Since ancient times, philosophers have debated on the relationship between how mind and matter relates, and interact, if at all. One such view became known as dualism, where the mind and body (matter) are two distinct, non-identical entities. Under dualism, lies interactionism, or mind-body interaction; a type of dualism where the physical world causally affects the mental world and vice versa. A strong supporter of dualism was Descartes who believed that physical and mental phenomenon only affects what goes into the brain, but opponents heavily criticized such view claiming it is not humanly conceivable and inconsistent with known laws of science. Yet, despite such arguments against the mind-body interaction, of all views, interactionism …show more content…
Princess Elisabeth objects to Descartes’ view, asking him to explain this, “For it seems that all determination of movement happens through the impulsion of the thing moved, by the manner in which it is pushed... or else by particular qualities and shape of the surface..” and she notes that “physical contact” is needed to move these objects, or the mechanistic theory of causation. Descartes neglects either one, by “excluding” them from each other. How then, can the physical world affect the mental and the mental affect the physical? However, natural phenomenon such as gravity, electron repulsion (electrons repulse due to their negative charges but do not directly touch), and other forces between subatomic particles occurs even without physically “touching”. Therefore, both Descartes’ and Princess Elisabeth’s claims fail to fully explain the interaction between the mind and matter, that coined the interaction problem. Nevertheless, I believe that Descartes’ arguments sufficiently explains mental and physical phenomenon. Demonstrated by gravity and forces within subatomic particles, along with many other examples of how two objects can interact without touching, Princess Elisabeth’s conclusion is not true at all times. Descartes ' view may not fully explain the mind-body interaction problem but I still support Descartes’ view, that the mind affects what goes into …show more content…
According to Descartes, the person might not drink water or go to sleep, because he/she does not feel thirsty or feel tired. However, since a person needs the desire to drink water, and the action of drinking the water, another argument against Descartes’ view, is the causal completeness argument, which would argue that even without the desires to drink water or feel tired, the person would still perform the action. The causal completeness argument follows as “effects of mental causes also have full physical causes, and because it would not be overdetermined to have both physical and mental causes, then mental occurrences are identical to physical occurrences". However, this redundancy is not found in nature. For example it would be overdetermined to say a single shot from a firing squad killed a man. In Sider’s example, he used a baseball shattering a window to object over determination. The parts making up the ball could have been the cause for breaking through the window, or because the ball came into contact with the window, or the event of the ball hitting the window (Sider). Assuming all these reasons caused the window to break would be over determination, and silly, because as Sider stated, once one of these reasons is the cause, then it leaves no room for any other
Descartes' error, Antonio Damasio tells us, was his belief in "the abyssal separation between body and mind . . . " (250). As Damasio notes, there are certainly many specific "errors" in Descartes' writings--that heat causes the circulation of the blood, for example, or that movement is translated instantaneously through the plenum from one object to another--but all these notions have been "corrected" by subsequent theory in ways that we can imagine Descartes himself might easily accept. The "abyssal separation" persists as the central cliché of modern philosophy because we do not yet agree on a solution, and Descartes serves as the convenient scapegoat for those who want to argue for the reduction of mind to matter. Damasio himself is part of a new generation of neuroscientists who, using the framework of connectionism or neural network theory, think they posses a solution to the mind/body [End Page 943] problem. The actual object of his attack is thus not so much Descartes but those cognitive psychologists who have defined themselves in terms of a Cartesian "nativism" or doctrine of innate elements of knowledge not derived from sensation. None of these "nativists" literally believes in mind/ body dualism, but insofar as they cling to the central functionalist dogma that mind can be instantiated in any physical system they de facto treat mind as something that can be considered apart from embodiment, and they embrace, more or less, an overtly Cartesian methodology, which Jerry Fodor has called "methodological solipsism." 1
Most philosophers in the seventeenth century were offering a response to Descartes’ dualism. In Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, he presents an argument for a mind-body dualism. Mind-body dualism is a distinction in regard to substance. The mind is a substance completely different than the body. The mind is where thought takes place. Body is extensive substance. According to Descartes, the mind controls the body’s movements and it is also where perception takes place. Elizabeth of Bohemia, a correspondent of Descartes, points out a problem with this mind-body dualism. If it is the case that mind and body are substances of completely different kinds it does not seem possible for the mind to interact with the body. How is it that the mind, being a completely different kind of substance, could come into contact with the body in order to make the body move? This is one problem Cavendish will attempt to resolve in her argument. Cavendish will attempt to reject dualism and argue for a type of monism consisting of animate (thinking) and inanimate (not thinking) matter. Her system can resolve the interaction problem because there would only be one substance. If it is the case that there is only one kind of substance then there could not be an interaction problem because an interaction problem of this sort inherently requires more than one
Many ancient philosophers, including Plato, explored metaphysics in relation to reality before Descartes’s in-depth questioning of the subject. However, Descartes’s views on mind/body dualism differ greatly from Plato’s. As Marleen Rozemond (author of Descartes's Dualism) points out, Plato believes that the body is simply a vessel for the soul to use, while Descartes provides proof that the body and soul are interconnected (172). One does not simply use the other; though they are separate, the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind. Cartesian dualism tells us that "although the whole mind seems to be united to the whole body, I recognize that if a foot or arm or any other part of the body is cut off, nothing has thereby been taken away from the mind" (414). However, Descartes also states that "nature also teaches me by . . . [sensations] that I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but that I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit" (412). Descartes shows through his dualism that though the mind and body are separate entities, they are connected and reliant on one another. This is one key idea that separates Descartes from great thinkers like Plato. Add another Rozemond quote.
Along with an argument usually comes a counter-argument or rebuttal. The main question about the mind-body issue is how can us humans determine the interaction between mind and matter. I believe property dualism is a logic, justifiable response because it separates the mental entity from brain states, and shows how it can be related to physical substances. The knowledge argument helps convey this view because it shows how non-physical properties such as consciousness, can be proven in any given person. The problems of interaction argument is a well structured rebuttal against property dualism, mostly because it brings about the issue that the mind is not a physical entity, thus it 's not possible for a non-physical substance to interact with a physical substance. According to scientism, this statement is correct but it can be refuted through a different perspective. A dualist could respond to this and bring out multiple points. The first one being that yes, the mind does act upon or bodies and the issue is only apparent, and does not exist. A good example of this can be pain. If a human breaks a bone, the pain is brought to the mental state of the person, then passed on to the brain for processing. This is direct evidence for the argument, and shows how the mind and body can interact. A second point I would consider a rebuttal for this argument, a dualist could
Elizabeth writes a letter to Descartes asking him to explain to her the relationship “there is between the soul, which is immaterial, and the body, which is material” (Margaret A.: p16). She seeks this clarification particularly on the aspect that regardless of how the soul influences the body movements. This question comes following a claim that Descartes had made “regarding the body and the soul” (Gordon B. and Katherine J.: p17 -19). He had intimated that the body and the soul exist as single entities and that each has autonomous function. This is found in the philosophy of the dualism. “The function of the brain is to think. The function of the body, on the other hand, is to show movements” (Gordon B. and Katherine J.: p17 -19). It is for this reason that Elizabeth wonders then that if the body and the soul are independent, how comes that the soul can cause body movements? She trusted that the great philosopher of the time, Descartes, would have an explanation considering the matter. The body-soul relation was a concept that Elizabeth found impossible to comprehend. “According to what she had already known from the metaphysics back ground is that movement of a physical body could only be effected by the action of another physical body” (Margaret A.: p17). How the soul managed to cause the body movement despite it being immaterial was the mystery that Elizabeth thought that Descartes would solve.
Despite having contrary qualities and fundamentally opposing natures, the mind and body are intertwined and interact with one another. Interactive dualism hold the idea that the mind is eternal and has the ability to exist apart from the body. Descartes holds the idea that if the physical realm in which the body material body exists ceased to exist, the mind would still be. However, if a circumstance arose which annihilated his ability to think, he would cease to exist. Interactive dualism explores the idea that the body is simply an extension of the forms of the individual in the physical world, that the demise of the material body does not render its fundamental nature to be obsolete. Interactive dualism can seem to diminish the importance of the material body, but it does not. Descartes states that the mind and body are united and interact so closely that it seems to create one whole. This unity is expressed by when the physical body experiences pain. If the mind simply related to the body in the manner a sailor relates to a ship, the mind would simply perceive pain through
Descartes is talking about something called interactionist substance dualism. He is stating that the mind and body causally interact with one another. This can be summed up to say that as easily as the mind can cause changes in the body, the body can also cause changes in the mind. Therefore the mind and body must be intimately united. An example of this is having the intuition to raise your hand.
On the dualism side of the argument, psychophysical parallelism and psychophysical interactionism have been advanced as explanations for the workings of mind and body. Parallelism has it that mental and physical events are independent of one another but occur simultaneously. Philosophers such as Leibnitz, for example, held that the activities of the mind and body were predetermined, and that both simply ran their course in a carefully orchestrated, synchronized, yet independent fashion. Interactionists, on the other hand, hold that mental and physical events are related in a causal way, such that the mind can influence the body and vice-versa. Descartes championed this idea with his notion that humans are "pilots in a ship;" mental beings who guide physical bodies through the world. Both psychophysical parallelism and psychophysical interactionism agree that the mind and body are of two different natures, and disagree over how closely those natures may interact.
Dualism is the theory that mind and matter are two distinct things. The main argument for dualism is that facts about the objective external world of particles and fields of force, as revealed by modern physical science, are not facts about how things appear from any particular point of view, whereas facts about subjective experience are precisely about how things are from the point of view of individual conscious subjects. They have to be described in the first person as well as in the third person.
The world we live in today is filled with psychopaths, murderers, priests, and teachers. Each and everyone of them have their own personal beliefs. Descartes had a philosophy he followed known as Dualism. Dualism is the belief that there is a sensory world and a realistic world. Ever since my early middle school years, I yearned for the high school experience. Television showed me high school is an enchanted place. There would be little work and be joyful. That being my sensory world, I thought high school would be magical. However, realistically, high school is depressing, exhausting, frustrating, and has turned me into a workaholic. Since I’ve learned about Dualism, this philosophy has described my experience in high school.
During the sixteen hundreds, the French philosopher René Descartes laid the foundations for the beginnings of Cartesian Dualism. In contrast, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued against dualism in favor of materialism. Recently, Cartesian Dualism, and dualism in general has fallen out of favor as materialism arose as a more plausible and explanatory theory regarding the interrelationships between body and mind. The translation Descartes’ writing in the Meditations is far more cryptic than Hobbes’ writing in the Leviathan. Making it far easier to see Hobbes’ claims. Hobbes provides a reasonable explanation against dualism in his objections to Descartes, and in his Leviathan, provides background upon his reasoning in those objections. Dualism may be less popular than materialism in current philosophy, but it may simply be because dualism has more or less reached some sort of block in regards to its further development, and not anything to do with the writings of Descartes or Hobbes. Descartes and Hobbes may have influenced many of the earlier bickering between philosophers of mind upon the subject of mind-body interaction, as Hobbes was likely the first objector to Descartes’ dualism.
As regards materialism, the downside of this doctrine is that when materialists attempt to reduce the mental realm to the physical by saying that mental experiences are brain processes, they deny the existence of consciousness, sometimes called ‘qualia’, which is nevertheless a subjective aspect of mental experiences. According to Dualism, having different properties is not the only difference between Mental and Physical realms, a third difference between the two as mentioned earlier is qualitative. Mental happenings have subjective qualities such as what it feels like, looks like or sounds like. Descartes' view claims that material properties could never produce something as perplexing as consciousness or awareness, because such qualities
René Descartes was the 17th century, French philosopher responsible for many well-known philosophical arguments, such as Cartesian dualism. Briefly discussed previously, according to dualism, brains and the bodies are physical things; the mind, which is a nonphysical object, is distinct from both the brain and from all other body parts (Sober 204). Sober makes a point to note Descartes never denied that there are causal interactions between mental and physical aspects (such as medication healing ailments), and this recognition di...
Descartes is a very well-known philosopher and has influenced much of modern philosophy. He is also commonly held as the father of the mind-body problem, thus any paper covering the major answers of the problem would not be complete without covering his argument. It is in Descartes’ most famous work, Meditations, that he gives his view for dualism. Descartes holds that mind and body are com...
What is ideology? How can it help us understand media? Use academic literature to support your argument.