Self from Within: The Introspective Self 305“9x6” b2726 Self and the Phenomenon of Life: A Biologist Examines Life from Molecules to Humanitythe body to influence the environment, making the mind-body relation
a two-way traffic.16,17
13.2.3 Mind interacts with body
The above discussion automatically leads us to the third school, the one
that looks appealing to me, which is very much like the second except
that a bidirectional action between body and mind is considered possible.
Although all the brain activities can be described in causal physical terms,
and although these physical activities are closed, it remains possible for the
mind (a product of the brain) to “somehow influence” the ongoing brain
activities.^18 Now, an insurmountable problem arises: there is no known nat-
ural law that can describe the effect of mind over matter. How can mind,
which has no mass/energy value and does not occupy space,^19 “jump-start”
the molecular and cellular events in the brain? I have no answer. I can
only offer three wild conjectures: (1) We currently have no conversion
formula from matter to mind; perhaps once we have it, the reverse pro-
cess could be better understood or described. (2) The absence of a law to
connect two natural events is no reason to negate the presence of either.
The mind-body “law” could be quite different from any other natural law
we have ever come to know. (3) It might be possible that mind emerges at a
certain stage of physical activities of the brain, and that at this critical point
mind and matter become one and the same (a novel “state of matter,” so to
speak), so that mind activity and brain activity are inseparable.^20
Perhaps we might have an answer in the future, but perhaps not.
There are many occurrences in the world that we cannot yet satisfacto-
rily explain; the nature of mind is just one of them, the other being the
nature of matter. At the very bottom, gravity does not mingle with quan-
tum mechanics, and this has all the physicists scratching their heads.
Christof Koch, physicist turned cognitive neuroscientist, after years of
tackling the problem of mind, transpired an air of humbleness:
“I would like to end with a plea for humility. Humility because even
though we are living in the age of science, we know so little. The