Monism And Dualism Similarities

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Are the mind and the brain identical? The brain is something that is a physical, fundamental part of a human’s composition. Something that is made up of matter. Physical things tend to have a life span, a time limit on how long they will last. The mind however is seen as nonphysical, something that potentially doesn’t have a limit on its life and could theoretically go on forever. When your body dies and decomposes, does your mind die and decompose too? I do not believe it does. In my research on the mind and the brain, I came across two very different types of theories; Monism and Dualism. Monism focuses on the belief that the mind and the brain are one. Whereas dualism describes the mind and the brain as separate. There is the view that there …show more content…

He believed that the mind was completely separate from the body. He supported the idea that it was completely possible to for each of these things to exist without the other (Skirry, 2015). This is called substance dualism. Where the physical things do not hold any thought and spread into space. Whereas the mental things, are things with all thought and no involvement into that of the physical world. Descartes main argument for dualism is one of indivisibility. He believes that the mind is strictly indivisible whereas the body is divisible. An example of this argument and how it relates to dualism is that if “a foot or an arm or any other bodily part amputated, I know that nothing would be taken away from the mind.” (Calef, 2015). In Descartes eyes, a man is only something that thinks, or in other words, man is mind. To me this describes the body as something where the mind is located within. He does state that humans are far different than any other substances out there (such as objects) in the way that the mind and the body are used in conjunction with each other. In this I believe means that the brain, being a physical part of the body, is not what makes a man. A brain is what works in conjunction with the man (the mind) to enable life in the physical

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