Mind-Body problem.

[Ulf]

I was wondering what opinions others have on the mind-body problem? I'm of the opinion that there really is/should not be any divide, but I'll explain myself after a few other responses first.

The mind-body problem concerns the explanation of the relationship that exists between minds, or mental processes, and bodily states or processes. The main aim of philosophers working in this area is to determine the nature of the mind and mental states/processes, and how--or even if--minds are affected by and can affect the body.
Our perceptual experiences depend on stimuli which arrive at our various sensory organs from the external world and these stimuli cause changes in our mental states, ultimately causing us to feel a sensation, which may be pleasant or unpleasant. Someone's desire for a slice of pizza, for example, will tend to cause that person to move his or her body in a specific manner and in a specific direction to obtain what he or she wants. The question, then, is how it can be possible for conscious experiences to arise out of a lump of gray matter endowed with nothing but electrochemical properties. A related problem is to explain how someone's propositional attitudes (e.g. beliefs and desires) can cause that individual's neurons to fire and his muscles to contract in exactly the correct manner. These comprise some of the puzzles that have confronted epistemologists and philosophers of mind from at least the time of René Descartes.

The mind-body dichotomy is the view that "mental" phenomena are, in some respects, "non-physical" (distinct from the body). In a religious sense, it refers to the separation of body and soul. The mind-body dichotomy is the starting point of Dualism, and became conceptualized in the form known to the modern Western world in René Descartes' philosophy, though it also surfaced in pre-Aristotelian concepts and in Avicennian philosophy.
This view of reality leads one to consider the corporeal as little valued and trivial. The rejection of the mind-body dichotomy is found in French Structuralism, and is a position that generally characterized post-war French philosophy. The absence of an empirically identifiable meeting point between the non-physical mind and its physical extension has proven problematic to dualism and many modern philosophers of mind maintain that the mind is not something separate from the body. These approaches have been particularly influential in the sciences, particularly in the fields of sociobiology, computer science, evolutionary psychology and the various neurosciences

Plato's idea

Plato argued that, as the body is from the material world, the soul is from the world of ideas and thus immortal. He believed the soul was temporarily united with the body and would only be separated at death where it would then go back to the world of forms. As the soul does not exist in time and space like the body, it can access universal truths from the world of ideas.

Dualism - the mind is distinct from the body.
Materialism - the mind is an extension of the body (eg. chemical reactions).
Idealism - reality is in the mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mind
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind-body_dichotomy

[Psychonaut]

A lot of the time, I'm inclined to agree with Nietzsche, that the mind is naught but a plaything of the body. Most days of the week, I go with the computer analogy. I think it's quite fair to view our minds as software that run on the hardware that is our brain. You might even go so far as to say that our ethnicity (or meta-ethnicity) provides the operating system through which the software of our Self is run. I think that the mind is totally and wholly dependent on and caused by the body and that the two are one single, inseparable unit. However, since our software at least appears to have the unique feature of self consciousness and (limited) free will, one must wonder if the body has created something that transcends itself.

[Lyfing]

I go with Nietzsche on this one..

This is from a nice little essay I've read many times called Nietzsche's Metaphysics..

3. 0vercoming Nihilism
A. The emphasis on physiology.

In describing the world in terms of will to power Nietzsche is in fact focusing on what had hitherto been thought of as appearance. For Nietzsche the distinction of thought and will is indicative of the dualism inherent in philosophy. Nietzsche argues that action takes place in the world and therefore he focuses on the will, which had hitherto been seen to bring thought in relation to the body and the world. For Nietzsche will and power refer to the actual world in contrast to thought (philosophical thought in particular) which conceives itself to be other-worldly.

Nietzsche's emphasis on the actual, finite world in contrast to the philosophical emphasis on the real, other-worldly realm (e.g., the realm of forms or the noumenal realm) explains his description of the will in physiological terms. He contends that the self and will are unites in the actual physiological person; that there is no self or will beyond the completely surface phenomenon of the body. Nietzsche asserts that the evolution of spirit should be considered as a question of the body.28 His dialectical scepticism shifts the focus of philosophy from thought to instinct. Nietzsche portrays himself as philosophizing with a hammer. He wishes to smash the idolatrous shed which he argues Platonism has cast over the body. In the light of these metaphors, Nietzsche describes thought as the self-expression of instinct, as a tool for self-preservation and self-enhancement.29 Whereas Plato argued that the rational element of the soul is prior to and sets the boundaries for the physical, Nietzsche reverses this priority.

Interestingly, Rydberg wrote this in Teutonic Mythology..

The reason for the obscurity is not, however, in the matter itself, which has never been thoroughly studied, but in the false premises from which the conclusions have been drawn. Mythologists have simply assumed that the popular view of the Christian Church in regard to terrestrial man, conceiving him to consist of two factors, the perishable body and the imperishable soul, was the necessary condition for every belief in a life hereafter, and that the heathen Teutons accordingly also cherished this idea.

But this duality did not enter into the belief of our heathen fathers. Nor is it of such a kind that a man, having conceived a life hereafter, in this connection necessarily must conceive the soul as the simple, indissoluble spiritual factor of human nature. The division into two parts, líf og sála, líkami og sála, body and soul, came with Christianity, and there is every reason for assuming, so far as the Scandinavian peoples are concerned, that the very word soul, sála, sál, is, like the idea it represents, an imported word. In Old Norse literature the word occurs for the first time in Olaf Tryggvason's contemporary Hallfred, after he had been converted to Christianity. Still the word is of Teutonic root. Ulfilas translates the New Testament psyche with saiwala, but this he does with his mind on the Platonic New Testament view of man as consisting of three factors: spirit (pneuma), soul (psyche), and body (soma). Spirit (pneuma) Ulfilas translates with ahma.

Another assumption, likewise incorrect in estimating the anthropological-eschatological belief of the Teutons, is that they are supposed to have distinguished between matter and mind, which is a result reached by the philosophers of the Occident in their abstract studies. It is, on the contrary, certain that such a distinction never enitered the system of heathen Teutonic views. In it all things were material, an efni of coarse or fine grain, tangible or intangible, visible or invisible. The imperishable factors of man were, like the perishable, material, and a force could not be conceived which was not bound to matter, or expressed itself in matter, or was matter.

http://www.northvegr.org/lore/rydberg/095.php

Later,
-Lyfing