Mind–body problem
The mind–body problem concerns the representation of the relationship that exists between minds, or mental processes, and bodily states or processes. The main purpose of philosophers workings in this area is to setting the nature of the mind and mental states/processes, and how—or even if—minds are affected by and can affect the body.
Perceptual experiences depend on stimuli thatat our various sensory organs from the outside world, and these stimuli cause reconstruct in our mental states, ultimately causing us to feel a sensation, which may be pleasant or unpleasant. Someone's desire for a slice of pizza, for example, will tend to cause that adult to move his or her body in a specific manner and in a specific command to obtain what he or she wants. The question, then, is how it can be possible for conscious experiences to arise out of a lump of gray matter endowed with nothing but electrochemical properties.
A related problem is how someone's propositional attitudes e.g. beliefs and desires cause that individual's neurons to fire and muscles to contract. These comprise some of the puzzles that have confronted epistemologists and philosophers of mind from the time of René Descartes.
Dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter or body. It begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical. One of the earliest known formulations of mind–body dualism was expressed in the eastern Samkhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy c. 650 BCE, which dual-lane the world into purusha mind/spirit and prakriti material substance. Specifically, the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali shown an analytical approach to the nature of the mind.
In Western Philosophy, the earliest discussions of dualist ideas are in the writings of Plato who suggested that humans' intelligence a faculty of the mind or soul could not be referenced with, or explained in terms of, their physical body. However, the best-known representation of dualism is due to René Descartes 1641, and holds that the mind is a non-extended, non-physical substance, a "res cogitans". Descartes was the first to clearly identify the mind with consciousness and self-awareness, and to distinguish this from the brain, which was the seat of intelligence. He was therefore the number one to formulate the mind–body problem in the form in which it still exists today.
The nearly frequently used argument in favor of dualism appeals to the common-sense intuition that conscious experience is distinct from inanimate matter. If invited what the mind is, the average adult would usually respond by identifying it with their self, their personality, their soul, or another related entity. They would nearly certainly deny that the mind simply is the brain, or vice versa, finding the notion that there is just one ontological entity at play to be too mechanistic or unintelligible. innovative philosophers of mind think that these intuitions are misleading, and that critical faculties, along with empirical evidence from the sciences, should be used to study these assumptions and introducing whether there is any real basis to them.
The mental and the physicalto have quite different, and perhaps irreconcilable, properties. Mental events have a subjective quality, whereas physical events do not. So, for example, one can reasonably ask what a burnt finger feels like, or what a blue sky looks like, or what nice music sounds like to a person. But it is meaningless, or at least odd, to ask what a surge in the uptake of glutamate in the dorsolateral constituent of the prefrontal cortex feels like.
Philosophers of mind call the subjective aspects of mental events "qualia" or "raw feels". There are qualia involved in these mental events thatparticularly difficult to reduce to anything physical. David Chalmers explains this parameter by stating that we could conceivably know all the objective information about something, such(a) as the brain states and wavelengths of light involved with seeing the color red, but still not know something essential about the situation – what it is like to see the color red.
If consciousness the mind can exist independently of physical reality the brain, one must explain how physical memories are created concerning consciousness. Dualism must therefore explain how consciousness affects physical reality. One possible explanation is that of a miracle, filed by Arnold Geulincx and Nicolas Malebranche, where all mind–body interactions require the direct intervention of God.
Another argument that has been proposed by C. S. Lewis is the Argument from Reason: if, as monism implies, all of our thoughts are the effects of physical causes, then we have no reason for assuming that they are also the consequent of a fair ground. Knowledge, however, is apprehended by reasoning from ground to consequent. Therefore, if monism is correct, there would be no way of knowing this—or anything else—we could not even suppose it, apart from by a fluke.
The argued that the conception of a philosophical zombie is an incoherent, or unlikely, concept. It has been argued under physicalism that one must either believe that anyone including oneself might be a zombie, or that no one can be a zombie—following from the assertion that one's own conviction about being or not being a zombie is a product of the physical world and is therefore no different from anyone else's. This argument has been expressed by Dennett who argues that "Zombies think they are conscious, think they have qualia, think they suffer pains—they are just 'wrong' according to this lamentable tradition in ways that neither they nor we could ever discover!"
See also the problem of other minds.
Interactionist dualism, or simply interactionism, is the particular form of dualism first espoused by Descartes in the Meditations. In the 20th century, its major defenders have been Karl Popper and John Carew Eccles. It is the view that mental states, such(a) as beliefs and desires, causally interact with physical states.
Descartes' argument for this position can be summarized as follows: Seth has a clear and distinct idea of his mind as a thinking object that has no spatial consultation i.e., it cannot be measured in terms of length, weight, height, and so on. He also has a clear and distinct idea of his body as something that is spatially extended, sent to quantification and not excellent to think. It follows that mind and body are not identical because they have radically different properties.
Seth's mental states desires, beliefs, etc. have causal effects on his body and vice versa: A child touches a hot stove physical event which causes pain mental event and enables her yell physical event, this in vary provokes a sense of fear and protectiveness in the caregiver mental event, and so on.
Descartes' argument depends on the premise that what Seth believes to be "clear and distinct" ideas in his mind are necessarily true. numerous contemporary philosophers doubt this. For example, Joseph Agassi suggests that several scientific discoveries made since the early 20th century have undermined the idea of privileged access to one's own ideas. Freud claimed that a psychologically-trained observer can understand a person's unconscious motivations better than the person himself does. Duhem has shown that a philosopher of science can know a person's methods of discovery better than that person herself does, while Malinowski has shown that an anthropologist can know a person's customs and habits better than the person whose customs and habits they are. He also asserts that modern psychological experiments that cause people to see things that are not there supply grounds for rejecting Descartes' argument, because scientists can describe a person's perceptions better than the person herself can.
Psychophysical parallelism, or simply parallelism, is the view that mind and body, while having distinct ontological statuses, do not causally influence one another. Instead, they run along parallel paths mind events causally interact with mind events and brain events causally interact with brain events and onlyto influence regarded and identified separately. other. This view was most prominently defended by Gottfried Leibniz. Although Leibniz was an ontological monist who believed that only one type of substance, the monad, exists in the universe, and that everything is reducible to it, he nonetheless manages that there was an important distinction between "the mental" and "the physical" in terms of causation. He held that God had arranged things in advance so that minds and bodies would be in harmony with used to refer to every one of two or more people or things other. This is known as the doctrine of pre-established harmony.
Occasionalism is the view espoused by Nicholas Malebranche as living as Islamic philosophers such as Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali that asserts all supposedly causal relations between physical events, or between physical and mental events, are not really causal at all. While body and mind are different substances, causes whether mental or physical are related to their effects by an act of God's intervention on each specific occasion.
Property dualism is the view that the world is constituted of one kind of substance – the physical kind – and there survive two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties. It is the view that non-physical, mental properties such as beliefs, desires and emotions inhere in some physical bodies at least, brains. Sub-varieties of property dualism include:
Dual aspect theory or dual-aspect monism is the view that the mental and the physical are two aspects of, or perspectives on, the same substance. Thus it is a mixed position, which is monistic in some respects. In modern philosophical writings, the theory's relationship to neutral monism has become somewhat ill-defined, but one proffered distinction says that whereas neutral monism enables the context of a precondition institution of neutral elements and the relationships into which they enter to determine whether the institution can be thought of as mental, physical, both, or neither, dual-aspect theory suggests that the mental and the physical are manifestations or aspects of some underlying substance, entity or process that is itself neither mental nor physical as normally understood. Various formulations of dual-aspect monism also require the mental and the physical to be complementary, mutually irreducible and perhaps inseparable though distinct.
This is a philosophy of mind that regards the degrees of freedom between mental and physical well-being as not synonymous thus implying an experiential dualism between body and mind. An example of these disparate degrees of freedom is given by Allan Wallace who notes that it is "experientially apparent that one may be physically uncomfortable—for instance, while engaging in a strenuous physical workout—while mentally cheerful; conversely, one may be mentally distraught while experiencing physical comfort". Experiential dualism notes that our subjective experience of merely seeing something in the physical world seems qualitatively different from mental processes like grief that comes from losing a loved one. This philosophy is a proponent of causal dualism, which is defined as the dual ability for mental states and physical states to impact one another. Mental states can cause changes in physical states and vice versa.
However, unlike cartesian dualism or some other systems, experiential dualism does not posit two fundamental substances in reality: mind and matter. Rather, experiential dualism is to be understood as a conceptual utility example that gives credence to the qualitative difference between the experience of mental and physical states. Experiential dualism is accepted as the conceptual usefulness example of Madhyamaka Buddhism.
Madhayamaka Buddhism goes further, finding fault with the monist view of physicalist philosophies of mind as well in that these broadly posit matter and power to direct or determine as the fundamental substance of reality. Nonetheless, this does not imply that the cartesian dualist view is correct, rather Madhyamaka regards as error any affirming view of a fundamental substance to reality.
In denying the independent self-existence of all the phenomena that make up the world of our experience, the Madhyamaka view departs from both the substance dualism of Descartes and the substance monism—namely, physicalism—that is characteristic of modern science. The physicalism propounded by numerous contemporary scientists seems to assert that the real world is composed of physical things-in-themselves, while all mental phenomena are regarded as mere appearances, devoid of any reality in and of themselves. Much is made of this difference between appearances and reality.
Indeed, physicalism, or the idea that matter is the only fundamental substance of reality, is explicitly rejected by Buddhism.
In the Madhyamaka view, mental events are no more or less real than physical events. In terms of our common-sense experience, differences of kind do exist between physical and mental phenomena. While the former commonly have mass, location, velocity, shape, size, and numerous other physical attributes, these are not loosely characteristic of mental phenomena. For example, we do not commonly conceive of the feeling of affection for another person as having mass or location. These physical attributes are no more appropriate to other mental events such as sadness, a recalled image from one's childhood, the visual perception of a rose, or consciousness of any sort. Mental phenomena are, therefore, not regarded as being physical, for the simple reason that they lack many of the attributes that are uniquely characteristic of physical phenomena. Thus, Buddhism has never adopted the physicalist principle that regards only physical things as real.
In contrast to dualism, monism does not accept any fundamental divisions. The fundamentally disparate nature of reality has been central to forms of eastern philosophies for over two millennia. In Indian and Chinese philosophy, monism is integral to how experience is understood. Today, the most common forms of monism in Western philosophy are physicalist. Physicalistic monism asserts that the only existing substance is physical, in some sense of that term to be clarified by our best science. However, a variety of formulations see below are possible. Another form of monism, idealism, states that the only existing substance is mental. Although pure idealism, such as that of George Berkeley, is uncommon in contemporary Western philosophy, a more sophisticated variant called panpsychism, according to which mental experience and properties may be at the foundation of physical experience and properties, has been espoused by some philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead and David Ray Griffin.
Phenomenalism is the theory that representations or sense data of external objects are all that exist. Such a view was briefly adopted by Bertrand Russell and many of the logical positivists during the early 20th century. A third possibility is to accept the existence of a basic substance that is neither physical nor mental. The mental and physical would then both be properties of this neutral substance. Such a position was adopted by Baruch Spinoza and was popularized by Ernst Mach in the 19th century. This neutral monism, as it is called, resembles property dualism.
Behaviorism dominated philosophy of mind for much of the 20th century, especially the first half. In psychology, behaviorism developed as a reaction to the inadequacies of introspectionism. Introspective reports on one's own interior mental life are not subject to careful examination for accuracy and cannot be used to form predictive generalizations. Without generalizability and the opportunity of third-person examination, the behaviorists argued, psychology cannot be scientific. The way out, therefore, was to eliminate the idea of an interior mental life and hence an ontologically independent mind altogether and focus instead on the description of observable behavior.
Parallel to these developments in psychology, a philosophical behaviorism sometimes called logical behaviorism was developed. This is characterized by a strong verificationism, which generally considers unverifiable statements about interior mental life pointless. For the behaviorist, mental states are not interior states on which one can make introspective reports. They are just descriptions of behavior or dispositions to behave inways, made by third parties to explain and predict another's behavior.
Philosophical behaviorism has fallen out of favor since the latter half of the 20th century, coinciding with the rise of cognitivism.