4.6DAVIDSON’S ANOMOLOUS MONISM:

Donald Davidson (1917-)is a contemporary philosopher who theorizes the issues of mind-body-identity issues[i].  He proposes that the mind is connected to the body it holds by the identity it is given. That is if a person called X does a thing it automatically means that it is X’s act. This is act is given to the identity of the Mr.X and his mind is taken to be responsible for the act.  This phenomena is called supervenience. The identity of the action is called token-identity.  The mind and the body and the action together are bound to a monistic state in an anomalous way. This is defined as the anomalous monism.

                      In the modern scientific sense the actions, emotions, appearance, thought, body weight, color, physical health, disease proneness are all linked to our DNA. The DNA is thus a de-facto soul. The DNA has no innate knowledge about its actions. It is only a protein ribbon of molecules with embedded codes.  It is responsible for our body and mind. It takes information from the perceptual organs and processed information is made into codes yet it by itself can not know the information. It is responsible for our ideas but cannot think by itself. It can leave our body and unite with another DNA and form an another soul(CHILD).

 Even one can die and his body may be lost but his DNA survives in the form of his child. If we think in that way the genes have every reason to be called as the soul.

This is exactly the reason the modern political controversies  about the gene splicing, genetic engineering, gene therapies, stem cell transplantation…etc . 

The sivagnana bodham(SGB) verse -3 takes up the definition of the soul and tries describe its properties. It comes closer to the modern description of a DNA. Let us see the DNA as an analogy for the concept of soul( as per SGB)

the soul  is different from life as life can end in death

the soul  is different from the body

the soul  is different from perceptions

the soul is different from thoughts

the soul is different from the conscious

the soul is different from the physiological functions like breathing

the soul is different from the sivam

the matters which makes the body, mind and conscious are not soul

the body is a transitional-mechanical-object only(MAYA-IYANDHRA-DHANU)மாயாயிந்திரதணு

the soul is the deeper driving force of this illusory –mechanical- object

From these it is obvious the SGB tries to  characterize the description of the properties of the soul. Theses qualifications best correspond to the modern DNA.

Donald Davidson’s anomalous monism is a modern  philosophical approach which comes very close to the SGB’s description of the body and mind. Actions and conscious too are only having a token identity and the real  identity is elsewhere.

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[i] Anomalous Monism is a theory about the scientific status of psychology, the physical status of mental events, and the relation between these issues developed by Donald Davidson. It claims that psychology cannot be a science like basic physics, in that it cannot in principle yield exceptionless laws for predicting or explaining human thoughts and actions (mental anomalism). It also holds that thoughts and actions must be physical (monism, or token-identity). Thus, according to Anomalous Monism, psychology cannot be reduced to physics, but must nonetheless share a physical ontology.
While neither of these claims, on its own, is novel, their relation, according to Anomalous Monism, is. It is precisely because there can be no such strict laws governing mental events that those events must be identical to physical events. Previous identity theories of mind had held that claims concerning the identity of particular mental and physical events (tokens) depended upon the discovery of lawlike relations between mental and physical properties (types). Empirical evidence for psychophysical laws was thus held to be required for particular token-identity claims. Token-identity claims thus depended upon type-identity. Davidson's position is dramatically different—it requires no empirical evidence and depends on there being no lawlike relations between mental and physical properties. It in effect justifies the token-identity of mental and physical events through arguing for the impossibility of type-identities between mental and physical properties. The appeal of Anomalous Monism is due to these enigmatic features, a fairly straightforward argumentative structure, and its attempt to bring together an intuitively acceptable metaphysics (monism) with a sophisticated understanding of the relation between psychological and physical explanatory schemes (anomalism). Its explicit assumptions are each intended, on their own, to be acceptable to positions opposing monism, but, when taken together, to show that monism is in fact required. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anomalous-monism/