Shadow puppet world
My rocky journey has brought me closer to touching heights where creative sparks flash, yet breathing air of such an altitude brings on a dizziness, leaving me to retreat in the caves where unanswered questions loom: How can I communicate my thoughts to others? How does it help me? The ‘magic flute disillusionment’ revisits me, so I must dig deeper into the history of the ‘mind-body problem’.
Yes, bodies can bump into each other and make their presence known, but what about my musical thoughts – my imagination? Strictly speaking, thoughts cannot move my body or another like physical touch can. Thoughts are immaterial and my body is bulk. How can thought move bulk?
This innocent question is a minefield, and triggers a formidable philosophical problem: the ‘mind-body problem’.
Firstly – why problem? It doesn’t bother me. We do not consider the relationship between mind and body a problem. Common sense tells us unambiguously that the mind leads the body. If, for example, I wish to take a sip of coffee, I do this by ‘telling’ my hand to reach out for the cup and bring it to my mouth. It seems blatantly obvious that there is first of all a wish to drink, followed by my willed action to reach out for the cup. But as we have seen, it is not that simple. We know that there is really no free will involved. The brain decides already a third of a second before consciousness that I want to take a sip of coffee. And when I finally take the cup of coffee, I then experience nothing else but the shadow puppet show of something that has already been decided. This is so, because my body, with its urges, habits and dependency on caffeine, decide that I need a sip of coffee – not my own free will!
Nevertheless, as long as we are just involved in doing something, mind and body synchronize perfectly well. But when we begin to think about it, the ‘mind body problem’ becomes real. Once more we are landed with the question of freedom. This question is especially important for performing artists, as many have been influenced by the ‘mind over matter myth’. We believe that we manipulate our body through the mind. We believe also that we impose our musical ideas on body and instrument. At this point we fall into the same trap as Descartes did when he divided the world into mind and matter.
Descartes
Descartes (1596-1650) proposed that there are two substances, one mental, the other physical. Since the essence of the mental substance consists of consciousness and thought, and the essence of the physical substance of spatial extendedness or bulk, there seems no point of contact between both. The question here is: how does something immaterial act on something material? How can thought move bulk? Descartes believed that the incompatibility between these two substances can be overcome in living human bodies, where both enter a union, led by the mental substance emerging from a part in the brain, called ‘pineal gland’.
It is interesting to understand this idea in context with another belief of the time. There are four fluid filled cavities in the brain, called ‘ventricles’. They were thought of as the seat of the ‘four humours’ or ‘animal spirits’.[1]It was believed that the nerves of the brain resembled extremely small tubes[2], able to transport parts of these four fluids to the soul, which had its ‘principal seat’, according to Descartes, in the pineal gland. In his ‘Treatise on Man’ Descartes explains this procedure:
“When the gland is stimulated by the animal spirits flowing through the nerves and brain, the soul residing in the gland will have a certain kind of sensation; conversely, when the soul wills a movement, it is able to transmit instructions to the body via the gland.”
Descartes believed that the mind (or, in his words, the soul[3]) is the mover, whilst the body is a passive recipient of its orders. Descartes was not as wrong as he is fashionably made out to be today. He quite rightly points to processes that take place inside the brain which are able to get the body moving.[4] What he could not know is the other side of the coin: the body and its being-in-the-world. As we see it today, there is no hierarchy leading from mind to body, but there is just direct and immediate interaction between two equally important principles: on the one hand, senses and brain, and on the other, the external world: inside and outside represented in the brain.
Does the key to a solution of the mind-body problem lie in understanding mind and body as one and the same thing, ‘perceived in a double way’, as Schopenhauer proposes it? This sounds plausible, especially when emotions and feelings enter the scene. And indeed, as we shall see, emotions are expressions of the body, and simultaneously, states of the mind. Does the key to overcome the dilemma of artistic freedom, as we have sketched it so far, lie in a body that is able to generate emotions?
A mindless brain
But before we can tackle emotions we need to explore how a mind is played into existence. Emotions, to be recognised as such, require a self-conscious mind. So, the question of mind is paramount in this context. And there is definitely a problem with this.
God created Adam from earth, and to give this inert piece of matter the gift of life, God himself breathes life into it. This is how the Bible describes the momentous event of matter transforming into a living being. Life is here synonymous with mind, because God is pure mind. The body is alive because it is powered by a mind. But what if the body becomes the driving force and the mind the passive follower?
There are strong indications as to the validity of this upside-down version of creation. There are mindless life forms – plants, for example. But it is also difficult to attribute a mind to animals, at least to the less advanced species. Furthermore, if we understand mind as brain, we will discover that on the lower rung of evolution there are some well organised life forms that have no brains, but just a primitive nervous system. So, not only life and mind are not synonymous, but also life and brain do not come as a package. First of all, so it seems, there was life expressing itself in moving bodies, and only long after this, something emerged that could be called a brain.
To understand more about mind and body, we need to find out how brains came into existence. We accept the brain as our mental centre. Mind-body relation is always brain to body relation. But if we look at it the other way round, as body to brain relation, we come to an astonishingly simple solution.
The Sea Squirt
To get into this exciting theme and understand how a moving body becomes the driving force behind mind and brain, let me entertain you with a slightly gruesome tale from nature.
There is a little animal called ‘sea squirt’. Whilst in its infancy, it swims freely in the waters. During this period in its life, it is the proud possessor of a brain. Not like ours of course, but big and complex enough to deserve the name ‘brain’. Reaching adulthood, however, sea squirts attach themselves to a stone, and do nothing else but filtering water. But one great act is still in store for them before they settle finally into this monotonous existence. As soon as they attach themselves to a stone they consume their own brain. Why? Because immobility, solely concerned with filtering water, requires no brain. A simple nervous system suffices.
So, in the case of Oliver Sacks, we have seen that a brain can eat a body, and in the case of the sea squirt, the body can eat a brain. This little gem from Mother Nature shows that movement and brains are synonymous. Mobility has its advantages, but also its dangers. It allows leaving a known environment, exploring new territories with all the bounty and danger this entails. Conquering and escaping become new activities for a body in motion. But dangers lurk around every corner, and to save their lives, bodies have to respond extremely quickly. All this is too much to cope with for just a simple nervous system. A better, more efficient organisation, which foresees dangers, is needed. This requires information, which has to be stored, and can be called up again. It requires also swift action, tailored to the predicted outcome. In short, an organisation is needed that can sense, feel, act and also think. This acting, emotional and thinking organisation is the brain.
Mind is the result of a body coping with itself and its environment. It is something entirely pragmatic, with entirely physical roots. However profound the thought, if we dig deep enough, we will discover that it is embedded in physical processes. Born from the real world, it has learned to abstract its heritage into concepts, ideas, and into the images in which we recognise our human world to be. Here lies its ambiguity: entirely material, it becomes nevertheless pure thought. And with this, it transforms everything into a matter of the mind.
[1] According to Claudius Galen (c.129-c.216), the most famous doctor in the Roman Empire, the 4 humours were: sanguine, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. For the next 1500 years, medicine, and especially psychiatry, relied on this understanding and derived its cures from it.
[2] Every epoch seems to explain the functioning of brains through its latest technological achievements. During Descartes times it was transport through tubes; the nineteenth century explained it as driven by electrical currents, and we explain it by using the computer as a paradigm.
[3] The word ‘soul’ does not necessarily have spiritual undertones. In Descartes’ time, ‘soul’ was very much understood as ‘mind’ is nowadays: the sum of what happens in the brain, from emoting, thinking, perceiving to being self-conscious.
[4] He was not (and could not be) radical enough here to come to a more modern conclusion. The fact (as Descartes points out) that a soul, residing in the pineal gland needs to be ‘stimulated’ before ‘transmitting instructions’ indicates after all that something has to happen before the soul can ‘instruct’. Consequently, the soul must be powered by a physical agent (‘the animal spirit flowing through the nerves’) and would thus gain its authority from a physically explainable source. The remaining question is then: what stimulates the animal spirits to flow through the nerves? Like Berkeley and many others, also Descartes will answer this question by bringing God into the equation. Nevertheless, what concerns the ‘soul’ as such Descartes was already a thoroughly modern philosopher by setting out an account of the soul as an epiphenomenon of the machinery of the human body. (see Descartes ‘Les passions de l’âme’)
Written by Detlef Hahn & Danny Hahn. 2010 ©
© 2011 NeoKitsch
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