Is the mind the brain? Philosophers give 3 main answers: the mind is not matter, the mind comes from matter and the question is badly put. AskPhilosophy presents 21 arguments, from Democritus to David Chalmers, reconstructed step by step, logic-checked and verified word for word against their original texts.
The 3 possible answers
Each column is one way of answering the question: what it holds and the philosophers who defend it. Click a column to see only its arguments.
Thought and consciousness are of another nature than the body.
René Descartes, Avicenne, Leibniz, Saul Kripke…
Thought arises from organised matter: the brain, the body.
Hobbes, Démocrite, Diderot, Julien Offray de La Mettrie…
The problem comes from how we talk about 'the mind', not from a hidden thing.
Wittgenstein, Spinoza, Gilbert Ryle, Daniel Dennett
The arguments
Click an argument to see it step by step, with the objections and replies.
The mind is not matter
Thought and consciousness are of another nature than the body.
8 argumentsMind distinct from body
I clearly conceive my mind without body and body without thought; two things that can exist apart are distinct.
The flying man: the soul knows itself without the body
Deprived of all sensation, the flying man is still sure he exists without affirming his body: so the self is not the body.
The mill: perception is not a machine
If we walked inside an enlarged thinking machine, we would see only parts pushing each other, never a perception.
If pain were a brain state it would be so necessarily: yet we can conceive it without one
If pain and a brain state were identical, they would be so necessarily; yet we can conceive one without the other, and not as an illusion.
What is it like to be a bat?
What it is like to be someone depends on their viewpoint, and a physical theory steps away from every viewpoint.
The brain is the nail, thought is the coat
The brain holds and draws only a small part of thought: it serves to act and to recall, not to produce or store the mind.
Mary, the scientist who has never seen red
Mary knows every physical fact about colour, yet learns something on seeing red: so a fact was missing from her knowledge.
The hard problem of consciousness and zombies
We can conceive a being physically identical to us but without consciousness, so consciousness is something beyond the physical.
The mind comes from matter
Thought arises from organised matter: the brain, the body.
9 argumentsWhat thinks is a body
Thinking is an act, which needs a subject; that subject is a substance, and substance and body are the same thing.
The soul is made of atoms
Everything is atoms and void; the soul is an assembly of atoms, the same as intelligence: thought is matter in motion.
The egg: matter can think
In an egg, inert matter becomes a being that feels and thinks; explaining this by a hidden non-material element explains nothing.
Man is a machine that winds its own springs
The state of the soul always follows that of the body (sleep, opium, food, fever): the soul is just the body at work.
We are conscious automata: the locomotive's steam-whistle
The body is fully explained by mechanism and nothing shows consciousness acts on it: it merely accompanies it.
Beliefs and desires: a false theory, like alchemy
Talk of beliefs and desires is an old theory that fails and stagnates; neuroscience will replace it, as it did alchemy.
The mind is born, ages and suffers with the body: it is material and mortal
The mind grows, ages, falls ill, gets drunk and is cured along with the body, and moves limbs only by contact: so it is corporeal.
Sensations are brain processes, as lightning is an electric discharge
Saying one has an orange afterimage is saying that a brain process is occurring; explaining it so avoids adding anything extra.
Pain can be realized by very different bodies: it is therefore not a particular brain state
Octopuses, humans, aliens or machines can suffer without sharing one brain state: pain depends on function, not on matter.
The question is badly put
The problem comes from how we talk about 'the mind', not from a hidden thing.
4 argumentsThe private language argument and the beetle in the box
A word needs a standard of correct use independent of the speaker's impression, which a private language lacks.
One thing, two attributes: the mind is the idea of the body
The mind is the idea of the body, and a thing and its idea are one reality seen in two ways.
The ghost in the machine: a category mistake
Mental words describe ways of acting, not a hidden thing: looking for the mind as an object is a category mistake.
There are no qualia: Dennett's intuition pumps
Thought experiments show that no property of experience can be both intrinsic and directly known.
Other philosophers' positions arrive as profiles are completed. No position is presented as the winner.