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Occasionalism is a variation upon Cartesian metaphysics. The latter is the most notorious case of dualism (mind and body, for instance). The mind is a “mental substance”. The body – a “material substance”. What permits the complex interactions which happen between these two disparate “substances”? The “unextended mind” and the “extended body” surely cannot interact without a mediating agency, God. The appearance is that of direct interaction but this is an illusion maintained by Him. He moves the body when the mind is willing and places ideas in the mind when the body comes across other bodies. Descartes postulated that the mind is an active, unextended, thought while the body is a passive, unthinking extension. The First Substance and the Second Substance combine to form the Third Substance, Man. God – the Fourth, uncreated Substance – facilitates the direct interaction among the two within the third. Foucher raised the question: how can God – a mental substance – interact with a material substance, the body. The answer offered was that God created the body (probably so that He will be able to interact with it). Leibnitz carried this further: his Monads, the units of reality, do not really react and interact. They just seem to be doing so because God created them with a pre-established harmony. The constant divine mediation was, thus, reduced to a one-time act of creation. This was considered to be both a logical result of occasionalism and its refutation by a reductio ad absurdum argument.
But, was the fourth substance necessary at all? Could not an explanation to all the known facts be provided without it? The ratio between the number of known facts (the outcomes of observations) and the number of theory elements and entities employed in order to explain them – is the parsimony ratio. Every newly discovered fact either reinforces the existing worldview – or forces the introduction of a new one, through a “crisis” or a “revolution” (a “paradigm shift” in Kuhn’s abandoned phrase). The new worldview need not necessarily be more parsimonious. It could be that a single new fact precipitates the introduction of a dozen new theoretical entities, axioms and functions (curves between data points). The very delineation of the field of study serves to limit the number of facts, which could exercise such an influence upon the existing worldview and still be considered pertinent.
...ples ideas based on the operations of our own mind. For example, the idea of a unicorn is also a complex idea, along with God, while many of us have seen a picture of a unicorn someone had to invent the original idea of what a unicorn is without seeing a picture. The operations of our own mind have created this idea of God, which rebuts Descartes’ argument that we have knowledge on the external world because of God. Descartes would argue that Humes’ idea of God is natural and never derived from impressions. Hume’ consequently has the better argument claiming that idea of god is actually based on ideas of perfection and infinity is inferred from the ideas of imperfection and finitude.
Descartes, Rene, and Donald Cress. Mediations on First Philosophy In Which The Existence of God And the Distinction of the Soul from the Body Are Demonstrated. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993. Print.
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
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.
In the Third Meditation, Descartes forms a proof for the existence of God. He begins by laying down a foundation for what he claims to know and then offers an explanation for why he previously accepted various ideas but is no longer certain of them. Before he arrives at the concept of God, Descartes categorizes ideas and the possible sources that they originate from. He then distinguishes between the varying degrees of reality that an idea can possess, as well as the cause of an idea. Descartes proceeds to investigate the idea of an infinite being, or God, and how he came to acquire such an idea with more objective reality than he himself has. By ruling out the possibility of this idea being invented or adventitious, Descartes concludes that the idea must be innate. Therefore, God necessarily exists and is responsible for his perception of a thing beyond a finite being.
The mind which is a non-extended thing, thinking is very different from the body which is a non-thinking thing, an extended and therefore Descartes argues that it is possible for the body to function without the mind and the mind to function without the body (Sorabji, 72). In Descartes theory of mind-body dualism, there exist several theories. Descartes describes the real distinction as the distinction between two things or substances. A substance is something that does not require any other creature to exist since it can occur with God’s concurrence only. Mode, on the other hand, is the affection towards a particular substance. Descartes argues that there are two payoffs for arguing that the mind and body can exist without each other. This includes the religious motivation and provides hope for the immortality of the soul and the second one is the scientific motivation that paves way for the new version of Descartes mechanistic
I wasn?t nervous to drive because my dad let me drive sometimes to my grandpa?s house If I took the back roads, so I had a little experience. When I took behind the wheel it was a little different than driving on the back roads, but I did ok. When I finished behind the wheel I signed up for a driving test. This was the part I had been waiting for, I wanted to pass so I could drive alone. The day of the test was very stressful, I had to use my grandma?s car because mine had tinted windows. I had never driven my grandma?s car, and I could not do corner backing with it.
Objects nearer to sense are prior and better known to man and the most universal causes are furthest from sense.
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...
"Honey," my mom yelled to me one sunny afternoon, "Go out and feed Sugar." Sugar was our dog, a big, husky lap dog. I went to our kitchen, and got some food. Then I stepped outside, into the warm, fresh August air, looking for Sugar. I glanced to where I kept Sugar, and couldn't believe my eyes. Sugar was not there. I ran to the place where Sugar slept, I saw that the leash was elegantly coiled up. I knew that Sugar could not have run away. I thought that she must have chased a deer or another animal. Then a disturbing thought hit me, Sugar might have been abducted. As I tried to push that thought out of my mind, I thought that my mom could have put Sugar out in the garage. I went to the garage to check, but unfortunately Sugar wasn?t there. ?Mom,? I cried after a couple of seconds, ?Do you know where Sugar is??
As a kid, I fell in love with the idea of getting a puppy for Christmas. Wrapped in a small box with a bow on top sitting under the tree just like the movies and tv shows I had seen. I can remember making a Christmas list of all the things I wanted that year, and every year the same thing that I wanted had said “puppy” with it underlined so that my mother knew which was my favorite on the list. Every year no surprise, I didn’t find a dog. I never understood why I never received one. When the kids at school talked about the few dogs they had at home made me so jealous, but I hoped that one day it would be me to have my own best friend at home.
When I was six years old the doctor gave me my first pair of glasses. They were round, thick, and made my face look like a pumpkin. My vision has been worsening ever since. My last doctor’s appointment, I was told that I have a chance of my retina completely detaching...after he did the examination for my potential premature glaucoma. Blindness in my left eye seems almost inevitable. However, I am not afraid. My family started raising guide dogs when I was ten. Something that was always talked about in the GDB community was bond. Many raisers discussed the theory that the dogs only bond with whoever has the food bowl, while others thought that the dogs have a special ability to deeply bond with their blind person. Guide dogs for the blind and
The Deductive-Nomological (D-N) Model gives an account of explanation through its basic form, the Covering Law Model. The D-N Model asks the basic question “What is a scientific explanation?” The aim of this paper is to answer that question and further develop the definition of an explanation by problematizing the D-N Model’s account of explanation, providing a solution to one of those problems, and then further problematizing that solution. By examining the details of an example that the D-N Model explains well, we can see why this model was popular in the first place before describing two of its major problems. Then, by looking at Wesley Salmon’s account of scientific explanation, we can see just how problematic the flaws in the D-N Model
Moritz Schlick believed the all important attempts at establishing a theory of knowledge grow out of the doubt of the certainty of human knowledge. This problem originates in the wish for absolute certainty. A very important idea is the concept of "protocol statements", which are "...statements which express the facts with absolute simplicity, without any moulding, alteration, or addition, in whose elaboration every science consists, and which precede all knowing, every judgment regarding the world." (1) It makes no sense to speak of uncertain facts, only assertions and our knowledge can be uncertain. If we succeed therefore in expressing the raw facts in protocol statements without any contamination, these appear to be the absolutely indubitable starting points of all knowledge. They are again abandoned, but they constitute a firm basis "...to which all our cognitions owe whatever validity they may possess." (2) Math is stated indirectly into protocol statements which are resolved into definite protocol statements which one could formulate exactly, in principle, but with tremendous effort. Knowledge in life and science in some sense begins with confirmation of facts, and the protocol statements stand at the beginning of science. In the event that protocol statements would be distinguished by definite logical properties, structure, position in the system of science, and one would be confronted with the task of actually specifying these properties. We fin...
Ever since I can remember I’ve wanted a dog. Never did I think that dogs would end up being by biggest fear. I was just a little kid around 6 years old when it happened. I was walking home from my friend’s house when I saw a stray dog, it was in the middle of the street blocking my way, I decided to walk past it, while I was walking it started growling at me, I hesitated but still kept trying to walk then suddenly it got up and started barking empathically towards me. I was terrified, my first initial reaction being a 6 year old kid was to scare it away, I was ignorant. I picked up a rock and threw it at the dog thinking it’ll get scared and run away. I was wrong. The dog had enough it made a whimpering noise then started barking even louder