It's all in the mind?

Ever since Plato started telling stories about people trapped in caves, as a means of illustrating how reality is created by the mind, philosophers have pondered the relationship between the mind (consciousness) and reality (the world as we experience it). This is generally known as the mind-body problem. Designers may not be overly excited by the mind-body problem but it touches on ideation, as part of design thinking, in that it highlights the relation, or interaction between the idea (subjectivity and intentionality) and outcome in terms of physical properties (spatio-temporal objects). Moreover, design ideas seem to have causal powers, but they also possess the mysterious property of intentionality, that is, being about other thing. Or, as the dualist might see it, the idea is in the matter, or the material world (concrete or visual ideas) but also in the computational world (abstract ideas). Intriguingly, though, simple mathematical relationships may not just tell us something about the way designers think but also something about the world. The body-mind problem, then, from a designer perspective could be conceived as fitting ideas to reality while recognising that nature is independent of ideas.