[The so-called body-mind problem].

THE PROBLEM

Even psychosomatic researchers seem to want to avoid the so-called body-mind problem, which is actually a mind-brain problem. In line with Beckermann (2008), the first the four possible positions on the mind-brain problem are presented. The debate over the past 100 years has revolved around the question of whether mental events are ontologically independent of brain physiology or whether they are in fact entirely determined by it. Such a physicalism approach based on properties (i.e., mental characteristics or phenomena are physical or can be completely reduced to physical characteristics), however, is diametrically opposed to some of our strongest intuitions, e.g., that computers will never be able to develop qualities of human experience (qualia) and thus become subjects in the first person singular. Yet we are equally unable to prove the fundamental impossibility of such a development.

THESIS

In this stalemate situation, a differentiation was undertaken by Gottlob Frege (1892) which could be of help: Expressed in today's language, a distinction is made between the sense of an expression, its contextual presentation (e.g., where there is a difference between "the evening star" and "the morning star"), on the one hand, and its so-called reference (the object to which it refers, here the planet Venus in both cases) on the other. The school of Gestalt psychology that developed in Berlin at the start of the last century similarly posited a "psychophysical level of the CNS," a continuum in a pattern of electrical field forces which manifests itself first in cerebral physiological-neuronal processes as well as in other perspectives such as consciousness and experience. A subsequent speculative concept then extends this model to assume also an (as yet) unknown Alpha configuration as being a common reference of two sense contents: (1) the results of the neurophysiological third-person perspective and (2) of the emotional-cognitive first-person perspectives. Only through the latter will Alpha be able to become self-conscious and an instance acting in his world.

RESULTS

Only through the latter will Alpha be able to become self-conscious and an instance acting in his world. The postulate of an Alpha configuration thus retains the possibility of a biology not (yet) accessible to our knowledge, such that our fundamental conviction regarding the holism of soma and psyche can be maintained for us as medical practitioners and scientific physicians. Our patients need both, our medical-scientific competence (3rd-person perspective) as well as our empathic sensibility in exploring their phenomenal experience (1st-person perspective). They need us as medical artists.