ABSTRACT
The mind-brain-problem has been discussed by philosophers over more than 2000 years. Today it gains new interest in the sciences, especially in neurobiology and neuropsychology. Although it seems to be a great advantage that this problem may now be reanalysed in the context of empirical investigation instead of being claimed by a rather unfruitful “ignorabimus”-position, there remain some very strong principle embarrassments concerning this topic.
Cognitive and brain processes obviously are on totally different scales of system behavior. The elementary dynamics of neuronal brain processes take place in the order of magnitude of 1012 to 1015 major events per second. In the stream of consciousness, on the other hand, no more than 100 bits/sec of information can be analyzed. The enormous complexity of the neural network is confronted with the unity of mental events.
Brain processes consist of myriads of identical action potentials forming global spatial and temporal patterns. The language of the brain is an unspecific “click, click” as Heinz von Foerster (1985) put it. The mental events on the other hand are rich of different sensory qualities and are capable of continuous qualitative changes in a number of dimensions. The unspecifity of neuronal events is confronted with the specifity of meaning in the cognitive sphere.
The brain processes seem to be governed by syntactic rules from which structures of any kind but without any observable meaning emerge. On the other hand phenomenal events are always meaningful and make sense for the individual. The syntax of brain processes is confronted with the semantics of mental events. The relations between meanings are organized by different laws than brain processes obey to.
The brain processes have well defined elements, the neurons, with well defined connections between one another, the synapses. The phenomenal events on the other hand have no such elements but instead, as the Gestaltists have pointed out, holistic features (Köffka 1935). Any part of the phenomenal field influences and is influenced by all other parts. The — on first sight — relatively discrete functioning on the neuronal level is confronted with the obvious field-like interactions in cognition (Kruse et al. 1987).
The most suspicious problem in mind-brain-research seems to be the assumption of causal relationships between material and immaterial events. While most philosophers and natural scientists agree that there are causal effects of the brain processes on the mental events, there is strong scepticism for causal relationships the other way round because such an assumption seems to violate the lawof conservation of energy. As long as one does not dare to assume brain effects caused by mental efforts the mind is only an epiphenomenon of the brain.
