Cartesian dualism

(a) To a Dualist, they believe that the mind and the body are two separate things that run parallel to each other and that is how they interact with each other. A Dualist would say that a belief is a direction that we act upon and a desire is a goal that drives us to do what we want to do in our lives. The notion that a belief is a direction can be explained in the part of the example that Bob believes that there is pizza in the fridge because he knew the direction of where he was headed to, to go

The topic I chose for this paper is the article What Mary Didn’t Know written by Frank Jackson. Essentially, What Mary Didn’t Know focuses on a woman, Mary, who is confined to a room where nothing contains any colour, everything is in black and white. She is educated this same way, strictly through means black and white tools. She is taught every possible thing there is to know about the physical nature of our world. Jackson concludes that physicalism must be false, for when she is let out of that

movements and functionality of our physical bodies. There has always been debate as to whether our brains are what control us, or if there is something more, like a soul, for example. The two main sides that people take are either physicalism or dualism. The physicalist view says that a person is made up solely of a physical body and that there is no soul present. Instead, our thoughts, feelings, and personalities are simply a function of our brains. The dualist, on the other hand, would argue that

and matter are distinct substances Descartes’ Argument For Dualism In his Meditations Rene Descartes aimed to reconstruct the whole of science by trying to prove the distinction between mind and matter. He gives an argument from doubt, and another from conceivability. I will give a brief summary of the foundations Descartes builds his thesis on, and then looking at his arguments and whether they are capable of persuading us that dualism is a logical stance to hold. To what extent if any is

According to Liebniz, "perception and consciousness cannot possibly be explained mechanically, and, hence, could not be physical processes," (Kulstad, 2007). Liebniz's philosophy of mind point of view contrasts directly with that of modern science, which can easily reduce the phenomena of mind to the brain. We might think that the mind is not identical to the brain if we ascribe to a metaphysical perspective like that of Liebniz. There are human experiences that cannot be reduced to materialism alone

Using this analysis, Churchland argues an argument which is parallel would also denounce dualism, because of the fact Mary would not hold sufficient “knowledge by acquaintance” even if she had extensive propositional knowledge concerning the nonphysical. Jackson responded to Churchland’s refutes in 1986 saying that one may actually know all of

various meanings, in this paper I will be referring to “physical” as relating to the subject of physics or relating to the body as opposed to the mind. An opposing view to physicalism is dualism which is the belief that there exists both physical and nonphysical things. In this paper, I will not be defending dualism or trying to argue for its truth, but instead, I will argue why physicalism must be false and highlight the many flaws that physicalism fails to address. The

Davidson’s Mental Events, challenges how we discuss mind-body interactions. The thesis presented by Davidson, is that of Anomalous Monism, which attempts to answer the causality of mental and physical events. Differing from forms of the more common Dualism, Davidson accepts monism as the best way to describe the mind-body relationship. Meaning he accepts token identity and rejects type-identity. Davidson’s argument consists of three key principles. The first being the Principle of Causal Interaction

Nagel argues that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat by first allowing us to try to imagine what it is like to be a bat. We must attempt to imagine what it is like to be a bat, we imagine that we have wings, that we have no vision, that we use sonar sensors etc. But these are all things we know as humans that bats have. This is the objective experience of the bat, we can imagine as a human what it is like to be a bat but we cannot imagine as a bat what it is like to be a bat, simply because

“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” is American philosopher, Thomas Nagel’s, opinion on the widely debated mind-body problem. Nagel introduces the paper by explaining what it means for something to be conscious. He defines consciousness as an organism’s ability for there to be something it is like to be that organism. Using his definition of consciousness Nagel suggests that physicalism cannot be successfully defended using the popular reductionism theory. This is because in order to be defended a physical