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mind/body dualism in the West

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very old tradition going back to people like Plato

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seen as fundamentally in opposition

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the rational faculties, the mind, trying to control the body

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Plato's chariot allegory

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charioteer (intellect) tries to control the first winged horse (rational/moral impulse) and the second winged horse (irrational passions/appetites) with the goal of driving them toward enlightenment

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the charioteer (the mind) trying to bring the horses (the body) under control

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mind/body dualism in China

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some scholars say there is no concept of this

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but they do have a tension between (1) rational faculties / conscience thought, and (2) the desires and emotions

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the closest word for mind is xin [sheen]

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refers to the heart

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pictograph of the heart

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translated as mind, heart and heart/mind

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a locus of cognition

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conscious thought

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will power

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ability to think rationally

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cognitive emotions such as worry and anxiety

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mohists and legalists

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rationality controls emotions

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emotions are fundamentally disordered and antisocial

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can bring them under control if we exert will power

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confucians and taoists

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a slightly different take on the mind

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mind reshapes the emotions and desires to bring them in harmony

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from a contemporary scientific perspective it's a little bit puzzling why people are mind/body dualists because to the best of our knowledge we are not ghosts in the machine

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to the best of our knowledge our rational and conscious thought is part of the body

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we are integrated mind-body systems designed by evolution to more through the world in a certain way

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so from a contemporary empirical system, it seems that mind/body dualism is just incorrect

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and yet this intuition that there's something different about minds, and that minds and bodies are different in kind, seems to be a universal human cognition, so why is this?

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the structure of our cognition makes us feel like we are two different things

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we experience ourselves as being split in an important way

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we get a sense of this when we analyze phrases that we use, e.g. "I had to drag myself out of bed this morning", who is being dragged and who is doing the dragging?

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these are metaphorical expressions but the split itself is not entirely metaphorical

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at a functional level, we seem to have two different modes of cognition, referred to as hot and cold cognition

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hot cognition

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emotion

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fast

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frugal, i.e. doesn't require a lot of resources

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automatic

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mostly unconscious

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we tend not to have access to hot cognition, these are the tacit, embodied programs that we have

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the body

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cold cognition

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non-emotional

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conscious thought

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physiologically expensive

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reflection

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our narrative account of ourselves

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these two systems interact with each other

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cognitive control

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using the conscious mind to control the unconscious mind / the body

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e.g. the ability to "drag yourself out of bed in the morning"

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the Stroop Effect

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a demonstration of interference in the reaction time of a task, e.g. when the name of a color is printed in a color not denoted by the name, then naming the color of the word takes longer and is more prone to errors than when the color of the ink matches the name of the color

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you feel yourself exerting cognitive control in order to name the correct color of the letters, it feels unnatural

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there is something unpleasant about exerting cognitive control

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studies have shown the cognitive control is a limited resource and exerting it is mentally tiring

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what's going on is you have two automatic systems

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1. your color recognition system

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2. your language reading system, and they are in conflict

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two otherwise quite automatic, hot-system-1 processes that are in fighting each other, and your brain has to quickly and unexpected pull in your cognitive control to sort out what is should be determined to be giving you correct information

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requires the " umpf" of conscious effort

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cognitive control is the key to human mastery of the planet

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allows us to delay gratification

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allows us to train ourselves to have new dispositions

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allows us to inhabit ecosystems which our bodies did not evolve to be able to inhabit

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it's relatively slow

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we experience this with the stroop test

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physiologically expensive

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when you exert cognitive control in one domain, you are less able to do it in another

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i.e. becoming weary from mental work

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easy to overload

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e.g. count backwards by 5 while performing some math problem or remembering a string of digits

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another theory is that it has more to do with switching task priorities

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we can't be exerting cognitive control all the time

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90% of what we do during the day are being done by implicit systems, the hot-systems

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10% is being done by cognitive cold-systems

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this has ramifications in religions and governments

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political systems

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how are people making the decisions they are making

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ethical models

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how to train people to be more ethical

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this issue also concerns our human nature, the hot-systems we are born with, and what needs to happen to that if we are to become civilized