Mind Memory

Dec 23, 2008 by Celastrus Shop

Ask any undergraduate philosophy student to explain the mind / body duality and its implications for free will and consciousness, and you’re likely to receive a shrug, a frown, and a furrowed brow. After all, the connection between mind memory (or past states of being, if you like) and physical body is a problem that’s been bothering humankind for a few thousand years by now. While research into cognition and neuroscience– neurobiology, -physics, -chemistry, and so on— has yielded concrete information on the divide between body and mind, we are still a long, long way from any hard understanding of this age-old distinction.

In philosophical terms, “mind” is often discussed separately from body and the physical processes of the brain. “Mind” refers to the subjective feeling of consciousness as a combination of thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and will and imagination, which we experience as a reaction to or adjunct to events in the physical world. Memory is included in this category: as a subjective process of remembering events, facts, opinions and other things that pertain to our interior conscious lives, memory is perhaps the most crucial part of mind for maintaining our consistent sense of self.

The earliest theories of mind and memory and how to distinguish the two from the physical nuts and bolts of the brain (neurons, glial cells, gray matter, etc.) were pre-scientific. Pre-twentieth century philosophers’ notions of memory and mind weren’t informed by cellular knowledge; instead, they tried to explain the connection between material processes and our interior subjective perceptions in terms of an immaterial spirit or soul that was somehow connected yet separate from a material body. The philosophical quandary of how the supposedly non-physical mind and physical body could possibly interact is known as mind-body dualism.

The most famous dualistic philosophy is probably substance dualism, also known as Cartesian dualism after its primary advocate, René Descartes. Substance dualism proposes that mind and body are two distinct substances, the body being material and the mind immaterial. He tried to explain their connection by suggesting that a structure in the brain (Descartes favored the pineal gland) might transmit physical sensations to this “immaterial mind”, although how something physical could transmit to something non-physical isn’t satisfactorily explained in Cartesian dualism.

The interaction between the physical world and seemingly non-physical mental states (which are considered to be different than the physical processes of the brain) is at the heart of any philosophy concerning mind-body dualism. It may seem obvious that our interior mental processes are affected by and can affect the physical world— you touch a hot stove (physical event 1), feel pain (mental event 1) and pull back in reflex (physical event 2)… right? However, as yet there’s still little empirical evidence to suggest that the two physical events are connected by your interior perception, or “mental event 1”. In other words, some philosophers would suggest that the act of touching a hot stove and pulling back are two physical events initiated by your body that do not depend on any conscious decision on your part. In this philosophy, called epiphenomenalism, your mental perception of pain (mental event 1) is irrelevant to your next action, pulling back from the stove (or physical event 2). Your body pulls away from the stove to avoid injury, but whether or not you consciously feel pain cannot be said to initiate this action; it’s an epiphenomenon, or a “dead end” that doesn’t affect your physical actions in the world.

What’s interesting is that brain imaging science is finally beginning to catch up to the philosophical debate about which comes first: thought in the mental world or action in the physical world. Experiments with brain imaging have demonstrated a considerable time lag of about half a second between when the brain starts firing to initiate an action (also called a decision) and when the subject becomes consciously aware of it. Based on these results, some scientists have suggested that our sense of free will in the moment may be illusory; that isn’t to say we have no free will, but rather that it may be based a lot more on unconscious processes and our habitual courses of action than is apparent to us in everyday conscious life.

However, so far these brain imaging studies have only examined actions that are executed over the span of a few seconds, such as getting subjects to move a finger to push a button. When it comes to actions or decisions that take many seconds, minutes, days or even longer to reach, most neuroscientists acknowledge that conscious awareness probably has a much bigger role to play.

Perhaps this is where memory comes into the mind-body dualism debate. After all, our memory is essential in constituting the interior mental states— the opinions, values, and experiences— which form the basis of our everyday decisions, both conscious and unconscious. Therefore, mind memory and intention may actually all be part of the same continuum of consciousness that animates us as human beings.