Abstract
The debate in Philosophy of Mind though heated is mostly limited to sterile and formal discussions. In order to overcome such a deadlock, I suggest a new breakthrough exploring three paths: rethinking the status and liability of the fundamental assumptions of the discipline; updating the description of human being in view of recent discoveries in neurosciences; and introducing new comprehension instruments, specifically the concept of “system.”
In this essay, I first critically consider the reductionist approach that most philosophers of mind accept without question—together with its derivatives such as materialism, scientism, physicalism, mechanicalism—and I ask: do we have reasons for accepting them? Should we revise them, or abandon them, and why?
Secondly, a new picture of human biology comes into focus from leading neuroscientists: brain is plastic and is reshaped by individual experiences; body is a process whose stability is guaranteed by constraints; there is a strong interconnection among bodily activity, feelings, and mind.
Previous considerations drive us to look at mind and body not as separate entities, but as constituents of the same global entity, the human being.
Finally, the concept of “system” is introduced to suggest a solution for the mind-brain problem: in systemic terms, mind is an emergent phenomenon, while brain is a subsystem with respect to the human being.
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Notes
- 1.
Libet (2004: 137–150), Libet hypothesizes that a conscious veto can control whether an action initiated unconsciously in the brain will or not take place.
- 2.
Alessandro Giuliani proves in many works that cells undergo change depending on the biological context in which they interact. See Kohestani et al. (2018).
- 3.
The term “structure” is used in literature with two rather different meanings. In ontology, transferred from logic, structure is understood as the correlation between parts that identifies a set, while Maturana and Varela (1985) understand it as the values of the variables taken on by an organization at time t, in dynamic perspective.
- 4.
For an excellent bibliography, see Minati et al. (2016).
- 5.
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Urbani Ulivi, L. (2019). Mind and Body. Whose? Philosophy of Mind and the Systemic Approach. In: Urbani Ulivi, L. (eds) The Systemic Turn in Human and Natural Sciences. Contemporary Systems Thinking. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00725-6_10
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