Our work in psychiatry always involves both sides of the
mind-body divide. But despite much effort to clarify the nature of
the relation between mind and body, this question is still a
riddle. That is a puzzling situation, to put it mildly.
One central unresolved question in understanding the mind-brain
relationship is not of an experimental type but stems from
difficulties in the use of concepts. St. Augustine ( 400 CE) wrote
that it is impossible for humans to understand how the mind is
attached to the body. Despite the inherent paradox that humans as
minds plus bodies are entirely puzzling and incomprehensible, this
would appear to be an accurate statement until now, despite an
extensive literature that tries to solve the difficulty,
particularly as a result of the recent increase in the knowledge of
brain function.
This essay, "Brain in Mind," shows that the difficulty is due to
the Occidental tradition of metaphysics-ontology, which claims that
reality is mindindependent; that belief eliminates the mind from
reality, because the mind cannot become mind-independent.
Principles from phenomenology (Jaspers) and constructivism (von
Glasersfeld and others), and the awareness that all
reality-structures involve the subject's pragmatic designing
activity in an unstructured background, show a contradiction-free
way of dealing with the question, which is also of help for other
areas of knowledge.
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