Posts tagged philosophy

examined-life:

‘[W]e go astray in thinking that death only follows [life], when in reality it has both preceded us and will in turn follow us.  Whatever condition existed before our birth, is death.’

~ Seneca, Letters, LIV

Which perception, of ALL, for you?

mysticpolitics:

‘A hot topic for several thousand years, the question of whether free will exists may never be settled to everyone’s satisfaction. But in a series of new articles for the Chronicles of Higher Education, six academics from diverse fields offer fresh perspectives from the standpoints of modern neuroscience and philosophy. Ultimately, they voted 4-2 in favor of the position that free will is merely an illusion.’

Read more: Is Free Will an Illusion? Scientists, Philosophers Forced to Differ

by Oliver Leech

Section One. Why the mind-problem is important

I took at myself in the mirror and see my body: skin, hair. eves, What is behind that outside appearance? A medical textbook explains that inside my body is a collection of organs — bones, muscles, a heart, a liver, lungs and, at the top, behind the eyes, a brain. Further enquiry reveals that all of my body, whether outside or insider is composed of cells — my body is indeed a composite of millions of cells which perform a great variety of different functions. The study of the nature and workings of the body, human biology, is a vast and complex subject. Now suppose that I knew everything there was to be known about human biology, the intricacies of the cell, the mechanics of all the systems, nervous, respiratory and so on. Suppose my knowledge of the body were complete in every conceivable detail. Would it follow from this that I knew everything about me? Put another way the question is this: am I the same as my body? Or is my body the sum total of me? Is a description of the body in all its detail a description of everything about me? Or is there a me in some sense which is not included in any biological analysis however meticulous and thoroughgoing.

At first impression there do seem to be elements of me which are outside the body’s biology. A thought about tomorrow’s weather, an idea about buying a lottery ticket, the smell of newly mown grass, the sound of a motorway, hunger, the memory of the shopping centre I visited yesterday, a decision to give up maple and pecan cookies. All these seem to be unique to me, part of me. They are all examples of what are called mental. states, that is, they exist in the mind but are not, at least not obviously, part of the body.

In Western philosophy there are three long-standing and well-supported responses to the problem of defining what this me really is: materialism, dualism and idealism. The way of the materialist is to describe all aspects of me in terms of physical things. The body obviously falls into this category. But for the materialist the mental states referred to above do not really exist separately from the body. If we continue to study them, according to the materialist, it will be found that they are not a special category made of some distinct non-material stuff but essentially physical substances described from a different point of view and about which some confusion of language has arisen. A thought, to the materialist, for example, is ultimately to be defined as some form of brain activity.

Dualism is the philosophical doctrine that physical things and mental states are both real but totally distinct and separate entities. The dualist (at least the strong dualist) rejects the idea that mental states can be, or in principle could ever be, reduced to or explained away in terms of physical things. To him mental states are completely separate in nature and origin: the universe is made not of one type of stuff (as the materialist believes) but of two: mind (the collective name for mental states) and matter.

Idealism, the third response, goes further than dualism. For the idealist, the direct opposite of the materialist, it is mental states, the mind, which are ultimate reality. Thoughts, ideas, feelings are real, matter is no more real than the phantom physical things we seem to touch and see in dreams. Material objects are projections of the mind, clusters of sense data which give the false appearance of being separate hard reality.

All three approaches face difficulties in giving a convincing answer to the question of what I am. Dualism, however. has an additional problem particular to it. Materialism and idealism share at least one claim, namely, that everything that exists, the entirety of the universe, is made of a single substance: where they disagree, of course, is in the nature of what that substance is. For the dualist, however, there are two discrete. real substances: the mental and the physical. The extra difficulty for the dualist is an obligation to provide an explanation of the relationship between mental states or consciousness and the physical world.

There are several possible relationships between the two, for example, one of interaction and one of parallelism. Interaction itself has subdivisions: two-way and one-way interaction. Two-way interaction entails that the body affects the mind and that the mind affects the body, so that, for example, stubbing your toe (physical) causes pain (mental), receiving a letter (physical) causes excitement (mental), being asked a question (physical) gives rise to a thought (mental). In each case an event in the physical world causes a mental experience of one sort or another. The other side of the two-way interaction is the power of the mind to influence the body in, for example, choosing to move the limbs, willing to stay awake when the body is falling asleep, expressing intentions through actions. One-way interaction would hold that the power to influence operates not in both but in a single direction, either from body to mind or from mind to body. Parallelism is quite different: it rejects interaction in either direction and claims that mind and body exist in separate domains, related to each other but not causally connected: each is independent of the other.

To return to dualism and the reasons for its declining popularity among professional philosophers. We recall that, although dualism needs a plausible explanation of the relationship between mind and body, its advocates have seemed unable to provide one. Parallelism, on the one hand, seemed out of touch. with reality. Interactionism, on the other, conformed more closely to immediate experience for we generally believe our minds both are affected by our bodies and also have the power to affect our bodies, But dualism rendered interaction impossible for the more it stressed that matter and consciousness were two totally different substances with contrasting properties and essences, the less scope was left for one to have any impact on the other. By making them alien to each other there was no common ground between them; neither could get any causal purchase on the other. Descartes was aware of this problem himself and proposed as a candidate for a meeting-point between mind and mater, the pineal gland whose function in his day was unknown. But of course, this is no answer. A gland whatever its function, is part of the biology of the body; it is made of cells and as much physical as a piece of granite.

The relationship of mind and body is not a dry academic question of interest only to a small coterie of university-based professional philosophers. Far from it. It is a question of central importance to anyone with a serious concern for seeking the truth about the human condition, to anyone who wants to know if there is a purpose to life, to anyone who wonders whether a religious teaching is founded on the truth about human beings, to anyone who questions the fundamentals of ethics and wants to live the ‘good life’. It must. matter to us whether we are ultimately only a temporary congregation of atoms or a conscious being whose substance is not dependent on the continuation or the body. What could be more important questions than these? What am 1? Of what am I made? Where am 1 going? What is the right way to live? It is to these questions that the mind-body problem, with its ions history and vast literature is intimately related… . .

(Source: philosophypathways.com)