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Critically analyse and discuss the scientific nature of psychology
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The famous philosophers Gilbert Ryle, René Descartes, and Thomas Nagel help us better understand the idea regarding mental and physical phenomena’s. A mental phenomenon is best described as feelings, emotions, and desires that are processed in the mind, and a physical phenomenon is best described as observable facts by the body that is processed by the brain. An example of a physical fact is a cell phone. A cell phone can be wholly explained, and all the parts can be fully identified and know by everyone to be the same. A physical fact is much different from a mental fact because mental facts can only be perceived by one’s self. An example of a mental fact is love because no one but yourself can know the feeling of the love that you felt for …show more content…
These philosophers each have different arguments regarding different parts of physical and mental phenomenon’s and how they are related, and they use different sets of ideas and examples like the category mistake, ghost in the machine, and subjective vs. objective to help better explain and improve their argument. The philosopher I agree with the most is Thomas Nagel because he uses the example of the bat to explain subjective and objective, and the example of subjective vs objective best explains my beliefs. I agree with his idea the most because I believe that mental phenomena can not be fully explained by physical phenomena. An important Philosopher in the idea behind the mind and body and how they are separate from each other, but one I disagree with is René Descartes. An important quote from Descartes is “I think, therefore I am.” This is an important quote because Descartes believes that you can not doubt your own existence due to the fact that in …show more content…
This example is subjective vs. objective. The subjective perspective is what we know and have known through experience, and the objective perspective is imagining the perspective of something else. An example of the subjective is ourselves because we only know what it is like to be and feel like ourselves. An example of the objective is the idea of being a bat, which Nagel explains in the textbook. Nagel says “I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task” (Intro to Philosophy p.405). This quote explains how is is not possible to have the same mental experience a real bat has through physical observations. The reason for this is because we only know what it is like to be ourselves, and if we wanted to know what it is like to be a bat, we would be unable to do that because we do not have the same mind as the bats. This is the reason why the objective perspective is unachievable by our minds. I agree with all aspects of this argument for many reasons. One of these reasons is because I know through experience that I am unable to know what a bat or any other organism feels like because the only resources I have are the experiences I have been through. The example of the bat best explains why I believe that mental phenomena can not be wholly explained by reference to
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.
Nagel is a profound philosopher, who defends a customary view of science a way to gain knowledge of the world. In the argument, Nagel makes it clear that there is good reason to believe that God doesn’t exist, however, he does make it clear that his views make fall along the lines of Buddhism. Nagel claims that he his questioning the theological proposition to believe in God. Nagel has given two points in proving that God does not exist. The first point goes along the lines that of that God exist, however, they don’t have a good reason to believe in God but they also have no good reason to not believe in God. Or we cannot truly understand the concept of God exist because according to Nagel its nonsense- although, we understand it as an expression
Richard Taylor explained why the body and the mind are one, and why they are not two separate substances. In the article “The Mind as a Function of the Body”, Taylor divides his article in a number of sections and explains clearly why dualism, or the theory that the mind and the body are separate is not conceivable. In one of these sections it is explained in detail the origin of why some philosophers and people believe in dualist metaphysics. As stated by Taylor “when we form an idea of a body or a physical object, what is most likely to come to mind is not some person or animal but something much simpler, such as a stone or a marble”(133). The human has the tendency to believe a physical object as simple, and not containing anything complex. A problem with believing this is that unlike a stone or a marble a human (or an animal) has a brain and the body is composed of living cells (excluding dead skin cells, hair, and nails which are dead cells). The f...
The mind-body problem can be a difficult issue to discuss due to the many opinions and issues that linger. The main issue behind the mind-body problem is the question regarding if us humans are only made up of matter, or a combination of both matter and mind. If we consist of both, how can we justify the interaction between the two? A significant philosophical issue that has been depicted by many, there are many prominent stances on the mind-body problem. I believe property dualism is a strong philosophical position on the mind-body issue, which can be defended through the knowledge argument against physicalism, also refuted through the problems of interaction.
Our mind and our body are undoubtedly separate from each other. A mind can survive without a body, and, likewise, a body is just house for the mind. In The Meditations, Descartes describes this concept in his dualist theory in the second of multiple Meditations. We can reach this conclusion by first understanding that the mind can survive any destruction of the body, and then realizing that you are identical to your mind and not your body. In other words, you are your thoughts and experiences – not your physical body. Finally, you cannot doubt your own existence, because the act of doubting is, itself, and act of thinking, and to think is to exist as a “thinking thing,” or Res Cogitans.
In accordance to the argument from analogy, although an individual may experience the same sensations or feelings as I do, this does not mean that we share the same conscious experiences. For example, let’s consider the conscious experiences between a blind man and a man with normal eyesight who partake in the same routines and/or activities throughout their day. In this scenario, both men cannot claim that they know what it is like to be the other person based on their different experiences with their sense of vision. In other words, the man who has normal eyesight is usually able to understand what he is reading, eating, or doing at a certain time throughout his day. However, for the blind man, he does not have the ability to rely on his sense of vision in order to understand what activities he partakes in. Therefore, although both men have the ability to understand how each other’s senses work and/or feel, their experiences with vision, taste, smell, touch, and hearing can only be shared with themselves and no one else. For this reason, Nagel would say that both men could not know what it is like to be the other person because of the lack of prior knowledge, memories, or
of each other. Regardless, there are still Christian counselors or therapists that use (or in a
Physicalism, or the idea that everything, including the mind, is physical is one of the major groups of theories about how the nature of the mind, alongside dualism and monism. This viewpoint strongly influences many ways in which we interact with our surrounding world, but it is not universally supported. Many objections have been raised to various aspects of the physicalist viewpoint with regards to the mind, due to apparent gaps in its explanatory power. One of these objections is Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument. This argument claims to show that even if one has all of the physical information about a situation, they can still lack knowledge about what it’s like to be in that situation. This is a problem for physicalism because physicalism claims that if a person knows everything physical about a situation they should know everything about a situation. There are, however, responses to the Knowledge Argument that patch up physicalism to where the Knowledge Argument no longer holds.
Thomas Nagel begins his collection of essays with a most intriguing discussion about death. Death being one of the most obviously important subjects of contemplation, Nagel takes an interesting approach as he tries to define the truth as to whether death is, or is not, a harm for that individual. Nagel does a brilliant job in attacking this issue from all sides and viewpoints, and it only makes sense that he does it this way in order to make his own observations more credible.
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...
The 'mind-body' problem has troubled philosophers for centuries. This is because no human being has been able to sufficiently explain how the mind actually works and how this mind relates to the body - most importantly to the brain. If this were not true then there would not be such heated debates on the subject. No one objects to the notion that the Earth revolves around the sun because it is empirical fact. However, there is no current explanation on the mind that can be accepted as fact. In 'What is it like to be a bat?', Thomas Nagel does not attempt to solve this 'problem'. Instead, he attempts to reject the reductionist views with his argument on subjectivity. He examines the difficulties of the mind-body problem by investigating the conscious experience of an organism, which is usually ignored by the reductionists. Unfortunately, his arguments contain some flaws but they do shed some light as to why the physicalist view may never be able to solve the mind-body problem.
body and whether or not he is successful. While I agree with his theory that the mind and body are distinct, I do not believe the mind is non-extended and I do not agree with Descartes’ assertion that the mind is capable of existence beyond the body.
While the great philosophical distinction between mind and body in western thought can be traced to the Greeks, it is to the influential work of René Descartes, French mathematician, philosopher, and physiologist, that we owe the first systematic account of the mind/body relationship. As the 19th century progressed, the problem of the relationship of mind to brain became ever more pressing.
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...
Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949) is a critique of the notion that the mind is distinct from the body, and is a rejection of the philosophical theory that mental states are distinct from physical states. Ryle argues that the traditional approach to the relation of mind and body (i.e., the approach which is taken by the philosophy of Descartes) assumes that there is a basic distinction between Mind and Matter. According to Ryle, this assumption is a basic 'category-mistake,' because it attempts to analyze the relation betwen 'mind' and 'body' as if they were terms of the same logical category. Furthermore, Ryle argues that traditional Idealism makes a basic 'category-mistake' by trying to reduce physical reality to the same status as mental reality, and that Materialism makes a basic 'category-mistake' by trying to reduce mental reality to the same status as physical reality.