Introduction

The mind-body problem is one of the fundamental questions of the philosophy of mind and neuroscience. The traditional approaches such as dualism, identity theory or psychophysical parallelism have tried to solve this problem on an ontological level. This analysis offers an alternative approach that considers the relationship between body and mind primarily as a problem of description and not as an ontological question.

The description level as a starting point

The relationship between body and mind exists only at the level of description. There is no specific relationship between the two beyond a correlation. Identity theory makes the mistake of relating the two to each other one-to-one, but such an ontological reference does not exist. Instead, we describe this relationship from either a psychological or a physiological perspective.
The fundamental starting point is always ourselves as human beings. We inevitably look at the world from our perspective and subordinate everything else to this perspective. Our experience, behaviour and experience form the primary frame of reference from which we understand and describe the world – including our own physiological processes.

Behavior and inner states are equal – both have physiological correlates and can be studied empirically. The crucial point, however, is the direction of this investigation: We always start from behavior or experience and then look for the physiological correlates, never the other way around.

The methodological one-sidedness

This one-sided methodological orientation is fundamental for understanding the body-mind relationship. Even if we place a subject under a scanner, the examination begins with a behavior-based or psychological concept. We ask the subject to solve a specific task or perceive a stimulus, and then observe the neuronal activity.
Without this link to behavior or experience, a pure observation of neuronal processes would be meaningless – it would only show patterns of electrochemical activity without us knowing what they represent or what function they fulfill. All medicine and neuroscience is based on this concept of correlation, which starts from behavior or experience.

Emergence on both sides

The fact that every act of behavior is based on a physiological process does not mean that one can be reduced to the other. This is contradicted by the fact that we are dealing with emergent phenomena on both sides. Neither a psychophysical parallelism nor a dualism of properties can adequately capture this complexity.

Neuroscience as a dependent discipline

Neuroscience has accumulated extensive knowledge through years of correlational studies, which allows it to draw conclusions even without direct correlations. Nevertheless, the starting point always remains the empiricism of behavior or experience. Brain research is thus an empirical-inferential science that cannot operate autonomously, but only in relation to behavior and experience.
It is noteworthy that both experimental neuroscience and clinical medicine implicitly act according to this pattern without thinking about it epistemologically. In practice, every neurological examination begins with behavioral observations or reports on subjective experience (symptoms) before physiological measurements or imaging techniques are used. Even if these disciplines often seem to advocate a physiological reductionism, their actual methodological practice follows the primacy of behavior and experience.

Neuroscience is a cartographic discipline that draws correlations, but is never the "language of the mind" itself. Physiology can only evaluate its findings retrospectively, because without psychological framing it would not know what is relevant at all.

Consciousness as a natural phenomenon

In this context, consciousness can be understood as a phenomenon that we can explain both in terms of evolutionary biology and investigate in neuroscientific terms. From an evolutionary biology point of view, we ask about the adaptive value of consciousness and its development in the course of evolution. At the neural level, we identify the specific mechanisms that enable consciousness.
Both approaches treat consciousness as a natural phenomenon without mystifying or reducing it. They stick to empirically accessible correlations without making ontological statements about a "substratum of consciousness".

The tendency towards premature ontologization

A fundamental epistemological error is that we usually directly ontologize what we observe, instead of looking for the underlying principles that lie behind or make up the phenomena. We take our observations – be they behaviors or physiological processes – as direct representations of reality and ascribe ontological status to them.
In doing so, we inevitably mix the levels of description and create pseudo-problems such as the classic body-soul problem. Instead of recognizing that they are different modes of describing complex phenomena, we treat consciousness and neural activity as separate ontological entities, the relationship of which then seems puzzling.
This tendency towards hasty ontologization is deeply anchored in our thinking and makes it difficult to consistently separate the levels of description. It leads us to look for ontological "bridges" between mind and body, where there are actually only different perspectives on the same phenomenon.

The fallacy of reversing the epistemic direction of access

Another fundamental error that follows from this tendency towards ontologization is the reversal of the methodological direction. We necessarily start from behavior and experience and then look for physiological correlates, but we then draw the wrong conclusion that we could just as well start from physiology.
This reverse conclusion is particularly evident in the assumption that – if we could physiologically replicate an organism 1:1 – we would also produce the same behavior and experience, i.e. consciousness. However, this idea is fundamentally wrong, as it reinterprets the methodological one-way street from behavior to physiology into an ontological two-way street.
The methodological one-way street consists in the fact that we can only ever start from our behavior and experience and identify physiological correlates from there. The opposite path – from physiology to experience – is methodologically closed to us. While we can make predictions about likely behavior based on our accumulated knowledge of correlations, we cannot infer the existence of experience or consciousness from physiology alone.

Why the reasoning is not reversible

The irreversibility of this argumentation is based on a fundamental asymmetry of our epistemic approach: behavior and experience are directly accessible to us, physiological processes, on the other hand, only indirectly through empirical investigation.
First, we have direct, privileged access to our own experience and observe our own behavior as well as that of others directly. This is the epistemological starting point of any investigation of consciousness.
Secondly, our knowledge of physiological processes is a result of scientific research, which is itself based on behavioural observation and experience reports. Neurophysiological research is historically and methodologically secondary to behavioral research.
Thirdly, we can only infer experience in other living beings on the basis of behavioral analogies. We do not have direct access to the experience of others, but interpret their behavior against the background of our own experience.

The Full Replica Argument and Its Problems

Nevertheless, one could argue that the complete replication of an organism would also lead to identical behavior and experience. This argument is based on the assumption that a complete structural identity would also have to be followed by functional identity and thus identical experience.
However, there are several problems inherent in this argument:

1. The verification problem: Even if we could perfectly replicate an organism, we would not have direct access to experience this replica. We could only observe the behavior and from there – based on analogies – infer experience. The assertion of identical experience would in principle remain unverifiable.

2. The incompleteness of correlation: Our knowledge of the correlation between physiological processes and experience is necessarily incomplete. We can never be sure that we have identified all the relevant physiological factors that are necessary for consciousness.

3. The problem of emergent properties: Consciousness could be an emergent property that cannot be explained by the sum of the parts alone. The mere replication of physiological structures does not guarantee the emergence of the same emergent properties.

4. The context problem: A living organism exists in an evolutionary, historical, and ecological context that is not fully reproducible in a replica. This context could be constitutive for the specific experience.
Thus, the fundamental epistemological asymmetry remains: we can infer physiological correlates from behavior and experience, but not vice versa from physiology to the existence of specific experience – even assuming complete reproduction.

Implications for AI research

This position has far-reaching implications for the debate on artificial intelligence and "machine consciousness". Any claim about "conscious AI" would not only be exaggerated, but fundamentally misguided, because it makes an ontological equation of pattern processing and experience.
Even if an AI exhibits complex behavior, it remains trapped in correlations in a purely descriptive way, without a real inner perspective. There is no gradual approach to consciousness through more complex algorithms – the debate about artificial consciousness is based on a category error that confuses phenomenology with pure signal processing.

The fallacy of the reversal of the epistemic causal direction becomes particularly clear here: We observe complex behavior in humans and correlate it with certain neuronal activity patterns. Then we try to generate similar behavioral patterns in AI systems and incorrectly conclude that similar experience qualities must also be associated with them. This assumption ignores the fact that the original correlation can only be established methodologically in one direction – from behaviour to physiology.
We can only grasp consciousness through behavior, not through pure physiological analysis.
Since physiology never grasps consciousness on its own, it cannot produce it.

Physiology can tell us how a heart beats – but it does not follow that it can "create" a heart.
The same applies to the brain: just because we can describe how neuronal processes correlate with consciousness does not mean that we can "build" consciousness. Physiology is a descriptive, not a generative discipline. You can't create consciousness out of physiology, because it itself is always dependent on external observation and methodological framing.

The human perspective as an indispensable starting point

An important epistemological consequence of this position is that the starting point is always us humans. We always look at the world from our perspective and subordinate everything else to this perspective. Any attempt to take an "objective" point of view that would be independent of human experience and behavior is ultimately doomed to failure, since we cannot eliminate ourselves as knowing subjects.
This anthropocentric starting point is not to be understood as a limitation, but as an inevitable condition of our cognition. He explains why we inevitably have to start from behaviour and experience in order to be able to interpret physiological processes in a meaningful way at all.

The central role of methodology

Therefore, methodology is the most important discipline in the philosophy of mind. The focus is not on the ontological questions about the "essence" of the spirit or consciousness, but on the critical reflection of our methods of cognition and descriptions. A methodologically reflected philosophy of mind does not primarily investigate what consciousness "is", but how we grasp it, describe it and examine it.
This methodological shift shifts the focus from the search for the "true essence" of the mind to the analysis of the conditions and limits of our cognition. It makes it clear that many classical problems in the philosophy of mind are based on methodological confusions and can be resolved by a clearer separation of the levels of description.

Result

The relationship between body and mind is primarily a methodological and not an ontological problem. By treating it as a matter of descriptive level, which inescapably emanates from our human perspective, we avoid the pitfalls of traditional approaches and gain a clearer understanding of the relationship between behavior, experience, and physiological processes.
This approach avoids both reductionism and dualism and treats consciousness as a natural phenomenon that has evolved in the context of biological evolution and is realized through neural processes. It offers a pragmatic framework for further research into the body-mind relationship without falling into metaphysical speculation.