soul, mind, and body Flashcards
plato
the body was like a prison for the soul, trapping it in this world of appearances. He thought our souls came from the world of forms and had a vague memory of the forms.
The charioteer: the rational part of the soul which leads the horses
The white horse: the spiritual part of the soul which is noble and gallantry, which is immortal and noble
The dark horse: the basic human appetite part of the soul which experiences love, hunger, etc., which is mortal, deformed and obstinate
argument from recollection
In The Meno Plato tells the story of how Socrates proved that an uneducated slave boy could be prompted by a series of questions and some shapes drawn in the sand to figure out how to solve a geometry question. The slave boy must therefore have been born with geometric concepts.
Anamnesis is the process of re-remembering these forms through a posteriori sense experience.
The argument from opposites: everything relies conceptually on its opposite, so death cannot be understood without life
In order to understand permanent bodily death, there must also permanent life/immortality
This is not true in the case of the body, so it must be the soul that continues to exist after death
explains problem of consciousness = why do we have personal, first-person experiences
against plato
Aristotle believed that Plato’s views on the soul were flawed
Aristotle points out it is far more plausible to think that we experience the world, and then devise concepts like beauty and justice to help us to describe and comprehend it.
If true, this means that these concepts do not exist prior to human experience, so they cannot be ‘recalled’ by the soul.
Argument against the argument from opposites: Brian Davies points out that not everything has an opposite and there is no need to infer a soul just because physical bodies exist.
Whilst abstract notions e.g. forms, have an opposite, for example truth and falsity, physical things in our world cannot be so easily compared.
aristotles views
Aristotle claimed that the soul was the formal cause of the body. He made an analogy with a stamp imprint in some wax. The imprint of the stamp has no actual positive existence separable from the wax, yet it nonetheless gives form to the wax
If an axe were a living thing then its body would be made of wood and metal. However, its soul would be the thing which made it an axe i.e. its capacity to chop. If it lost its ability to chop it would cease to be an axe – it would simply be wood and metal.
The soul is a living being’s capacity to move towards its telos.
Aristotle’s theory is perhaps more defensible than Plato’s but arguably this is because he has far fewer metaphysical commitments, and as a result, his theory is more of an upshot of his theory of causation rather than a metaphysical thesis that plays a core role in his worldview
descartes substance dualism
humans are comprised of two individual and entirely different substances: mental and material (or ‘body and soul’)
So, he began his philosophy with ‘radical doubt’, claiming that he would doubt everything which was not certain. He even doubted the existence of the world and the physical objects perceived by the senses.
it is possible to doubt all things - unreliability of senses - body
However, Descartes found that he could not doubt his own existence, because in the act of doubting (thinking), his own existence was obvious; he was the one doing the doubting.
Descartes has proved his existence only insofar as he thinks, and so primarily he is “a thing which thinks” (res cogitans).
The true self is engaged in thought, so the mind is known to exist. However, the existence of the body has not been proven. There is a “real distinction” between the mind and the body.
relying here on part of Leibniz’s law (the ‘identity of indiscernibles’), which states that, for any x and y, if x and y are identical, then x and y have all and only the same properties.
heil
Heil points out that the qualities of a painful experience in, say, a big toe could never be encountered or replicated in a material object; even if a neuroscientist examined someone’s nervous system (or brain) whilst they were experiencing pain, they would not be able to detect anything qualitative that might resemble the subject’s pain.
What Heil appears to be talking about is the possible existence of qualia – that is, subjective experiences accessible only to ourselves. According to Heil, Descartes sees these ‘qualia’ as essential properties of mental substances.
masked man fallacy
he seems to be guilty of a masked man fallacy (a masked man fallacy is a misuse of Leibniz’s law).
This can be shown with a parallel example:
1. Lois Lane knows Clark Kent
2. Lois Lane does not know Superman
C: Therefore, Clark Kent and Superman are two separate beings.
This clearly fallacious argument shows that that Leibnitz’s law cannot apply to perspectival characteristics of a subject: it can only apply to the ontological or objective characteristics of a subject.
If dualism is correct and the mind and body are separate fundamental types of existence, how is it possible for them to interact?
requires non-physical mental substance to causally affect and interact with physical substance, but it’s not clear how that would be possible.
Appealing to the soul/ non-physical entities fails to account for how dependant qualia/mental states seem to be on the physical brain:
When damage occurs from physical trauma, drug abuse, or pathological diseases our mental powers are always compromised and usually our inner subjective experiences of reality are as well.
ANSCOMBE - analogy of a bodily action (gesture pointing to a chessboard), meaning of gesture does not come from action alone, but the pointing is still by an material substance (connection between mental and physical)
Mental thoughts can produce physical responses – ‘to go over there’
Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia argued that only physical things can interact with other physical things. She says interaction is when one thing pushes against another - dualism must be false
pineal gland - mind and body connected, only aspect of the body that was not a pair (outdated understanding of the body)
biologists later proved that false. More importantly, Descartes is sayingwherehe thinks the mind and body interact, but the interaction problem doesn’t questionwherebuthow. Descartes is not providing an answer.
gilbert ryle
the idea of a soul – which he described as ‘the ghost in the machine’ – was a ‘category mistake’.
to speak of a soul was a mistake in the use of language. This results in people speaking of the mind and the body as different phenomena, as if the soul was something identifiably extra within a person.
E.g. ‘Cambridge University’ as something other than the sum of the colleges, libraries, museums etc.
any talk of a soul was talk about the way in which a person acted and integrated with others and the world. It was not something separate and distinct
commits a category error by supposing that the mental and physical are two different categories, and events and causes must be one or the other. This makes the unjustified assumption that events cannot be both mental and physical.
PHILLIPS - word of soul alone does not constitute an explanation - assumption that because language contains a word, there must be some sort of entity corresponding to the name
Anthony Flew – Cheshire cat grin – makes no sense without the cat.
dawkins
The modern study of the brain (neuroscience) is increasingly able to explain consciousness without the need to refer to an invisible spirit or soul.
DAWKINS - Dawkins thinks that everything about us, including our minds and consciousness, is nothing more than biological processes in our body and brain.
The Selfish Gene (1976) - Humans are just survival machines. They are the vehicles of genes, which are only interested in replicating themselves.
Soul 1 = the Platonic/Cartesian separate substance of much trad thought. Dawkins rejects this as depending on entirely myth and faith, and not empirical evidence
at best we should be using the word ‘soul’ metaphorically to describe our higher cognitive faculties and the fact that we are conscious of our own feelings and experiences.
hard problem of consciousness’, which is what brain process is responsible for consciousness itself - CHALMERS its failure thus far to make any significant progress at solving the hard problem suggests that explaining consciousness will require discovery of something new which is radically different to anything we currently understand
There are many things science cannot currently make much or any progress on, such as dark matter. This doesn’t give us grounds for supposing something non-physical might exist
susan blackmore - consciousness as an illusion and not a reality
by virtue of not asserting a mysterious intangible substance, have the advantage of not multiplying entities beyond necessity (Occam’s Razor)
