Reviews for The Mind-Body Problem

The average rating for The Mind-Body Problem based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-10-27 00:00:00 Ilia Ilia [The title is The Mind-Body Problem, and the heroine is writing a dissertation about the mind-body problem, so let's at least consider the hypothesis that the book is, indeed, a take on the mind-body problem. Now the thing that makes this a problem for many people is that minds and bodies seem to be quite different things. Minds are pure, unchanging essences. Bodies are gross, contingent accidents. Minds are much nobler than bodies, and the truly worthwhile things in life have to do with minds. In particular, when it comes to romantic relationships, it's inappropriate and wrong to be fixated on your loved one's body. You should value them for their mind. But is this so obvious? In the book, Renee can be read as a wittily designed counterexample. (Ah, those counterexamples!) She's a girl with extreme daddy issues, who's only really interested in older men, and only in their minds: she often tells us that youth and beauty just don't do it for her. And she's as gross and inappropriate as the male chauvinist pig who's only interested in women's cup sizes. She seduces and marries Noam because she wants a trophy husband who's got a huge brain, and she's so fixated on it that other aspects of him hardly register at all. Noam has also been set up to illustrate the incoherence of the conventional views about minds and bodies. He lives almost entirely in his head, and the mental is what's important to him. But mathematicians burn out early, and at the end it's graphically revealed that minds aren't pure, unchanging essences after all. Noam's mathematical gift has left him, just as Renee's youthful body has started to age. And it's even harder for him to find a beauty parlor that will at least temporarily arrest the process. The philosophical point is that dualism doesn't make sense: minds and bodies are much more similar than we first imagine. Well, I think that's the mental take on the book, and it's consistent that the physical take is better. Renee is funnier as a sexy bitch than as a philosophical counterexample, and that's as it should be. (hide spoiler)]

Review # 2 was written on 2009-08-25 00:00:00 Lemur Lemurov I'd call this book anti-frum, except that the protagonist, a grown woman off the derech, has such an empty life, it's just as much an indictment of the secular world as it is the world she left behind. The title comes from the classic problem of philosophy: are humans just the sum of their biological processes or does the mind have a metaphysical existence? The protagonist, a graduate student in Philosophy, grapples with a derivative of the question in her own life and marriage: is it only about my body? Since the answer seems to be yes, she looks at her frum relatives with envy, understanding at least that they live with real meaning. I'm upping this book to 4 because it's well-written, well-characterized, and has stuck in my memory even though I read it years ago. It was formerly a 2 because I couldn't get past my prejudice against the protagonist and her (im)moral choices, but I'm older now and more inclined to be forgiving.