Ask any undergraduate philosophy student to explain the mind / body duality and its implications within ideas of identity, memory, and existentialism, and you’re likely to receive a shrug, a frown, and a furrowed brow. It is, after all, a problem that’s been bothering mankind for a few thousand years by now, and, while research into cognition and the “neuros-” (-biology, -physics, -chemistry, and so on) has yielded concrete information on the divide between body and mind, we are still a long, long way from any hard understanding of this age-old distinction.
In general terms, “mind” refers to the aspects of intellect and consciousness as they appear as combinations of thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and will and imagination. Also included is perhaps the most crucial of or identifying mental activities, memory. So, mind is memory, and memory is mind, along with all of the brain’s conscious processes, often thought of as the thought process of reason. It is reason, as the undergrad philosophy major will tell you, that Kant believed separated man from all other beasts, and likewise provided the basis for our notion of right and wrong.
But the earliest theories of mind and memory and how the two are distinguished from the actual physical nuts and bolts of the brain (neurons, cell, gray matter and brain stems…) were pre-scientific. Which means their notions of memory and mind weren’t informed by cellular knowledge. Instead, they based mind and memory on thoughts of theology, and the relationship between the mind and the soul. Thus, part of our “memory” was of a realm beyond the mere physical, something to transcend the earth on which we walked. Today, science has taken up the call to understand the mind / body duality, with some of our greatest minds and bodies devoting their lives to the pursuit.
