It is commonly believed that there is a mind-body problem because we can give an explanation of matter but not of the mind. But according to John Collins, we don’t understand matter either. Materialism was refuted by Newton in the 17th century, and the physicalism which has replaced it is not a substantive doctrine. There are gaps in our understanding of the mental – we still do not have a good theory of what the mind is – but after Newton, there is no ‘mind-body problem’
Minds are problematic. We don’t quite know what they are. If one has a mind, let us agree, then one is sentient and sapient, able to be self-aware and to think and reason about things. But both of these qualities are opaque, not least because they have no apparent analogy in the non-mental world. What, exactly, does one need to add to a body to get a mind? How is a thing that is merely subject to physical laws self-aware and able to think about dinosaurs and the afterlife? This conundrum is invariably depicted in terms of there being a mind-body problem. I’ll try in what follows to give you reasons to think that this label is at best misleading. There are lots of mind problems and lots of body problems, but no mind-body problem, because there is no realm of bodies in some general sense from which minds are excluded. Before you call for an intervention, let me explain.
A potted history.