Mental And Mental Beliefs Of Gilbert Ryle, René Descartes And Thomas Nagel

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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

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