Recently I got into the “mind-body problem,” a philosophical term for the question of how our mental consciousness/awareness is related to our physical body/world. Take my thoughts with a grain of salt.

What I noticed is that a civilization’s institutions influence its understanding of consciousness. Note that I’m crudely defining ‘civilization’ as a group with a common culture & history, like the West, the Islamic world, or the Sinosphere.

For example, René Descartes’ mind-body dualism theory, which was widely influential during the 17th century, argued that “the nature of the mind is completely different from that of the body, and therefore it is possible for one to exist without the other” (IEP). Descartes was a Christian, and his theory would appear to support Christianity’s belief in a soul that continues on after death; a sort of ‘mind matter’ that can exist separately from the body. And on the cosmic scale, Christian dualism posits that God and Creation are distinct but interrelated, akin to Cartesian mind-body dualism.

Moving forward a few centuries. Materialism, which supports that consciousness is simply a result of complex electrochemical interactions, is arguably much more popular nowadays. Current acceptance of materialist theories appears to reflect free-market capitalism’s ideals of material gain and mechanistic efficiency. Are we simply cogs in the machine of production?

Certainly all I’m noting here are correlations, as one could argue that the advent of science has shaped philosophy, and that is what accounts for the shift in mind-body theories towards materialism. Following the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolutions, it’s only natural that society took on a more mechanistic understanding of the world. After all, science has provided logical explanations for the movement of the planets, heredity, disease, and much more.

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