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Mind/Body and Biopsychosocial Models (Dualism debate)

 

Under the postulates of dualism, observable, conscious, somatic, and deterministic terminology is used to explain one domain of life – the body – while unobservable, unconscious, psychic, and agentic (e.g., free will, choice) terminology is used to explain another domain – the mind.  How these two domains interact, given the body’s deterministic and materialistic characteristics and the mind’s agentic and seemingly immaterial characteristics is unclear.  However, because, in dualism, the mind is taken to be responsible for the body’s actions, an interaction between mind and body was assumed.  This problem of the interaction between mind and body leads to the first requirement for resolving the problems with dualism: it cannot postulate two completely different realities, such as a material reality and an immaterial reality.

                 There have been many attempts to reconcile this interaction problem of dualism.  In fact, materialism (e.g., the philosophical position, which assumes that biological explanations will (eventually) be able to fully account for and explain, among other things, psychological phenomena), itself, can be seen as such an attempt.  That is, materialism attempted to address the philosophical problems involved in dualism by eliminating one side, the immaterial, from the dualism.  The “eliminative” nature of this solution, however, belies an important problem involved in this means of addressing dualism: it merely creates a one-sided dualism.  That is, because such materialistic conceptions merely eliminate and do not account for the immaterial side, the inference is that the immaterial can either be ignored or simply does not exist.  Still, the problem of agency, for example, was one of the main reasons Descartes felt it necessary to postulate two separate realities: he recognized that the body is best understood as a predictable reality, governed by natural laws but he also realized that such entities are rarely considered agentic.

This problem with the materialistic non-solution to dualism leads to the second requirement for resolving the problems with dualism:  it must account for the basic qualities of both mind and body, including, but not necessarily limited to, agentic responsibility and biological predictability.  This second requirement may need more justification than the first.  That is, the first requirement is likely relatively noncontroversial; the philosophical inconsistency of a material reality and a nonmaterial reality interacting is fairly straightforward.  However, though fairly straightforward as well, some readers may want some further justification for requiring the basic qualities of both mind and body to be accounted for.  In essence, there are two reasons why this is required.  First, the arbitrary elimination of one side’s qualities, such as agency, implies that this elimination occurs without appropriate evidence or rationale.  As such, they are not truly eliminated but merely unaccounted for or ignored.  Though there may be some who might argue that research has demonstrated the nonexistence of agentic qualities, these arguments are a result of theories or interpretations of research, not a result of the data from the research itself.  That is, there is no evidence against agency; there are merely assumptions and interpretations of the data, such as materialism, that omit agency as a consideration rather than eliminate it as a possible explanation.

This omission of agency as a consideration leads to the second reason for the second requirement: even if one side of the dualism is eliminated from consideration, this elimination does not necessarily mean that the general framework associated with dualism is itself eliminated.  Even the notion of “eliminating one side” itself assumes that the two sides operate independently of one another to some degree.  If this were not so, then the elimination of one side of the dualism would also mean the elimination of the other side.  In fact, the assumption of self-containment and independence, implicit to such an eliminative perspective, is itself a defining assumption of dualism.  Consequently, if the second requirement is not met, dualism may be implicit.

The failure of one-sided dualisms (materialism and idealism).  As noted above, materialism has been considered an attempt to address the inconsistencies of dualism.  The problem is that belief in the sufficiency of materialism operates, as also noted, in an eliminating fashion rather than in an accounting fashion; eliminating the basic agentic qualities of the mind, such as meaning and responsibility, from consideration in explanations rather than accounting for these qualities.  Alternatively, the belief in the sufficiency of the mind – referred to as idealism or solipsism – has the same problem, failing the second of the requirements.  These sorts of one-sided dualisms postulate that agency alone can explain or account for human behavior.  Again, the failure of this perspective is its eliminating rather than accounting for the basic deterministic qualities of the body.

The failure of compound-word alternatives (interactionisms).  Consider also the compound-word conceptions, such as bio-psycho-socio-etc. models, that attempt to provide more holistic replacements for traditional psychological explanations by allowing for interaction of multiple domains.  These conceptions, unfortunately, are rarely more than collections of materialist variables, relying on reciprocal and sequential interactions between various material factors, with one of these material factors always being in the ascendancy (e.g., one of the factors always “comes first” at some point).  Truly nonmaterial factors are frequently overlooked, with variables such as “socio” and “psycho” defined and operationalized in naturalistic terms (e.g., “environment”). As DeBerry has shown, such compound-word conceptions typically devolve to a deterministic interaction of materialist factors.  As such, these “interaction” or “compound-word” models also fail on the second requirement, because they account for the material aspects but not the non-material aspects of psychological existence.

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