When Nell woke up, she noticed her phone pressed against her naked arm. Otherwise she had managed to make an awkward position surprisingly comfortable.
She moaned and reality slapped her in the face. Mortified she looked at her phone. No active voice call. She looked in the log. The phone call at 3 AM last night had only lasted twenty minutes. She went over it in her head. Had Patricia been trying to wake her up over the phone. Oh god! She had fallen asleep right when they were both crying! Proof that an evil witch doctor had it in for her.
She stumbled to the bathroom, but stumbled back to bed again mumbling a solemn oath never to ask the mirror on the wall about anything ever again.
Weeping felt out of place. This called for mourning, so why did she feel good?
Because she had heard Patricia’s voice once more! Nell smiled and smiled and flung over in bed with a chuckle. The folly of her actions hurt so much that the body reacted illogically. Like when ice on the skin burns. For a moment she let the drowsiness take over and reclined in bed again.
Lazily she rolled around and stretched her arm to the pile of second hand books on the floor. Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tried to hide under heavier and more impressive books.
She knew it. A library lend in her possession promised a good read, but after a month, she had not gotten very far. No fault of the book though. But now things were different. She had to constantly come up with new games to play with Patricia, and she had time to devote to this most holy project.
What made this an appealing book was the introspective descriptions and the conceptual grasp on reality these patients had to wrestle with.
Neurology and philosophy. Dizygotic twins conjoined at the dualist hip.
Dualism. Seemingly a relic from the past, but an undying one as well. “I am in love with your mind”, she thought. But it didn’t make sense, unless the mind not only existed, but also was the most precious part of an existing person. Something jarred about the whole thing.
Again she let her mind wander. What wandered? The mind? But it had no physical extension, so how could it move spatially? She sat up and decided to get a grip on herself.
She found an easy read on the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Dualism and Mind. Time for a refresh on dualism. The first of many.
Substance dualists
The mind is made of a substance entirely different from the body.
- Mind is made from a non-physical substance.
- Body and brain is made from physical matter.
- Interaction between objects in different realms remain the key problem.
Interaction between the mind and the brain.
- Interactionism: Body and mind can exert influence on each other.
- Occasionalism: They cannot influence each other, but God manages relaying action
- Parallelism: They cannot influence each other, but they don’t have to. Like identical clocks, they chime at the same time.
Plato: Soul exists apart from body
- Something changes by stop being X and start being Y. Always reversible. Thus something must have existed before body became alive.
- We know concepts even when using them first time. What “remembers”?
- Soul is indivisible. No fault-lines along which to deteriorate. Will live forever, unlike body.
Descartes: The mind is a thing that thinks
- The mind thinks, but is not extended in space
- The body is extended, but does not think
- D. connects the mind with the I. “I think”
Property dualists
Property dualists are not committed to the existence of non-physical substances, but are committed to the
irreducibility of mental phenomena to physical phenomena.
- Mental feeling of warmth can be reduced to physical state of heat (as experienced by consciousness)
- Mental sensation of colour can be reduced to physical state of wavelength (as experienced by consciousness)
- Consciousness corresponds to brain activity… as experienced by consciousness?
Consciousness seems irreducible.
Time to look at the clock to see what time it was. Perhaps it was time to look at the clock.
She hated the mood she was in and decided to get out of bed. Patricia wouldn’t be reachable before she believed Nell was up and ready. Say 10 AM GMT which amounted to 6 PM in China.
Not much to see outside, but she found a bunch of trees and read on. Without Patricia next to her, it felt boring. Endless poor arguments by authors splitting words.
No. It was 11 AM, so the girl would think it was 3 AM back home.
She called…
P: “Nell?”
N: “Yes, it’s me. Please, I want to apologise. I have been so exhausted from catching planes and, well, all.”
P: “But I was worried sick, Nell. You mumbled and went silent.”
N: “Sorry, sorry. I don’t know what to say. You really worried about me?”
P: “Of course. Say something intelligent, will you? So I know your brain is working. I don’t care if they keep it in a jar, as long as you are you.”
N: “Me…?” Her brain went berserk.
N: “Me, as a thinking machine, thinks. No reason to doubt that. But I can see no reason to argue that it makes »me« exist. Then you ask me to speak, so you can know that the one you refer to as ‘you’ is alright. But all I can offer you are mental states. Likely they correspond to physical states. Perhaps they exist on their own and will survive the demise of my aging body. But most likely my brain will take them with me when I go.”
P: “See, now I know you are alright! You are sweet, clever Nell. That was Descartes whose word you twisted, wasn’t it?”
N: “This article got me thinking. For Descartes the main thing was to preserve the self, the soul. But a lot of dualists are a lot more modest. Their main objective is that thinking appears to be of a different nature altogether than physics, biology, chemistry can offer. Mental states appear to be irreducible to non-mental phenomena.”
P: “Can you send me that article? I’d like to read it. What’s the clock where you are? 3 AM, right? I love it when you call me, but you really need to sleep now. I don’t want you to fall asleep again right in our conversation, okay? Send me the article, I can read it and we can talk tomorrow.”
N: “It’s sent. Thank you, I mean it.”
There it was again, “I mean it”,
N: “Patricia… is my ‘I’ the same as your ‘you’?”
P: “Nell, stop scaring me. You are compos mentis, aren’t you?”
N: “No, I mean it. After having read this article, and constantly having considered small situations where thinking and personality was in play, I have started to notice aperiodic moments of confusion. The »thinking« as Descartes calls it seems to be functioning perfectly fine without my volition. I am not even sure the »I« is me!”
Patricia gave it some thought.
P: “Let me read that article, please? I want to join the conversation.”
•P•A•R•A•D•O•X•