Summary of Steven Harnad’s Paper – “Correlation vs Causality: How/Why the Mind-Body Problem is hard”

In the era of modern philosophy, the distinction between mind and body was upon drawn by Descartes. Descartes’ statement that “I think therefore I exist”, shows that he considered the existence of mind to be indubitable unlike the existence of matter. With the progress of science and contributions by Newton, Darwin etc., the existence of mind came to be doubted whereas matter’s existence came to be taken as a given.

The classical Mind-body problem is about how two different things (i.e. Mind and Body) can interact with each other. Thus, dualism is presupposed. But in the contemporary setting, dualism is not presupposed. Harnard’s paper is about the Mind-Body problem in the contemporary setting.

Harnad’s paper is in reply to Humphrey’s paper, “How to solve the Mind-Body Problem.” In his paper, Humphrey is giving arguments that he believes will help to solve the mind-body problem. Harnad believes that the mind body problem is unsolvable and he gives counter arguments to Humphrey’s claims. Harnad’s main line of attack is the following – “Correlations confirm that Mind does indeed supervene on Body, but causality is needed to show how/why Mind is not supererogatory: that’s the hard part”. Harnad states it more clearly as, “I have feelings. Undoubtedly the feelings are in some way caused by and identical to brain processes/structures, but it is not clear how and even less clear why.” Using this line of attack he is able to ward off all the arguments that Humphery has given.

Humphrey gives the example of electrical discharge and lightning. He says, although, we may not be able to say, what makes an electrical discharge manifest also as lightning, but we can predict the occurrence of lightning whenever there is a lightning discharge. According to him, in a similar way, one day we might collect so much information about the mind-brain correlations that we predict which mental state will supervene on any specific brain state. Harnad counter argues by stating that there is no causal model that unifies mind and body, as the correlated phenomena are not of the same kind, unlike electric discharge and lightning. So such an analogy is not applicable here.

Humphrey attributes a lot of importance to Reid’s distinction between perception and sensation. According to Reid,
Sensation has to do with the self, with bodily stimulation, with feelings; perception by contrast has to do with judgments about the objective facts of the external world. But Harnard rejects the idea that there is any insight in Reid’s viewpoint. According to him, it is the relation between feelings and brain states that M/BP is concerned about and not between feelings and other objects, whether external or external.

Humphrey uses Reid’s concept of sensation to explain the evolution the privatization of sensory activity. According to Humphrey, the command signals begin to loop back upon themselves, becoming in process self-sustaining and self-creating and such recursive signals enter a new intentional domain. But again Harnad dismisses such arguments. Harnad argues that all such activities can be done without feelings also, so Humphrey’s explanation is begging the question. Also Harnad regards the internal loops as too easy to give rise to mental states.

Harnad argues that the hard problem cannot be solved in the way Humphrey is proposing, rather he thinks it is solvable at all. Although, he does not give reasons of why he thinks so but he makes a point that it is not because of any limitation of the human mind as McGinn believes. According to him, every mental capacity has both an easy and a hard aspect: the functional aspect is easy, the feeling aspect is hard. But it’s the feeling part that makes it mental and this is the hard M/BP.