Physical Brain States

This morning in Philosophy, we continued our dicussion on the philosophy of the mind. Our good friend René Descartes is in on this discussion as well, as he was in many of the areas of philosophical discourse.

We were discussing the views of Dualism, more specifically substance dualism, versus Materialism in the question of whether the mind is a seperate thing from the body. I don't think that I could adequately relate both views, but I will try for the quickie versions. The substance dualist might say that there are two kinds of substances in reality, matter (physical substance) and mental substance, the body and brain being physical matter and the mind being made of this mental substance. The simple problem with this is that there is no way to prove the existence of "mental matter," or how the mind would then interact with the physical matter that is our brain.

The materialist tries to simplify the problem further by saying that there is no such thing as the mind or mental matter. There is only the physical body, the brain. Any thoughts, feelings, or mental states that we have are equivalent with the physiological processes that we have observed during these mental states. Our professor used pain as his pet example. Studies using MRI scans have shown that certain fibers in the brain, c-fibers, fire when people experience the mental state of pain. He said that there is a bit more to it than that, but that the materialist says this mental state is not something that we experience seperate from the physiological response: we have no "mind."

The problem with Materialism is that if there is no mind, if we don't experience mental states apart from our physical states, then what makes us who we are? This view would have us understand ALL of our mental states (pain, love, joy, anger, fright, confusion, etc.) to simply be physiological, perhaps chemical reactions taking place in our brain and central nervous system. Our professor said that this gets tricky because by believing this, you are basically saying there is no soul.

All this to tell you that when I heard this in class, it made me think of the story of the little mermaid, the actual one by Hans Christian Anderson. In the story, mermaids don't have immortal souls. When they die, they simply turn to foam. In a weird, funny way, if one subscribes to Materialism, then they believe that we turn to foam when we die. My reasoning for this is that the materialist says that mental states = brain states. Therefore, when our brain dies, we die. Well, during the process of natural decomposition of the body, the brain is one of the organs that goes early. This is because "all the bacteria in the mouth chew through the palate," says Arpad Vass in Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. The brain is quite soft and apparently easy for the bacteria to munch. "The brain liquefies very quickly. It just pours out the ears and bubbles out the mouth." This is known as "frothy purge."

So, if you believe that we are just physical matter and firing electrons, then you might say that we too turn to foam when we die.