Descartes’ mind/body problem that he left the world has been greatly criticized over the years. His distinction between the mental and physical properties has gotten great scrutiny and has been of late gone the opposite way of Descartes thinking. J.J. Smart theorized that mental states where nothing more than brain states. This paper is going to show that even though Descartes theory may be wrong, J.J. Smarts’ theory is further off than Descartes and really that the relationship of the mind and the body is that the mind and the body do react.
J.J. Smart concluded that the mind can be broken down into brain states. This makes the mental states no more than physical states. This is because brain states are that of neurons firing and chemicals being released to cause different things to happen in the body. That makes the mental properties or sensations nothing more than physical properties because the firing of neurons and chemical reactions are physical properties, according to the scientific world. This means that there are no sensations or mental states. Smart rationalizes this out through the denial of nomological danglers and the use of raw feelings such as pain. Nomological danglers are those things that do not fit into
the laws of science, such as the conscious or falling in love. To Smart these “nomological danglers smell queer”, for some reason he could not make himself believe that there are things in this world that just do not fit into the laws of science. What he fails to realize here is that we created these laws we made them real. So it is possible for things in this world to not fit into the laws that we created. We did not created the world but we have been discovering (creating) the laws that we use to understand the world. Therefore of course there are things that will not fit into our laws and maybe never will. Smart also uses the sensation of “pain” as his defense for his Identity theory. He states that, “(pain) is a report of a process that happens to be a brain process”, which plainly means that the pains is only a brain process. This is true you really have no pain wherever the cause of the pain comes from; it is all in your head. The nerves send your pain the chemical that states something wrong is going on down here and that something needs to be done. This in turns makes the person with the pain check out what is going on. There are no mystical mental properties taking over here telling you that there is a “feeling” of pain and something wrong is going on here. This argument of Smart is strong enough to point out that not all feelings and sensations are mystical and hidden. Smarts’ Identity Theory has its strong points but also many weak points that a
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