> This shouldn't come as a surprise; "mental" and "physical" aren't distinct entities ...
In one critical sense, the mind and body are distinct. The body can be scientifically investigated because it yields objective, empirical evidence. For the mind, you have to ask the mind's owner what he's experiencing, and that leads to all sort of well-documented distortions.
>For the mind, you have to ask the mind's owner what he's experiencing
This isn't really a legit distinction. Describing "the mind" as separate from the body because we don't know how it works is like describing cancer or AIDS as separate from the body because we don't know precisely how they work. All of cancer, HIV, and thought stem from biological processes that we don't fully understand. That doesn't mean they are somehow not the body, it just means we don't understand the body.
> This isn't really a legit distinction. Describing "the mind" as separate from the body because we don't know how it works is like describing cancer or AIDS as separate from the body because we don't know precisely how they work.
From a scientific standpoint, yes, it's legitimate. We can gather unambiguous empirical data about the brain and the body, the meaning of which different observers will accept, but we cannot do that for the mind.
> All of cancer, HIV, and thought stem from biological processes that we don't fully understand.
Yes, but we can diagnose the first two objectively, so they're much more objective and scientific than what people choose to report about their minds. A microscope image of a pathogen has it all over someone's verbal report that he's sick.
Consider this example -- a trained actor can simulate all the symptoms of Alzheimer's, such that a psychologist will provide the diagnosis (as they regularly do), but that same actor will not get the diagnosis from a neuroscientist using an MRI scanner, because the latter method can produce an objective diagnosis that the former cannot.
> That doesn't mean they are somehow not the body, it just means we don't understand the body.
It's all relative. We may not fully understand the body, but we understand it much better than the mind. This is why psychologists have had to abandon promising diagnoses repeatedly over the decades -- such diagnoses often create a huge public uproar, then they're discredited, then they're abandoned. Psychologists can make a popular diagnosis like Asperger's disappear by removing it from their diagnostic manual (as they recently did), but that doesn't work for cancer and heart disease, because the latter conditions are real.
>From a scientific standpoint, yes, it's legitimate
No, sorry, it isn't. You can't gather empirical data about 'the mind' because it is a category you made up to describe a set of symptoms but which you are confusing for an entity.
> You can't gather empirical data about 'the mind' because it is a category you made up to describe a set of symptoms but which you are confusing for an entity.
No, I'm not doing that, psychologists are. And psychologists insist that the mind is a suitable topic for scientific investigation. You've managed to confuse me with a group that I spend much of my time criticizing for their scientific pretensions.
In one critical sense, the mind and body are distinct. The body can be scientifically investigated because it yields objective, empirical evidence. For the mind, you have to ask the mind's owner what he's experiencing, and that leads to all sort of well-documented distortions.
> ... our bodies function as a whole.
Most of the time, yes.