The huge fashion for alternative medicine may be misguided, it does, however, lead me to think it must be there for a reason. Not a supernatural one, but a recognition that something is lacking in western medicine. The separation of mind and body, the belief in souls and consciousness being separable from the meat is the mistake at the core. Little is known about the placebo effect. Yet when the doctor gives the oblivious patient a chalk pill they do get better. If we are to accept that reasoning is dependent on feelings within the body, that emotion takes place all over the body and not just in the brain, if we accept that there is no mind body duality, then we need to begin to look deeper in to how they interact. How mind affects body, just as body affects mind.
We really don't have a clue when it comes to mental illness. My own problems have no clear organic basis or obvious neurological dysfunction. Instead they are regarded as 'emotional' or 'psychological' adjustment problems. In other words, mental trouble and are thus deemed to be amenable to psychotherapy. The distinction between diseases of 'brain' and 'mind', between 'neurological' problems and 'psychological' or 'psychiatric' ones, is an unfortunate cultural inheritance that permeates society and medicine. It reflects a basic ignorance of the relationship between brain and mind. Diseases of the brain are seen as tragedies visited on people who cannot be blamed for their condition, while diseases of the mind, especially those that effect conduct and emotion, are seen as social inconveniences for which sufferers have much to answer. Individuals are to be blamed for their character flaws, defective emotional modulation, and so on, lack of willpower is supposed to be the primary problem.
Any serious concept of mind should encompass emotions and feelings. Yet most respected scientific accounts of cognition dont do that. Emotions are considered elusive entities, unfit to sit with the more tangible contents of the thoughts they, nonetheless, qualify. This is the common view that excludes feelings and emotions from mainstream cognitive science.
To be sure, feelings are about something different, and what makes them different as that they are first and foremost about the body. They offer us the cognition of our visceral and musculoskeletal state as it becomes affected by pre organised mechanisms and by the cognitive structures we have developed under their influence. Feelings let us keep an internal 'eye' on the body. They let us mind the body 'live' when they give us perceptual images of the body, or 'replay' when they give us recalled images of the body state appropriate to certain circumstances when we imagine we are experiencing them. Feelings offer us a glimpse of what goes on in our flesh, as a momentary image of that flesh is juxtaposed to the images of other objects and situations; in so doing, feelings modify our comprehensive notion of those other objects and situations. By dint of juxtaposition, body images give to other images a quality of goodness or badness, of pleasure or pain. Because of their inextricable ties to the body, they come first in developement and retain this primacy in our mental lives. Because the brain is the captive audience, feelings win out. Their influence is immense.
It is the entire organism that interacts with the environment, not the body or brain alone. When we see, touch, smell or hear the body and brain operate as one, not in separation.
The idea that mind arises from both body and brain, from the entire organism may still sound odd to you. From Descartes day when the mind came from no location to now current fashions for locating it within the brain we have progressed. It is once again when we look to other animals that we see mind comes from brain and body together. The representation of the whole in motion is necessary for most animal processes. The mind is not in the body, but the body contributes a content that is necessary for the workings of a normal mind.
Descartes myth, that the mind can split from body and brain is wholly inaccurate. It leads to more problems than any other misguided notion man has come up with. The soul may at first appear to be a vaguely uplifting notion, but it is only once we value lives over souls that modern peace arises.
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