What’s the relation between brain and mind?
That question came up yesterday, in a post on Jerry Coyne’s
blog website. Jerry was discussing a recent “60 Minutes” segment on schizophrenia, and took exception (Jerry called it a quibble) about the wording used:
After seeing this, the pair have this exchange:
Kroft: This is really a disease of the brain, and not a disease of the mind.
That’s not good; for the mind is, as Pinker says, “what the brain does.” In the case of schizophrenia, if there is a genetically (or environmentally) based pathology of the brain, it also causes a pathology of the mind: racing thoughts, voices in the head, and desires to harm. So it’s a disease of both the brain and the mind. Television shouldn’t perpetuate this duality.
Okay, it was only a quibble. But it seems a rather strange quibble.
Most people make a clear distinction between a disease of the mind and a disease of the brain. For example, they might consider nicotine addiction a disease of the mind. But schizophrenia and bipolar disorder they would see as diseases of the brain. The distinction is that with shizophrenia and bipolar disorder there are clearly identified organic problems in the brain that account for the disease. It will take medical treatment to deal with those diseases. By contrast, with nicotine addiction, many people seem to be able to learn their way out of the problem, to find a way of changing their behavior to solve the problem without special medical treatment.
Saying that there is a distinction is not to deny that the brain chemistry is involved in either case. Still, the terminological distinction seems to be widely understood.
Jerry’s complaint is that he apparently sees an implication of dualism there. I do not see any such implication. It seems to me that Jerry is being overly literalistic about this.
Mind as metaphor
So, how do I see mind and brain?
Personally, I take the mind to be a metaphor. I don’t see the term “mind” as referring to any object, material or immaterial. So we have people saying “the mind is what the brain does” (ascribed to Pinker), “the mind is the software of the brain”, “the mind is the brain’s operating system”, “the mind is a Joycean computer” (Dennett uses that idea in his “Consciousness Explained”). Those are all interesting ways of using the mind as metaphor. If we want to take the mind as some kind of object, and not just a metaphor, then all of those statements would require evidence and I doubt that much evidence could be found for any of them.