Monday, February 12, 2024

Conflating The Mind And The Body

If blood stops pumping when the heart is inactive, it still is not the case that blood literally is the same thing as the heart.  There would be a causal or at minimum correlative relationship of some kind, but the two things are not the same, blood and the heart.  When a car's engine is turned off, its radio shuts off (as far as my sensory observations perceive), but the car radio is not the same as the engine.  Likewise, a light switch is not the same as the light bulb that it powers or the wiring that connects with the light bulb, and I have never encountered someone whose words confused one for the other(s).


A television screen is not the same as the electricity that provides it with power, and a shirt is not the sensation of wearing a shirt.  A thing and what causes it or what it in turn causes are not the same.  With miscellaneous examples such as the ones provided, there is often little to no actual pushback: the irrationalistic belief that correlation is causation or that scientific causation can even be proven at all does not usually seem to stop people from vaguely seeing that a shirt is not the sensation of wearing a shirt if someone else mentions it.

People tend to be far, far more likely to conflate separate correlative or causal factors for the same metaphysical entity more specifically when it comes to the mind and the body, and more precisely the mind and the brain or extended nervous system.  The body and mind are thought of as the same existent by certain people, though this is very obviously false when one does not make assumptions and looks to reason.  A perceiving thing and mass of tissue are not identical and this is plain.  One does not need to experience a hypothetical afterlife where the mind is free of the body to know this with absolute logical certainty.

No, making no assumptions, and knowing that logic is inherently true, they only need to realize that a mind is an immaterial seat of thought and perception, that no one could ever tangibly grasp a thought because it is not a neuron or any other physical body part and that having a body does not logically necessitate having the senses, which are mental in nature.  The fact that it would be logically possible--not necessarily contingently true in actuality--for a mind to exist separately from a bodily shell also could only be true if consciousness is not the same as the body.

Many also get so focused in the unknowable (for humans) reality of whether the mind causes the body or the body causes the mind to come into existence, as well as whether or not consciousness continues to exist outside of the body after biological death, to realize how simultaneously abstract and simple the matter really is.  Some things about consciousness are knowable, including that one is conscious, that having the experience of one's mind cannot be an illusion and is thus absolutely certain, that one's own mind exists even if others do not, and so on.  Its fundamental immateriality is among these things.

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