"Science, too, has generally seen this border as impenetrable. The great German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz used the famous "mill argument": If there was, he wrote in 1714, "a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions," then you could imagine enlarging it to a size of a mill and walking into it - but all you'd be able to see is parts that push one another, and no amount of detail could explain how all of that converts into actual thinking and perceiving."
"It stated that behavior - that is, the physical movements performed by an animal body - is the only readout for an animal mind there could possibly be, and "mind," as a scientific concept, should never even be discussed: The goal is merely to determine which inputs into the "black box" of the brain predict which outputs come out of it - what stimuli cause what behavior."
A sharp border between the physical and the mental appears intuitive and underpins widespread belief in a soul distinct from the body that experiences sensations and beliefs. Gottfried Leibniz's mill argument emphasized the difficulty of deriving subjective experience from mechanistic parts alone. Mid-20th-century behaviorism treated the brain as an impenetrable black box and limited science to observable behavior, excluding 'mind' as a legitimate concept. Advances in brain imaging and neuroscience exposed internal brain processes, showing that brains are not mere relays to muscles but actively create meanings by abstracting and memorizing complex patterns, thereby challenging the strict separation between physical and mental.
Read at Big Think
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