SDA Flashcards
(23 cards)
1
Q
What is the philosophical problem associated with SDA?
A
- Whether the mind and body are one of the SAME nature ( a monist/materialist view) or different natures (dualist view)
-What happens when a person dies
2
Q
Describe the dualistic view
A
- Dualists believe that there are two aspects to a human being - physical body and non physical soul (self/psyche)
- The non-physical aspect of the body goes on to experience ‘eternal life’ after physical life
3
Q
describe the monist/materialist view
A
- Human beings are made of one substance which is the physical body
- They believe in human beings being made up of matter - one substance
- A person’s identity is inextricably linked to their physical body so when they die their life ends
- They are likely to reject LAD as without a physical form ‘life’ cannot be supported
4
Q
Describe plato’s beliefs about the soul/body after death
A
- Plato was a dualist
- the soul is immaterial and the real self that has lived before - its real home is the world of the forms and it is trapped in a physical body
- The physical body belongs to the world of senses, the should belongs to the world of the forms
- It is pre-existent and immortal
- We come back during our next life as something better/worse depending on how we behaved in this life, until we fulfil our potential and reach heavenes
5
Q
Describe Aristotle’s beliefs about the soul/body after death
A
- Humans are made up of two things: body (matter) and soul (form)
- the soul is an integral part of the body
- You cannot have one without the other - the should animates the body, by organising a potential living body into an actual living body - aquinas took on these ideas. we live and think and that is what makes us humans
- The soul is the essence of a human being which gives us life and it is an essence which is distinct from but also inseparable from the material body
6
Q
Who was Descartes and what did he try to establish?
A
- he was a substance dualist, who believed the should is a distinctly separate substance from the body
- He argued mind and body are separate substances with distinguished properties - matter/extended substance, vs mind/metnal substance
7
Q
Describe what Descartes meant by ‘I think therefore I am’
A
- reflects his certainty about the existence of a thinking mind
- He believed that even though everything else could be doubted/questioned, the existence of the thinking self was undeniable proof of his existence as a conscious being
8
Q
Describe what Descartes said about the Pineal gland
A
- The small portion of the brain that lies between the two hemispheres
- He considered this to be the point at which the mind controlled the body
- God facilitated this interaction
- His suggestion doesn’t work because locating mind-body interaction anywhere int he brain doesn’t solve anything
- It doesn’t tell us how, it merely states - it interacts here
9
Q
Describe descartes’ belief about animal souls
A
- distinguished between animal and human souls
- he ebleievd animals were complex machines lacking rational souls and humans possessed rational should capable of consciousness, thought and self awarenessq
10
Q
Describe descartes’ beleifs about the immortality of the soul
A
- the human soul is immortal and can exist independently of the body after death
11
Q
Describe descartes’ argument from doubt about the existence of the soul
A
- He began by doubting everuthign he could possibly doubt.
- He realised he could doubt the existence of the external world, his body and god, but not his thinking self - the mind
- This led him to conclude: ‘ I thinl therefore I am’ - the very act of doubting required a thinkign mind, so the mind/soul is distinct from the body
12
Q
Describe descartes’ argument from clear and distinct ideas about the existence of the soul
A
- some ideas a re clear and distinct - so self evident that they can’t be false
- he argued that the idea of the mind as a thinking, non-material substance was clear and distinct, whilst the idea of the body was a separate, distinct idea
- since the mind and the body had different natures, Descartes reasoned that they must be distinct substances - the mind is non material and possesses the property of thought, whereas the Body is material and lacks the capacity for thought - therefore, the mind and the body are two separate substances with the mind being the essence of the soul
13
Q
Describe descartes’ argument from divisibility about the existence of the soul
A
- physical susbtances like the body could be divided into smaller parts, the soul cannot
- ## because they have different properties he contented they must be distinct substances distinct from each other
14
Q
describe Hume’s criticisms of descartes
A
- the whole idea of a substance is confused - Hume stated that Descartes’ argument that the should emerged from a conscious substance doesn’t solve anything and instead raises the question of how a substance can think - the response that a substance can think because the soul is a thinking substance was to Hume a circular argument
- Thinking cannot tell us what is actually the case: the cause of thought could actually be a material substances
- The logic of descartes only establishes that there is thinking, rather than that there is an ‘I’ who thinks
15
Q
Describe Gilbert Ryle’s criticism of descartes
A
- ridiculed it, calling it the ‘ghost in the machine’
- argued it was false not in detail, but also in principle
- argue it is a CATEGORY MISTAKE, representing the facts of mental life as if they belonged to a category of one thing when in reality they belong to another
- to explain this idea of a category mistake, he used the unvoeristy analogy
- someone visits a university and sees many different colleges/labs ect, then asks but where is the university - the answer is that there is no university over its component parts, as the term university is a category, not the same category as the individual components
- in the same way, Ryle argued that you should not expect to find a mind over and above ll the various parts of the body and its component parts
16
Q
Describe physicalism
A
- The philosophical idea that everything can be explained in terms of matter and so the soul is not needed to describe the nature of a person
- For a physicalist, there is no body soul relationship because there is no soul
- It is a reductive philosophy - the mind can be reduced to the brain, which is physical and empirically verifiable
- it gives an explanation for common phenomena: eg, as people reach old age they develop dementia because the brain is subject to physical decay
- ## Therefore experience is related to forward physical causes and science can provide all answers to significant questions about life
17
Q
Describe functionalism (a physicalist theory)
A
- developed out of cognitive science
- th function of the mind is what it does - it processes data inputted through the senses and generates an appropriate outcome in a human being - the platform on which it does this is the human brain - eg goosebumps are a physical reaction as a result of an action our body produces to the sensory input it recieves
- functionalism disregards the concept of a ‘mental substance’, believing that mental states are merely sensory inputs and behaviour outputs - the mind should be seen as a powerful computer
18
Q
Describe how physicalist theories criticise Descartes mind-body dualism
A
- if mental substance is different to physical substance there is no way in which they can interact
- Physicalist theories make an obvious but valid point that if there are no physical bodies there are no minds as minds are fundamentally linked to matter
- There is no affect that mind-altering drink and drugs affect the way that the mind thinks
19
Q
Give the strengths of dualism
A
- Matter doesn’t exclusively control our minds, but our minds control our bodies - therefore its still considered by many to be true today
- Still the most popular religious approach to the mind
- Compatible with conventional religious thought - eg christians believe we have souls that survive the death
- evidence fo dualism in near death experiences - understood b y those who have them, and by some who investigate them scientifically, to be evidence of a soul surviving the existence of death
20
Q
Describe the Qualia argument
A
- to refer to qualia is to ask ‘what is it like’ , which is a subjective and personal question
- Eg Wittgenstein said that ‘when describing the smell of a cup of coffee’, nobody could experience that smell by hearing a description of it
- This suggests qualia have to be experienced, push back neurological states of the brain as we cannot fully explain what they are and they must be personally experienced
- this is known as the hard problem of consciousness - consciousness implies dualism exists in some form
21
Q
Describe Thomas Nagel’s argument - what is it like to be a bat
A
- All mammals have conscious experiences in different ways which are unimaginable to us
- a bat’s subjective experience is alien to us
- that organism cannot be reduced to a physical description of its functional states so in the same way no functionalist theory can explain qualia in purely physical terms
22
Q
Define dual-aspect monism
A
Fundamental reality is a single substance with mental and physical aspect
23
Q
Describe D.A.M
A
- Not dualism - because it holds that there is only one kind of substance. it is monist.
- there is only one kind of ontological entity, but that entity has two aspects, and neither reduces to the other. mind and brain are two aspects of the same substance
- one aspect (mind) is first-person subjective aware less, so is the perspective of consciousness. If we take quail we cannot know their subjective feeling by observing merely atoms or molecules/the activity of neutrons in the brain
- if you put someone in a brain scanner you can see electrical activity but not what the brain is experiencing subjectively
- dual aspect monism avoids the obvious problem with substance dualism - how mental and physical substances interact as there ARE no separate substances - only one substance with two aspects, both mental and physical
- it also avoids physicalism’s problem with quail - physicalism cannot reduce consciousness/qualia to a purely physical description
- however, the single substance of dual-aspect monism is unknown - in quantum theory entities such as quarks are unobservable however the ‘standard model’ of particle physics doesn’t make sense without quarks so they must exist in some manner therefore the idea that mind and matter are underpinned by a single unknown substance isn’t unlikely
- the relationship between the two aspects is supported by quantum theory - as DAM argues that the fundamental reality is a single substance with mental and physical aspects, and quantum mechanics shows that reality at its basic level has a dual aspect.
- in DAM thinking, the soul is an unnecessary entity - persons are bodies and brains, bit bodies and brains aren’t just physical substances but rather objects with both ,mental and physical aspects - therefore all forms of dualism including substance dualism are unnecessary since subjective mental life can be explained as one aspect of one underlying substance.
