What is the mind-body problem & how does it arise? what kind of a problem is it?

Question

If you also want please state what it shows, in your view...

Answer 1

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/adler.htm

Alfred Adler (1931)

What Life Should Mean to You

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Source: What Life Should mean to You (1933) publ. Unwin Books, 1932. Chapter 2 reproduced here.


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Chapter 2. Mind and Body

MEN have always debated whether the mind governs the body or the body governs the mind. Philosophers have joined in the controversy and taken one position or the other; they have called themselves idealists or materialists; they have brought up arguments by the thousand; and the question still seems as vexed and unsettled as ever. Perhaps Individual Psychology may give some help towards a solution; for in Individual Psychology we are really confronted with the living interactions of mind and body. Someone's mind and body is here to be treated; and if our treatment is wrongly based we shall fail to help him. Our theory must definitely grow from experience; it must definitely stand the test of application. We are living amongst these interactions, and we have the strongest challenge to find the right point of view."

It is similar to the first cause question in that knowing something a person feels the need to know which came first, but it is a scientific methodology that goes beyond reliance on causal consequent descriptions to discribe purpose and function in actuality, that the total being essential nature is active, and only description in action supercedes static conceptualizations. The organic nature of rationalism needs organic interaction description.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ol/ol_phen.htm

Answer 2

We distinguish between physical things (rocks, trees, tables, chairs, bodies, etc.) and mental things (ideas, states of mind, emotions). Physical things (bodies is shorter) have shapes, colors, weight, length, width, states of motion and rest, and so on. None of those characteristics apply to mental things. Your love of your mother or your country does not have length, color, weight, or shape. You can't use it to prop up a wobbling chair. Physical things and mental things are so different they must be different KINDS of things, what in the middle ages they called substances, which by definition cannot affect one another.

So the problem is, how is it that our minds affect our bodies? How do I make my hand move when I cannot make that cup over there move? Rene Descartes, father of modern philosophy, laid it all out very clearly. What's not clear is whether his solution is satisfactory.