preview

Three Theories Of Mind In The Film Shaun Of The Dead

Decent Essays

Shaun of the Dead is a zombie movie with a main character Shaun where everything goes wrong in his life. The idea of the film is simple it showing us that most of us lead a zombie life with monotonous and mind-numbing work. Apparently, Shaun’s best friend Ed is beaten by zombie and he is turned into zombie. At the end of the movie we see that Shaun and Ed are playing video games in Shaun’s backyard. That raise a question does Ed has a mind or not. In this paper I’m going to discuss three theories of mind: Substance Dualism, Logical Behaviourism and Identity theory to find out how these theories will evaluate Ed’s mind.

The first theory I’m going to talk about is substance dualism. This theory implies the existence of two substances: material and immaterial. Within the framework of the dualism the mind and …show more content…

The identity theory says that the states and processes of mind are identical to states and processes in the brain. According to ontological claim is that mental states are identical to brain states and causal claim is that mental states cause bodily behaviour.(reference). Take the experience of pain, vision of something or having a mental image. According to the theory of identity, these experiences have to be just processes in the brain. Some philosophers believe that, although the experience is the process in the brain, they are nevertheless endowed with an essentially non-physical, mental properties, sometimes referred to as qualia. Qualia is the experience of a certain action: whether it is the feeling of pain, sound, hearing, sight of colour. To know what it's like to have such experience is to know qualia. So, from argument of zombie if identity theory is true then having a quail is identical to have certain neural activity, therefore, zombie have lack of qualia while they have certain neural activity, so identity theory is false. This will lead to that identity theory denies that Ed has a

Get Access