The Mind-Body Problem

One of the enduring central topics in Philosophy is the 'Mind-Body Problem'. Most generally, solutions to this problem attempt to explain the relation between mental and bodily events. Some are reductionistic--e. g. the 'Body' is taken to be no more than a mental construct, or the 'Mind' is nothing more than the physical brain. Others present schemes that combine the two in various ways, the main challenge of which is to explain how Mind and Body interact. So, for example, Descartes proposed the pineal gland as a place of intersection, the difficulty of which probably inspired Spinoza to conclude that Mind and Body are parallel, and, hence never interact. In a similar vein are theories which hold that they are two sides of the same coin. One premise that all these, and even the standard rubric share, is the initial segregation of events into 'mental' and 'bodily'. Clues that this classification abstracts from a more fundamental distinction are that there are two types of 'mental' event--cognitive and volitional, and two types of 'bodily' event--sensory and motor. In some of the few cases where this potential complication is noticed, the rogue elements get suppressed, e. g. Epiphenomenal theories that deny that Mind is volitional, or Rationalist theories that deny that the sense organs are essential to cognition. But this suppression implicitly acknowledges the possiblity of a more fundamental division of organic processes, into, say, the afferential ones and the efferential ones, both of which are part mental and part bodily, from which the 'Mind-Body' scheme subsequently abstracts. Hence, the question concerning the relations between mental and bodily events might be more accurately put as the 'Volition-Cognition Problem'.