Consciousness and the Physical Brain-A Complex Relationship

Consciousness and the Physical Brain-A Complex Relationship

The dualist school of thought appeals more to me than the materialistic one. I believe that there are more aspects to being alive than just the physical components. The aspects that are not attributed to typical physical objects are usually possessed by a person, particularly consciousness (including perceptual experience and emotional experience). Accordingly, the emotional experience encompasses feelings, moods, and affective states that color one’s subjective reality (Robinson para. 1). Emotions play a crucial role in human psychology, influencing behavior, decision-making, and social interactions. Philosophical inquiries into emotional experience explore topics such as the nature of emotions (for example, are they purely physiological responses or cognitive evaluations?), the role of emotions in ethical reasoning, and the relationship between emotions and rationality.

Further, higher-order consciousness involves reflective awareness and self-consciousness, allowing individuals to introspect about their thoughts, feelings, and experiences. This aspect of consciousness raises questions about self-awareness, personal identity, and the nature of subjective experience. Philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche (Emden 5) and cognitive scientists explore phenomena such as the “self” or “ego,” the unity of consciousness (how disparate experiences are integrated into a cohesive whole), and the neural correlates of self-awareness.

Even though there is no explanation for how these two elements, mind, and body, work together, one cannot deny the fact that these two exist, and the most likely answer is that we have yet to learn how they function together while being in a non-physical and physical state. Conscious experience, while reliant on brain function, is not itself a fundamentally physical phenomenon. To describe conscious experience, one needs to hypothesize at least some fundamentally non-physical laws, entities, substances, properties, processes, or forces (Salje and Geddes 48). As such, the dualism school of thought appeals more to me than materialism.

Works Cited

Emden, Christian. Nietzsche on language, consciousness, and the body. University of Illinois Press, 2005.

Robinson, Howard. “Dualism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Spring 2023 Edition, 11 Sept. 2020, plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/dualism.

Salje, Léa, and Alexander Geddes. “Conscious Experience.” Self-Experience: Essays on Inner Awareness (2023): 27.

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The Ancient Greeks are credited with founding many schools of philosophy. In general, we might say that the Greek philosophers fell into two camps. Some, like the Pythagoreans and Atomists, were extreme materialists. They believed that the physical world we can see and measure is all that exists. And they searched for truth by trying to understand the laws of this physical world. On the other hand, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and their descendants believed in universal truths or virtues that represented something greater than just the physical world. Many of their philosophies approached a belief in something like a soul, separate from the body (a belief referred to as dualism).

Consciousness and the Physical Brain-A Complex Relationship

Which of these two broad schools of thought (materialism or dualism) appeals more to you? Framed another way, do you think individuals have a soul or consciousness that is separate from their physical bodies? Or is our consciousness something that only exists due to the working of our brains?