Ecological Intelligence by Ian Mccallum

Author:Ian Mccallum
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2008-11-05T23:00:00+00:00

Genetically specified and regulated by the action of specific chemicals known as neurotransmitters, the hard-wired pathways in the central nervous systems of reptiles, birds, and mammals are the ones that account for our basic emotional responses to the environment, our primary instincts or drives, our senses (sight, sound, and so forth), and our motor functioning. Called the pathway or channel systems, it is well known that when an individual suffers a stroke in which such a path-way is involved, the result is a loss of function of the target muscles or organs involved.

On the other hand, our inner state—the way we feel, interpret, experience, reflect upon, and modify our responses to the environment—appears not to be wired at all. Our inner state cannot be pinned down to any one or other pathway. Instead, in association with different neurotransmitters to those in the pathway or channel systems, the neurons responsible for our inner state act globally. In other words, the connections of these neurons interact and overlap with each other in what is aptly referred to as a field of influence. This brings us back to the brain-mind conundrum.

Very basically, there are those who say that the brain and the mind are the same thing and those who say they are not. Both theories, as we shall see, are flawed by the same problem, namely, we know that our neurons are active while we are thinking, but neither theory is able to explain exactly how our thoughts cause our neurons to start firing and vice versa. Either way, we cannot escape the fact that our minds are a reality upon which our brains and our bodies depend and that we are a mindful species, for as Solms and Turnbull remind us, our minds are “the part of nature that we ourselves occupy. It is us.”

The dualists, with whom the philosopher Descartes (1596–1650) is associated, believe in the dichotomy of mind and matter, body and soul, and, in this case, brain and mind. To them, the brain and the mind are not the same thing. They believe that mental and neural processes may interact or even co-occur (Descartes thought that the pineal gland was the point of interaction) but they are ultimately irreducible to one another. In other words, the mind has no substance or physical properties. It exists as a kind of ghost in the machine.

A classic example of dualist thinking is intrinsic to the notion that psychiatric conditions such as irritable bowels and bladders, phobias, obsessions, compulsions, panic episodes, anxiety neuroses, and depression, are, because they cannot be measured, “all in the mind.” In other words, the physical condition does not exist. Acknowledging that mental processes have an influence on bodily processes, they nevertheless maintain that the mind is an autonomous entity and that in certain conditions, all that is needed is that the patient get his or her mind “right.”

The monists on the other hand, with whom the Dutch philosopher Spinoza (1632–1677) is most closely associated, believe that the physical and mental are aspects of the same reality organized in different ways.

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