Reading Minds

The mind is a beautiful object of study. And the study of the mind is likely as old as human society itself. The origin story in the Abrahamic tradition tells of such first mindreading when Eve uses her ability to guess and kindle Adam’s desires to try the forbidden fruit—an act that bestows the ability for self-awareness, albeit leading to the shameful expulsion from the garden of Eden. Throughout history, the understanding of the human mind—here vaguely defined as an entity that unites faculties such as cognition, imagination, memory, and emotion (see “Mind”)—has taken many different forms. Religion, philosophy, and psychology are disciplines that have traditionally focused on its study, but quantitative and computational approaches have gained new prominence in exploring its properties. In Western thought, there exists a long and complex tradition to account for the mind within a dualistic framework. In this thinking, body and mind are considered two forces in tension with each other, the moral imperative being that the spiritual force ultimately overcomes the materiality of the body, which corrupts its integrity. And for important stretches of Western philosophy, the mind has been considered to be best studied by exercises of self-reflection, so much so that the epistemological conundrum implied in this approach was turned on its head by René Descartes by arguing that it provided the only possible certainty (Discours de la Méthode, 1637). But Descartes’s understanding of the human being as a thinking being still insisted on a split between “animal” machine and “human” mind that had already become problematic for him and contemporary thinkers. While often quoted and condemned for its reductive understanding of humanity, Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine (1747), which further explored Descartes’s suggestions, is less an apology for materialism than the expression of a deep uncertainty about how to conceptualize the human mind in the wake of secularization. The fear that approaches such as that of La Mettrie would coincide with a deterministic understanding of the human being—with all its ethical and legal implications—was immense, but the floodgates to rooting the mind in the fleshy matter of the body and its machine-like conception were opened. The attempts to locate the mind not in the soul but in the organ of the brain and its nervous extensions were increasingly accompanied by the conviction that the mind can be studied by methods that rely on sense perception and common experience (see Breidbach). While we know of early attempts to study the materiality of thought in the Western tradition (plates such as the one