hummingwolf | (no subject)

Some people firmly believe in the concept of Mind Over Matter. These people often have amazing stories about wonders performed by their enlightened guru of choice, or the miraculous recovery of their great aunt's godmother's step-niece's best friend once removed, yet their own personal experiences tend to be along the lines of that time when they, through an intensive regimen of meditative practice and positive thinking, drove away the common cold in six days instead of their usual seven. They may know a little something about the results of legitimate studies illegitimately extrapolated, but conversations with them often end in an exotic region of nowhere populated by the bright fluffy angels with sparkly wings.

Other people, skeptic souls, are convinced that matter is the only thing that matters--never mind the mind. Every ailment is brought about by a physical cause, whether genetic, chemical, or bacterial. Even emotional and psychological issues all have a physical cause, best treated by some well-publicized recent addition to the pharmacopoeia. Any study demonstrating that, say, people are more susceptible to infection when they're highly stressed out, is an irremediably flawed study to be discarded as soon as it's mentioned. Your mind is just an epiphenomenon, an illusion springing from the meaningless interactions of chemicals and electrical sparks in your brain matter. Your mind has power over nothing. Individual blobs of matter are all you need to concern yourself with. Some folks will argue for this belief in matter with their dying breath, even if they have to resort to using government coverups and space aliens as an explanation to do so.

Can you believe the lengths people will go to in order to avoid the obvious?

It's not mind over matter or matter over mind or one being an illusion or the other never existing. Whatever the mind is, mind interacts with matter. At its best, the interaction is a dance between two partners with respect for each other.

Sometimes, though, the interaction becomes a duel, or the less-civilized barroom brawl. Sometimes matter beats mind into submission.

Ow.

There was going to be a point to this post, but then the migraine that's been hanging round off & on for the last few days decided to remind me of its continuing malevolence. Whatever the matter was, it slipped my mind.

Did I actually just try to slip the word "epiphenomenon" into a LiveJournal post? Ay yi yi.

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Yes, you did. :)

That's what I was afraid of. Sometimes the weirdest words come floating along in the stream of consciousness, ya know?

And ever since the word did pop up in the stream of consciousness, the way a friend of mine used to make fun of our freshman philosophy professor's way of saying "epiphenomenalism?" has been running through my head. Silly mind.

They have actually documented the mind-body connection in recent years. I can't remember how. I read a couple of articles a year or two ago. It's funny, because I remember these questions playing a prominent role in the Philosophy class I took in college. At that time, all discussion was purely theoretical.

Yeah, there have been some good studies on the mind-body relationship in the last decade or two. The connection between psychological stress & the immune system is particularly well-documented. Many people don't believe those studies though, just as many other people would rather believe everything is all in the mind and nothing physical is really important.

It's funny, because I remember these questions playing a prominent role in the Philosophy class I took in college. At that time, all discussion was purely theoretical.

They may still be teaching it as if it were purely theoretical. At least, the philosophy professors I had seemed pretty uninterested in anything going on in the world outside of theory, and I don't see any reason why they'd change their minds now.

The professors from my alma mater were tenured, happy and safe in their nests feathered with the legal tender of their comfortable professor salaries. Not much was demanded of them. They had no motivation to change their ways of thinking and for the most part, they didn't bother to learn (or by extension teach) much of anything new.

That said, the college I work for seems to demand that their professors stay up-to date. I'm not sure if these differences represent a change in the times, the difference between a private, academically competitive school vs. a rural state school, is only true of certain cutting edge disciplines, like computers, sciences, communications, etc. or some combination of all of the above factors.

It would be interesting to see if the attitudes differ greatly between the philosophy department and the physics department at the same institution, for example.

dang your brain works pretty good even when migrainy! :)
*hug*

dang your brain works pretty good even when migrainy! :)

Heh. Thanks. It worked for about five whole minutes before spluttering out!

::hug back::

migraine-y is sometimes when I am the most creative, maybe because the barriers of the mind are hammered down? Nothing prevents ideas from rising to the surface. It's a good sounding post though. I especially like the "less-civilized barroom brawl" comment. Sometimes it feels like that!

Migraines are good for some interesting altered states. But most of those states are places I used to get to without migraines, so frankly I'd be just as happy to live without the pain again!

Glad people liked bits of this post, even if I never did figure out where I was going with it.

Yes this was a great post. Thank you for stretching our minds a bit - I need to be yanked out of an intellectual rut now and then.