Oliver Sacks Essay

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.

The brain is considered the most complex organ in the body. It is responsible for controlling motor function, the body’s ability to balance and the ability to translate information sent to the brain by sensory organs. The mind is described as the faculty of consciousness and thought. It’s where our feeling and emotions originate from and defines who we are as a person. The brain is composed of the visual cortex, which is responsible for processing visual information. In blind individuals the feature that makes up visions still exists in the visual cortex. These features are now used to process information received from the other senses. However, blind individuals are able to view the images because what’s in their mind.

The mind is a complex myriad of thoughts and psychological systems that even philosophers today cannot entirely grapple. It is composed of the senses, feelings, perceptions, and a whole series of other components. However, the mind is often believed to be similar or even the same as the brain. This gives rise to the mind-brain identity theory, and whether there exists a clear distinction between the physical world and the non-material mind. In this paper, I will delineate the similarities and differences between mind and brain, describe the relevant ideas such as functionalism and materialism, and provide explanations on how these theories crystallized. Further, I will discuss the differing views of this concept from multiple philosophers’ perspectives and highlight the significance of each. Ultimately, I will defend the view that the mind-brain identity theory is false by analyzing its errors and examining the invalid assumptions it makes about consciousness.

Without the quantifiable entity that is the brain, the mind would have no medium for which to exist.

In the short story the “Neglect Senses” the author is a visitor at the school for the blind. The author who in this case is the visitor can see, so she tries to see what it's like to be blindfolded. In neglect senses she explains that, “ I agreed to let myself be blindfolded and led through the streets of Lhasa by two blind teenage girls, Choden and Yangchen.” (Mahoney 2) She believes that by being escorted around town, that she can still function like a person with vision, even though she has a blindfold on to signify blindness. This shows that even when you're legally blind, that being blind but still having vision is the same because you don't have to see something to know what it is.

Often many times we wonder what it is like to understand the mind and its functions, yet to understand it we have to have the knowledge to go forth with it. The mind is a complex figure to understand; furthermore the mind is something you must understand on your own. The philosophical meaning of the mind is, the nature of mental phenomena, and their behavior, nonetheless the brain. The mind is not something easy to make sense of, its like reading a hundred pages of Spanish writings and being able to tell the whole story to someone who doesn't speak the same language as you. Things like reality, computers, conciseness, reactions, response, etc, come into factor when figuring out the mind.

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.

The symbolism of "blindness" mentioned in Oliver Sacks essay "The Mind's Eye" helps reinforce the arguments mentioned in Beth Loffreda's essay "Losing Matt Shepard" and Susan Faludi's essay "The Naked Citadel". In Sacks' essay, blindness is portrayed as a symbol of victory. In each narrative Sacks talks about, he emphasizes how they overcame blindness, and rather than taking it as an disadvantage, they take it to their advantage, leading them to lofty heights, and symbolizing it as a sense of victory. Using blindness as a lens to look at the other two essays, we are able to infer as to why the events mentioned in those two essays took place. Loffreda's essay symbolizes Matt Shepards death, whereas Faludi's essay symbolizes the "whole man,"

In Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, he denotes a “deficit is an impairment or incapacity of neurological function; such as loss of speech, loss of language, loss of memory, loss of vision loss of dexterity, or loss of identity” (Sacks, 1985). The specific neurological disorder that is highlighted in chapter one is Visual Agnosia, which is a deficit associated with poor primary visual processing that affects shape perception, figures, object, face and letter recognition (Serino, et al., 2014). Other subtypes of visual agnosia that also seemed to fit the descriptions that Sacks shared is prosopagnosia, which is the inability to recognize human faces (Shah, 2016), and pantomime agnosia, characterized as the inability to understand gestures (Gonzalez, Mack, & Heilman, K., 1986).

Awakenings is a 1973 nonfiction book by Oliver Sacks later on in 1990 became a film directed by Penny Marshall. The movie is based on Oliver Sacks's memoir which tells the story of encephalitic lethargica survivors as they undergo treatment with Dr.Sacks. He treated his patients with the then-new drug L-DOPA which was being used to treat Parkinson’s disease. Dr.Sacks believed that the encephalitic lethargica patients had suffered from a form of Parkinson’s that was so advanced which caused them to freeze and become statue like.

The mind and body problem can be divided into many different questions. We can consider or ask by ourselves that what is the mind? What is the body? And do both of them are co-existing, or does the mind only exist in the body? Or does the body only exist

What separates the human brain from the human mind? While the workings of the brain contribute to the mind, “the mind consists of the intangible realm of thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and consciousness” (Marder). That humans can envision the future separates them from all other species. In the same way, humans are the only species that can look critically at the past and to think about abstract ideas. Thinking on a continuum of time - from backward to forward - sets humans apart and influences societies everywhere and everyday. To be human is to imagine the future as well as to evaluate the past.

The secondary form of the mind-brain conflict is the concept of dualism. Dualism is the idea that instead of one substance, there are two different substances. This concept tells individuals that there is spiritual dimension to a person’s mind. This causes the consciousness in the mind, and a possible enduring attribute. Dualism also believes that a person has a physical body and mind that work as one substance. While the non-physical aspects count as the second substance (Philosophy 1). So to put it in simplest terms dualist deny that the brain and mind are the exact same thing (Caleff 1).

The mind-body problem is an age-old topic in philosophy that questions the relationship between the mental aspect of life, such as the field of beliefs, pains, and emotions, and the physical side of life which deals with matter, atoms, and neurons. There are four concepts that each argue their respective sides. For example, Physicalism is the belief that humans only have a physical brain along with other physical structures, whereas Idealism argues that everything is mind-based. Furthermore, Materialism argues that the whole universe is purely physical. However, the strongest case that answers the commonly asked questions such as “Does the mind exist?” and “Is the mind your brain?” is Dualism.

The mind and body problem is a conundrum that argues the explanation of how mental