The Mind-Body "Problem": A Blog Short by Gog

The mind-body problem arises from a category error due to grammatical muddles. For an obvious illustration: It's a bit like what Wittgenstein said that imagine that "Mr. Nobody is in the room" became part of our colloquial talk and it had the same use as the regular, "Nobody is in the room." In this case, the idea that 'Mr. Nobody' refers to something would be a mistake. And it'd be a grammatical mistake. So any so-called philosophical problem that came from treating 'Mr. Nobody' as referring to something would be a mistake.

Basically, the problem arises by treating "there occur brain processes" and "there occur mental processes" to be of the same grammatical rules.

Comparing "there occur mental processes" and "there occur brain processes" as having the same underlying rules of language use is a bit like treating "happiness came to my party" and "John came to my party" as having the same underlying rules of language use.  It would obviously be a mistake firstly to think that 'happiness' represents an entity, like 'Johnny'. But it is furthermore, and more subtle, a mistake to think that happiness coming to a party is anything like a person coming to a party.

The mind-body so-called problem arises because of a mistake that would arise from treating 'happiness' like 'Johnny' and their coming and going to places similarly, in that mental processes are treated as para-mechanical to make them "work" with (or at least be an epiphenomenon of) mechanical processes. Mental processes just don't make sense to be in episodic mechanistic pictures. It's not because they're "hidden" or "non-spatial". 

**A perfect example of how language misleads us given by Gilbert Ryle from his book The Concept of Mind:

Basically, If I say, "I'm attending to what I'm reading", we might think two seeming occurrences are simultaneously going on: reading and attending. But if I say, "I'm reading attentively", only one seeming occurrence is alluded to. Both sentences mean the same thing though, only there is an adverb use for 'attend' in the second sentence rather than the regular verb use that's in the first sentence. The second form of expression is less misleading than the first though, when philosophizing at least, because no occult occurrence is seemingly defined in addition to the reading. This book totally demolishes the myth of "the ghost in the machine ". So this "sky daddy theory" is largely the result of not being able to navigate basic grammar. "We aren't just physical stuff" - Okay, how are we defining 'stuff'? If you want to play the language-game of physics and evoke paramechanistic "things" in addition to mechanistic things, then you're just going to lose. Some stuff just isn't anything like other stuff! But that's a linguistic distinction, not a "beyond" or "outside of" or "supernatural" distinction. The stuff found in Super Mario bros, for example, just isn't the kind of stuff physicists study. But you don't need to explain Super Mario bros stuff in paramechanical terms. Maybe you explain it in terms of Koopa Troopas and mushroom kingdoms. Sorry, No "soul thing" exists in the way physical entities exist.

- Gog is Forrest Rice 

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**Taken from previous blog "Christ or Chaos": A Book Review+ by Gog and (Magog)

- Image taken from still of Forrest Rice's short film "Evolution of an Atmosphere" (in which I assisted in the making). Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFGoY4ZFbGo