Does a functioning mind need a functioning body ?

One of the main topics of the proposed book is the computational requirements for designing a functioning mind. This could either be a “purely rational” mind or it could be a mind with affective capacity. In this paper I would like to consider whether is is meaningful to consider designing such a mind without simultaneously designing a body to go with it. We shall take a non-dualist perspective as an axiom. Therefore there is a requirement for the mind to be realized in some fashion in the physical world. The aim of this paper is to consider the relationship between those parts of the body which act as a substrate for mind (in the sense that they could be replaced in a functionalist fashion by another substrate with no difference) and those parts of the body which influence mind yet which cannot/are not part of a substitutable substrate. The “cannot/are not” in the previous sentence can be interpreted usefully at a number of levels. A strong notion may be that there are no physically possible ways of realizing the same phenomenon. Some phenomena may admit a weaker notion in that it is “easier” in some sense (e.g. faster, more energy efficient) for the mind to process this phenomenon using a physical process which is substrate-contained.