What is the modern solution to the mind-body problem for those who still hold the mind is separate?

Question

René Descartes gave us the problem of how the mind interacts with the body in its modern formulation. Essentially, he asked how the incorporeal mind was able to influence the material body. He also pointed out that the mind was influenced by the body, which was a more novel suggestion (and clearly a true one given what we now know about biochemistry). He landed on the pineal gland as the point where the mind and body interact. This turns out to be a simplistic solution and at least incomplete, if not outright wrong.

It seems the most usual solution to the problem these days is to simply eliminate the concept of a mind separate from a body. Therefore our thoughts are something of an illusion that arise from complex operations of the brain, nervous system and hormone secreting glands. Assuming this conception of the mind is acceptable to a thinker, the solution is perfectly serviceable.

But what is the current thinking about the mind-body problem among philosophers who still maintain a separate mind? Are there any dualist philosophers still in existence?

Answer 1

Wikipedia is brief:

Dualism in modern and contemporary philosophy

The American philosopher Arthur Oncken Lovejoy in his The Revolt Against Dualism (1960) develops a critique of the modern new realism, reproposing a form of dualism based on a "fork of human experience."

Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, founded Journal of the History of Ideas wrote the paper Dualism and Paradox of Reference

His complete works and biography can be accessed here.

On the other hand, Thomas Nagel, of "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974) fame is known for his stance against reductionism. In the same wikipedia entry:

In "What is it Like to Be a Bat?", Nagel argues that consciousness has essential to it a subjective character, a what it is like aspect. He states that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism." His critics have objected strongly to what they see as a misguided attempt to argue from a perfectly true fact about how one represents the world (trivially, one can only do so from his own point of view) to a false claim about the world, that it somehow has first personal perspectives built into it. On that understanding, Nagel is a conventional dualist about the physical and the mental. This is, however, a misunderstanding: Nagel's point is that there is a constraint on what it is to possess the concept of a mental state, namely, that one be directly acquainted with it. Concepts of mental states are only made available to a thinker who can be acquainted with his/her own states; clearly, the possession and use of physical concepts has no corresponding constraint.

Answer 2

It is common nowadays to distinguish substance from property dualism. No major philosopher has advocated substance dualism since Descartes himself, but a large number of philosophers have advocated property dualism. This is a view which classifies the properties of objects as being of two kinds, physical and mental, while maintaining monism or quietism about the ultimate nature of substance.

Advocates of this view include Donald Davidson (his theory of Anomalous Monism), Richard Rorty (non-reductive physicalsim), Wilfrid Sellars (in his A Semantical Solution to the Mind Body Problem). They have all argued that there are events which simultaneously have both physical and mental properties, and that these properties are not reducable to one another. All have asserted the ontological identity of properties without asserting epistemological identity. Like Frege's way of differentiating the meaning of two co-referring terms by attributing to each a distinct 'sense', they are suggesting that physical attributes and mental attributes ultimately belong to same entities, but that the very notion of a property or attribute is inseparable from human understanding, i.e. it is epistemic in nature, and hence arises the mind-body problem.

Indeed, of the main schools of thought in philosophy of mind in the last few decades-identity theory (type and token), functionalism and a so-called 'new materialism'- all of them have asserted ontological identity of physical and mental properties while respecting the epistemological irreducibility of physical and mental predicates.

The majority of philosophers asserting views of these kinds would probably accept being called 'non-reductive materialists', i.e. mental properties are physical properties in some metaphysical but conceptually irreducible sense. The mental-physical relation is one of identity for them, so they do not give ontological priority to mind or matter, yet they call themselves 'materialists'. That is because while all objects and events have physical properties, only some of them have mental properties. In that sense, everything is physical, but not everything is mental.

Many others have rejected this thesis, and the label 'materialism', and rejected the metaphysical or ontological identity of mental/physical properties, e.g. Jackson, Sprigge, Honderdich. A good summary is in Chalmers 1996 p. 166+. Rejecting materialism implies a strong dualism about properties without saying anything about the ultimate nature of substance, or that every event is physical. The position is close to that of Descartes. Others have adopted a quietism where the ultimate nature of things is unstated (e.g. the so-called 'New Mysterians' such as Colin McGinn actually say the mind-body relationship is ultimately unknowable to the human mind).

Most philosophers would agree not all states or events have mental properties (i.e. some events are purely physical), only some do. Some of these mental events we would characterise as thoughts, having conceptual properties such as an inferential role or a logical syntax. Other mental events are not thoughts, e.g. pain. But for materialist philosophers, all mental events are identical to physical events, i.e. the same event under a different description (e.g. pain is the firing of C-fibres). The key points of interest for all is the conceptual and metaphysical relations between the mental and physical properties of such events. The metaphysical level is usually taken as identity, while the conceptual level is usually characterised as a mutual dependence relation, which is given the name 'supervenience' (Jaegwon Kim writes extensively on this relation).

I tend to think that classifying properties in a dualistic way is in a sense fundamental to our way of thinking about the world, and though it leads to paradox (the mind-body problem), we have no better schema, idealism and materialism notwithstanding.

Tyler Burges' paper Philosophy of Mind: 1950-2000 in his book Foundations of Mind, Philosophical Essays vol. 2 provides an excellent summary of recent philosophy of mind.

Answer 3

It seems the most usual solution to the problem these days is to simply eliminate the concept of a mind separate from a body. Therefore our thoughts are something of an illusion that arise from complex operations of the brain, nervous system and hormone secreting glands. Assuming this conception of the mind is acceptable to a thinker, the solution is perfectly serviceable

I am not sure if it is indeed as straightforward as you think.

To give you an example, if someone has a brain-stroke (i.e. in laymen terms: the brain suffered (severe) damage) nobody takes the person to the mental-institution or psychiatry but to the hospital.

Also there has been medical operations where part of the brain has been removed, but the patient's memory was not also partially lost.

In many such cases, one would expect that the opposite would happen if your assumption was indeed the case.

I don't think that up-today we know enough about the function of the brain to fully reject this concept of duality/separation which originates from Greek philosophers.

Aristotle on the interaction of mind/body gave a specific example:
If someone is drunk then his personality/psichi also appears altered.
And if someone is under a specific psychological condition i.e. in fear or stress or joy then his body seems to also present relative points to accompany the state of mind.