The Mind-Body Problem

The mind-body problem is an alleged difficulty for substance dualism that challenges the notion of a nonphysical consciousness and a physical body interacting with each other.  It has absolutely no metaphysical potency, and it does not in any way disqualify substance dualism from being true by necessity.  Substance dualism is the notion that conscious minds are immaterial and physical bodies are material, and as such the two are composed of different "substances."  There are enormous ramifications to this, some of which I have explored in previous posts.  But to address the mind-body problem I will first briefly explain again what a mind/consciousness is and why it cannot be a part of the body (see other posts for longer treatment of this).

Consciousness is the ability to perceive and the thing that perceives all at once; a brain is a physical organ that, without consciousness, is no more aware than a non-sentient rock [1].  It is logically possible to have a brain without a mind/consciousness (like when someone dies) and to have a consciousness without a body.  That is, there is nothing impossible about the concept of one existing apart from the other.  The very facts that consciousness and a brain are not conceptually identical and that it is logically possible for one exist entirely apart from the other prove that one is not synonymous with the other, revealing that a conscious mind and a physical body are distinct, the former being immaterial (not made of matter) and the latter being material (having physical being).  Since consciousness could exist even if there was no physical matter, it cannot be material, even if it is generated by material brains, and thus it is immaterial.

So how do minds and bodies interact if one is immaterial and the other physical?  I know that my mind and body can and do affect each other, which requires by necessity that they interact with each other.  It is actually not difficult at all to recognize examples of someone's mental states affecting his or her body.  For instance, experiencing a thought, a purely mental event, can trigger a physical reaction of one's body, like a sad thought bringing tears to one's eyes.  Likewise, a person could experience fear that results a rapid beating of the heart or a sudden sweat, anger that produces an increase in body temperature, or sexual attraction that triggers a physiological reaction of the genitals.  Sadness, fear, anger, and sexual attraction are all mental states/events, only existing within a nonphysical consciousness, that can cause the body to react in a certain way.

But I do not need to know exactly how my mind and body interact on an explanatory level in order for me to know for sure that my mind/consciousness and body are objectively distinct, yet still intimately intertwined.  I do not need to know how my mind and body interact to know that they do.  This is comparable to how one might know that time flows in a linear direction without knowing exactly how this occurs, or know that fire generates heat without knowing exactly how this happens, and so on.  An objection saying that minds and bodies can't interact is bullshit because they do, and the two cannot be the same.  It is not that there is just good evidence that a mind and body are not synonymous; one can logically prove this in full.

Knowing that something is true does not always require knowledge of just how it is the case, only knowledge of how one knows it is the case--there is a difference between discovering reality and discovering why a certain reality is the way it is.  The "mind-body problem" is not about metaphysical or logical impossibility, nor is it even about not knowing that consciousnesses and bodies are distinct, but it is instead about not knowing exactly how nonphysical and physical things interact, though they do every day.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-language-of-substance-dualism.html