is composed of two main parts: an immaterial mind and a physical body.

(b) Only immaterial minds can have mental properties.

(c) Only physical objects can have physical properties.

 (d) Mind and body are able to exist independently (and generally do so after death).

(e) Mind and body enter into two-way causal interaction.

immaterial mind =df. a spatially unextended thinking thing

There are two ways something might be spatially unextended: (i) it might not exist in space at all, and
so the notion of spatial extension doesn't apply at all; or (ii) it exists in space but it is so tiny as to be
absolutely dimensionless -- it has no length, width, or height; it is like a geometrical point.

It is not clear whether Descartes thinks minds exist inside space or outside space, so our
interpretation of Descartes' dualism will remain neutral about it.

mental property =df. a property such that anything that has it must be conscious

So if a thing has a mental property then it is guaranteed to be conscious.

Examples of mental properties:

being in pain

believing the Red Sox are in first place

tasting the taste of chocolate

wanting the semester to be over

feeling sad

Each of these properties is a mental property because if you have any of them, then you have to be
conscious. There is not way to have any of these properties without being conscious.
Examples of properties that are not mental properties:

stubbing your toe

screaming "ouch"

saying, "Woo-hoo, the Red Sox are in first place"

saying, "Damn, I can't wait for the semester to be over"

frowning

None of these properties is a mental property because it is at least logically possible to imagine a
thing having any one of them without being conscious. For instance, we could build a robot that had
all of these properties but had no mental states at all. It is easy to mistake the above properties for
mental properties because, as things stand in our world, these properties are tightly causally
connected with mental properties.

physical object =df. a thing that is extended in space and time

To say that a thing has extension -- that it is extended in space -- is to say that it has bulk. That it
takes up space. That it takes up room in the universe.

Examples of physical objects: my body, your body, Lassie the dog, the chair I am sitting in, the Eiffel
Tower, a hydrogen atom, the planet Earth, The Milky Way galaxy

An example of an object that is not extended in space and time? This is harder to come by. Even if we
squeeze something down really, really tiny, so long as it has just a bit of length, or width, or height, it
is still extended, and so is a physical object. The points studied in geometry, if there are such things,
are not physical objects, since they are not extended. If there are abstract objects, such as numbers,
presumably they are not objects with extension, so they are not physical objects.

physical property =df. a property such that anything that has it must be a physical object
So a physical property guarantees that whatever has it is spatially extended.

Examples of physical properties:

being red

weighing 150 lbs.

being 6 feet tall

being cubical

stubbing your toe

having a chemical change in your brain

screaming

See Sober p. 261, "Immortality of the Soul," for some comments relevant to clause (d) of CD.

About clause (e): Descartes thinks that, although mind a body are two distinct things, they can enter
into two-way causal interaction. So, events in the body can cause events in the mind: for example,
the stubbing of a toe can cause the firing of a neuron in the brain which can cause the sensation of
pain in the mind. Also, events in the mind can cause events in the body: the desire to drink the water
can cause the firing of some neuron in the brain which causes the contraction of the arm muscle
which causes the raising of the water bottle to take a drink.

B. Minimal Materialism

MM: (a) Each person is just a physical object (his/her own body); and
 (b) There are no souls or immaterial minds; and

(c) Each person (that is, each human body) has mental as well as physical properties.

I call this 'minimal materialism' because it contains theses that any reasonable form of materialism
would contain, but it is in important ways incomplete. It is in complete because it does not tell us
how it is that a physical object like a human organism can have mental properties. That is, it does not
include a theory of mind.