A Study on Leibniz's Philosophy of Mind

In his writings, “A Contemporary Defense of Dualism,” J.P. Moreland argues the point that the mind and brain are separate from each other. It seems as a quick thought that both are the same. However, the mind deals with ideas, thoughts and hopes. The brain is made up of the neural process. Throughout the entire argument, Moreland tries to prove the theory of physicalism, which is the idea that only things that exist are composed of matter. His explanation is that the soul doesn’t exist and the brain controls everything.

However if these experiences are intangible, then they can 't be exactly the same as the functioning of the brain, which is a tangible substance. The Two Marys analogy demonstrates this dispute of reductive materialism, as once the Mary has learned something by an experience or 'qualia ', then that experience can 't be a physical event in the brain.

As the tool of scientific investigation increase, the relationship between the mind and the brain has never been more intimate. Chemical changes in our brain could lead to heightened euphoria or it can lead to the most profound depression. Damages to the brain can lead to changes that can eliminate the some abilities of the brain, such as smell, vision, or even the ability to recognized faces. Therefore, this is at that vary lease a powerful correlation between the state of the mind and state of the brain. But this is not enough for the Identity theories, so they go above and beyond this to explain this profound view.

I read the article, “Secrets of the Brain”, found in the February 2014 issue of National Geographic written by Carl Zimmer. I chose this subject because I have been fascinated with the brain and how it works. The research of the brain has been ongoing for many centuries now. The history in this article is interesting. It explained how scientists used to understand the brain and its inner workings. For example, “in the ancient world physicians believed that the brain was made of phlegm. Aristotle looked on it as a refrigerator, cooling of the fiery heart. From his time through the Renaissance, anatomists declared with great authority that our perceptions, emotions, reasoning, and actions were all the result of “animal spirits”—mysterious, unknowable vapors that swirled through cavities in our head and traveled through our bodies.” (Zimmer, p. 38)

Sure the brain has the actual chemical processes and functions, but the mind holds the reasoning behinds actions, and the complex feelings a person has. It is basically what makes a person who he is, and controls his actions as a person. The brain only tells the body to carry out these actions.

Nothing in the world is more mysterious than the human mind but without the brain how do you have a mind? The brain sends and receives information by electrical impulses around the human body allowing us to see, move, feel, hear and think. If the brain is removed from the human body these impulses will cease, thus there will be no mind. Philosophers like Place, Smart, and Armstrong support this claim through the notion of identify theory and type physicalism. Brain and mind identity is a very controversial topic with some philosophers arguing that because people can have knowledge of a specific mental state without being affected in the physical state, mind and the brain may well be different. However with significant breakthroughs in neuroscience in the last century, such as Dr. Penfield’s Montreal procedure it is safe to say that the brain has direct control over the mind thus the two being in/distinguishable.

In denying that the mind and mental properties, like qualia, are nonphysical things, mind-brain theory objects to both substance and property dualism. Therefore it is a physicalist approach to the philosophy of

The mind body problem can be understood in the following way, there is something it is like to ‘be’ and this ‘being’ is by its nature subjective and an organism has conscious metal states only if there is something it is like to ‘be’ that organism. This indeed seems to be incredibly perplexing to explain in terms of science because science the way it is practiced currently only explains phenomena objectively, either it tries to reduce and explain the subjective in terms of objective processes or only makes co-relation of the subjective processes to the objective processes but if it only makes co-relation then it is not able to explain the subjective itself. For example take the color red, no account of any physical theory of light wave, how

And this assumption raises issues if the person is not a believer of soul immortality. There is also overwhelming evidence from medical data which shows the connection between the brain and the mind. For example, when you touch colder water in in winter signals are sent to the from the brain to the mind and the mind sends back instructions to the brain to remove the hand. The removal of brain parts results in reduced mental cognition. From scientific evidence things like plants which do not have brains have no souls and there is nothing with a soul but without a brain.

Descartes' Views on the Topic of Philosophy of Mind Descartes has indeeed made some notable contributions towards the philosophy of mind. It is the aim of this essay to discuss these contributions. Descartes is well known for being an avid dualist. This is the view that the mind and body are understood to be seperate and distinct from each other, but in some way causally connected.

Leibniz’s argument, however, is far from perfect. For example, take a sound. There is no physical way to see a sound, but sound waves cause noise to move across an area or medium; however, we perceive what the sound is by physically hearing it and having our eardrum interpret it. Without the eardrum, there would be no way for the mind to be able to tell if there is a noise at all, as we wouldn’t be able to comprehend it. Also, without the eardrum, there would be no signals sent to the brain to perceive things one way or another. The same occurs in thought, which is one of the reasons as to why things are physical. There are scientific signs on the brain that prove thought as a physical entity; for example, scientists say that different thoughts

exists except from matter so therefore the mind and the body (brain) work together and

Opposed to Mind-Body Materialism is Mind-Body Dualism, a view which supports that mind and body are not identical, but, in some sense, radically different kinds of thing. It denies that the mind is the same of the brain, or a product of the brain, by arguing that the thoughts and the material things are composed of different substances, and the mind is a thinking thing that lacks the usual attributes of physical objects: size, shape, location, solidity, motion, etc. According to the Dualism, the soul is comprised of a non-physical substance, while the body is constituted of matter. This view also establishes that mind and body are capable of causally affecting each other, even if they are necessarily not the same thing. When applying this notion the human body, the meaning becomes clearest: the intellect is responsible for all our acts, but it does not imply that the intellect is the brain. For example, before eating a meal, which is a physical action, you probably felt hungry,

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz has the view that the mind of a substance, including humans, is not a composite entity. To Leibniz, the mind is similar to a mill, in the sense that it is like a machine where all of the parts of it work together. When, in reality, the mind is something that is complex, and needs both an intellectual and a technical side to it for it to function –quite unlike the machine Leibniz claims it is. His argument, known as “The Mill Argument”, states that if a person were to walk into a mill, he or she would observe the inner workings of it, and not know what the parts are made of, or how they are related. Nothing about the parts of the mill would provide insight as to how it works. Leibniz concludes that the mind is

How to define minds has always been a challenge for the “lovers of wisdom” since the advent of modern philosophy. The mind is arduous to define because it is incorporeal and the only person knowing its existence is its owner. That is; the mind differs from those familiar physical stuffs which can easily be defined in terms of their characteristics. Facing the thorny problem, the debate between dualists and physicalists about the nature of mind and its relationship with the body is becoming intense. In this paper I will maintain that the epiphnomenalism is not “repugnant”, but rather it is squat and resilient would be the best theory to illustrate the relationship between mind and body. The paper