Translation Issues , Again: The Septuagint. Here again we find the profound impact translation has not only on interpretation of text but on history itself. Quoting from the Septuagint , Philo writes:. There could not be a mind that consisted of a lone pain or red after-image, especially not of one that had detached itself from the mind to which it had previously belonged.
Therefore it makes more sense to think of mental contents as modes of a subject. Bundle theorists tend to take phenomenal contents as the primary elements in their bundle. Seeing the problem in this way has obvious Humean roots. This atomistic conception of the problem becomes less natural if one tries to accommodate other kinds of mental activity and contents.
How are acts of conceptualising, attending to or willing with respect to, such perceptual contents to be conceived? These kinds of mental acts seem to be less naturally treated as atomic elements in a bundle, bound by a passive unity of apperception.
William James , vol. James attributes to these Thoughts acts of judging, attending, willing etc, and this may seem incoherent in the absence of a genuine subject. But there is also a tendency to treat many if not all aspects of agency as mere awareness of bodily actions or tendencies, which moves one back towards a more normal Humean position.
But see Sprigge , 84—97, for an excellent, sympathetic discussion. The problem is to explain what kind of a thing an immaterial substance is, such that its presence explains the unity of the mind. The answers given can be divided into three kinds. There are two problems with this approach. Second, and connectedly, it is not clear in what sense such stuff is immaterial, except in the sense that it cannot be integrated into the normal scientific account of the physical world.
Why is it not just an aberrant kind of physical stuff? Account a allowed the immaterial substance to have a nature over and above the kinds of state we would regard as mental. The consciousness account does not. The most obvious objection to this theory is that it does not allow the subject to exist when unconscious. This forces one to take one of four possible theories. He has half escaped because he does not attribute non-mental properties to the self, but he is still captured by trying to explain what it is made of.
The reason is that, even when we have acknowledged that basic subjects are wholly non-physical, we still tend to approach the issue of their essential natures in the shadow of the physical paradigm. One can interpret Berkeley as implying that there is more to the self than introspection can capture, or we can interpret him as saying that notions, though presenting stranger entities than ideas, capture them just as totally.
Varieties of Dualism: Ontology 2. Varieties of Dualism: Interaction 3. Arguments for Dualism 4. Problems for Dualism 5. The ontological question: what are mental states and what are physical states? Is one class a subclass of the other, so that all mental states are physical, or vice versa? Or are mental states and physical states entirely distinct? The causal question: do physical states influence mental states?
Do mental states influence physical states? If so, how? The problem of consciousness: what is consciousness? How is it related to the brain and the body? The problem of intentionality: what is intentionality? The problem of the self: what is the self? Other aspects of the mind-body problem arise for aspects of the physical. For example: The problem of embodiment: what is it for the mind to be housed in a body? What is it for a body to belong to a particular subject?
Varieties of Dualism: Ontology There are various ways of dividing up kinds of dualism. Varieties of Dualism: Interaction If mind and body are different realms, in the way required by either property or substance dualism, then there arises the question of how they are related. For more detailed treatment and further reading on this topic, see the entry epiphenomenalism.
I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and can never observe any thing but the perception. Somewhat surprisingly, it is not very clear just what his worry was, but it is expressed as follows: In short there are two principles, which I cannot render consistent; nor is it in my power to renounce either of them, viz.
A natural response to Hume would be to say that, even if we cannot detect ourselves apart from our perceptions our conscious experiences we can at least detect ourselves in them … Surely I am aware of [my experience], so to speak, from the inside — not as something presented, but as something which I have or as the experiential state which I am in … and this is equivalent to saying that I detect it by being aware of myself being visually aware.
If the bundle theory were true, then it should be possible to identify mental events independently of, or prior to, identifying the person or mind to which they belong. It is not possible to identify mental events in this way. Therefore, The bundle theory is false. Lowe defends this argument and argues for 2 as follows. What is wrong with the [bundle] theory is that … it presupposes, untenably,that an account of the identity conditions of psychological modes can be provided which need not rely on reference to persons.
But it emerges that the identity of any psychological mode turns on the identity of the person that possesses it. What this implies is that psychological modes are essentially modes of persons, and correspondingly that persons can be conceived of as substances. He says: The mind is a kind of theatre where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. We can scale counterfactual suggestions as follows: This table might have been made of ice.
This table might have been made of a different sort of wood. Any present state of consciousness that I can imagine either is or is not mine.
There is no question of degree here. Perhaps, in the case of a sophisticated conversation, the fundamentality of meaning, and of conscious reflection, as a driver is even more obvious than in the case of sensation A dualist could, it seems, argue that Plato was right in claiming that intellect necessarily has an affinity with the realm of abstract entities, and Aristotle was right to think that no material or mechanical system could capture the flexibility built into genuine understanding.
Problems for Dualism We have already discussed the problem of interaction. Bibliography Almog, J. Hamlyn trans. Armstrong, D. Averill, E.
Ayer, A. Baker, M. Goetz eds. Benacerraf, P. Berkeley, G. Luce and T. Jessop eds. Bricke, J. Broad, C. Chalmers, D. Collins, C. Collins, R. Crane, T. Cucu, A. Dainton, B. Davidson, D. Foster and J. Swanson eds. Dennett, D. Hookway ed. Descartes, R. Cottingham trans. Ducasse, C. Hook ed. Dimensions of Mind , New York: Collier, pp. Eccles, J. Blakemore and S. Green fields eds. Efron, A. Feigl, H. Feigl, M. Scriven and G. Maxwell, eds. Fodor, J. Foster, J. Smythies and J. Beloff eds.
Fumerton, R. Green, C. Hamlyn, D. Hart, W. Guttenplan ed. Hawthorne, J. Zimmerman eds. Heil, J. Herbert, R. Himma, K. Hodgson, D. Honderich, T. Hume, D. VI, and Appendix, D. Norton and M. Norton eds. Huxley, T.
Jackson, F. James, W. Kim, J. Robb eds. Kripke, S. Lahav, R. Larmer, R. Latham, N. Lowe, E. McGinn, C. Davies and G. Humphreys eds. Madell, G. Mills, E. Nussbaum, M. Oderberg, D. Parfit, D. Penelhum, T. Penfield, W. Penrose, R. Pietroski, P. Pitts, J. Plato, Phaedo , in J. Cooper ed. Popper, K. Reid, T. Richardson, R. Robinson, H. Stich and T. Warfield eds. Novak and A. Simony eds. Rosenburg, J. Rozemond, M. Ryle, G. Searle, J. This version includes many peer responses. The article itself has been republished many times.
Sellars, W. Sherrington, C. Shoemaker, S. Smook, R. Smythies, J. His arguments used premises which we question today. For example, Plato thought that he could conclude that the soul could exist independent of the body because it acted independently from the body when it engaged in pure thought.
This is no longer accepted as true since it is equally evident today that without a physical brain thought appears unlikely to occur. Plato thought that the only way to explain how people come to know things is that they are remembering the knowledge implanted in their souls when the souls were in the realm of pure thought and eternal forms before entering into the body after which they forgot as they became confused by physical emotions an feelings and limited experiences through the senses.
This is no longer accepted as the best explanation of how people come to have knowledge. None the less, Plato is credited with being the first human to attempt to set out any sort of a proof that humans had souls and that they survived the death of the body and that they were immortal. He offered these arguments in the Dialogue he wrote titled the Phaedo.
Descartes also believed that the soul existed prior to and separate from the body see Meditation II of Meditations on First Philosophy and so was immortal. In his view all of reality consisted of two very different substances: matter or the physical and spirit or the non-physical.
The physical was what would be extended in time and space and the non-physical would not be so characterized. For Descartes the soul of a human exists prior to and separate from the body. His proof consisted of argumentation that has been seriously criticized and rejected.
He thought that if he could in some form demonstrate that humans can prove that they exist without first proving that they have physical bodies then that would prove that they did not need a physical body in order to exist. He thought that his famous claim that " I think therefore I am" established not just that he existed but that he existed without a body as a "thinking thing".
A "thinking thing" is a thing that thinks and by that would be included: imagining, conceiving, hoping, dreaming, desiring, fearing, conjecturing, reasoning, remembering and more.
For him a "thinking thing" needed no physical parts to do what it does. Modern science has established that there is no evidence of humans that are without a physical body and its brain. There is no evidence that thought is possible without a brain. There is much evidence that what has been associated with Descartes' "thinking thing" is now explained solely in terms of the brain and how the brain is physically structured and the functioning of the brain.
READ Wikipedia on this dualism. Variations on Dualism. Interactionism - minds and bodies exist and interact in some way. Epiphenomenalism - body acts on mind but minds do NOT act on bodies. Parallelism -minds and bodies exist in separate dimensions and are coordinated. Pre-Established Harmony-minds and bodies are set in motion and coordinated from the beginning of time by a deity that creates the universe. Occasionalism- on the occasion of the mind making a decision the body is moved by the creator deity to do whatever the mind has decided to make the body do.
But we cannot imagine seeing half a colour or seeing two different colours in the same space at the same time.
Descartes argued that as long as it is thinking, the mind is always experienced as being a single and complete entity. When I consider the mind - i. The unity of physical objects, on the other hand, always occurs as a matter of degree with a seemingly infinite amount of possible subdivisions. Descartes stated that,. Finally, the nature of qualia reveals the inherent subjectivity of the mind.
This makes the mind different from the substances dealt with in the physical sciences because they only deal in facts that can be proven to be true or false, irrespective of human opinion.
This means that any physical theory of the mind will have to differ greatly from traditional science, not only will it have to reference subjective opinion, but it will have to explain why we have subjective experiences at all. Descartes showed that any physical theory of the mind will have to explain why we experience thoughts of any kind, including qualia and rational introspection.
It will also have to explain why qualia cannot be communicated with others, where qualia reside within the brain, and why we cannot divide these thoughts into parts.
Descartes solved these problems with dualism, the idea that the mind is composed of an indivisible, thinking substance that does not exist in physical space. This solution is not without problems, however.
The biggest problem is that Descartes did not explain how such distinct substances could interact. The mind must have some control over the body; this is evident when we decide to move. The body, in turn, has some control over our mind; this is evident when we feel pain. The problem of how the mind and body interact, despite obeying different physical laws, is known as the problem of causal interaction. This is analogous to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics discussed in Chapter Copyright Privacy Disclaimer Search Sitemap.
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