정신과 육체에 대한 비생물학적 입장 -의식 개념에 대한 철학적 분석을 중심으로-

Abstract

Ever since Descartes claimed that minds and material objects, including human bodies, were two distinct kinds of entity, philosophers have been occupied with the problem of explaining how the mind is related to the body or some part of the body, such as the brain. Over the past three hundred years, a number of theories have appeared concerning this problem, some of the most influential of which include: causal interactionism, eliminativism, behaviorism, materialism, functionalism, etc. But all of them are unsatisfactory because either they fail to explain the causal relation between the mind and the body or they ignore the subjective character of conscious experience. The failure of the traditional theories can be traced back to Descartes. For Descartes human mind was not an extended material thing and no extended material could be a thinking subject. The mind and the body are two different substances; they are independent from each other not only on the ontological dimension but also on the conceptual dimension. But does this so-called Cartesian dualism reflect the self-evident truth? It seems that his concept of mind or consciousness fails to leave space for the possibility that what it designates should turn out also to be a physical thing or events, as the result of closer scientific investigation. Following Thomas Nagel, I argue in this paper that this possibility should not be ruled out in advance. It is conceivable that mental phenomena such as qualia can be located in space, and are causally related to physical phenomena. In particular, an individual's subjective conscious experience could be a physiologically describable event in the brain.