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Editorial

Against Stupidity

by Rick Lewis

To be reading these words you must have (or be?) a mind. But philosophers have always had trouble establishing exactly what a mind is. Is it a ghostly immaterial thing which occupies your head but is separate from your brain? So Descartes thought; but how then does your non-physical mind cause movements of your physical body, for instance when you will your arm to lift or your finger to scratch your nose? Various theories were put forward over the centuries, and my tutor John Heawood used to illustrate them by drawing little stick people with ghosts hovering over their heads and arrows to indicate causes. Parallelism, for example, said that mind and body each follow their own causal laws without interacting, but somehow staying in sync; epiphenomenalism says the causes only go one way, from brain to mind, and not vice versa. My personal favourite is occasionalism, the theory that on each occasion an immaterial mind wills a movement of the physical body, God intervenes with a small localized miracle to make it happen.

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