Goldstein’s Mind-Body Problem
Philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein centers the mind-body problem around the nature of the person, with two distinct kinds of descriptions: our physical bodies and brains, which science can, in principle, analyze completely, and our inner thoughts, perceptions, emotions, dreams, which science can never access completely.
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Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Philosopher & Writer
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an American philosopher and novelist known for blending science and philosophy in both fiction and non-fiction; she is a MacArthur Fellow and National Humanities Medal recipient. Her work explores philosophical rationalism and her original “mattering theory.”
Key Takeaways
Core Claim
We are fully physical, but inner experience can’t be fully captured by brain science.
How It Works
Consciousness arises from the brain, yet remains partly inaccessible from the outside.
Distinguishing Idea
Science explains bodies; novels capture minds—both views are essential.
Goldstein’s Mind-Body Problem
Philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein centers the mind-body problem around the nature of the person, with two distinct kinds of descriptions: our physical bodies and brains, which science can, in principle, analyze completely, and our inner thoughts, perceptions, emotions, dreams, which science can never access completely (Goldstein, 2011a, 2011b).
Goldstein thinks that the internal description of what it’s like to be a person—“what I try to do in creating a character in a novel”—is “really about the body because ultimately there are no nonmaterial states.”
Goldstein states that the kind of stuff underlining these intentional states or states of feeling that we describe in terms of consciousness is entirely brain stuff. “Could we ever derive the one description from the other? Could we ever know enough about the brain stuff so that we could actually know everything there is to be a person, just by the description of the brain stuff? I don't think so” (Goldstein, 2011a, 2011b).
Goldstein says that panpsychism seems plausible and she understands why some are dualists, where that internal point of view is something that is not the body, and could, in principle, exist separate from the body. She appreciates why some people who hope for immortality hope dualism is true. (She herself rejects dualism.)
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