...Meditation VI: The Conceivability and Divisibility Arguments The Argument Introduced The Conceivability Argument occurs in Meditation VI. It is Descartes’ most celebrated argument. It was criticised in its day and has been ever since. The argument purports to establish that minds are non-physical substances and hence that a mind is not identical to any bit of the body, such as the brain. A person is a special unity of two substances: physical substance (the body) and mental substance (the mind). Only humans are such special unities. Animals have bodies but lack minds and angels have minds but lack bodies. Here’s the passage: First, I know that everything which I clearly and distinctly understand is capable of being created by God so as to correspond exactly with my understanding of it. Hence the fact that I can clearly and distinctly understand one thing apart from another is enough to make me certain that the two things are distinct, since they are capable of being separated, at least by God. The question of what kind of power is required to bring about such a separation does not affect the judgment that they are distinct. Thus, simply by knowing that I exist and seeing at the same time that absolutely nothing belongs to my nature or essence except that I am a thinking thing, I can infer correctly that my essence consists solely in the fact that I am a thinking thing. It is true that I may have (or, to anticipate, that I certainly have) a body that is very...
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...article claims the ontological argument for the existence of God in Meditation V is identical to the causal argument in Meditation III. Descartes’ ontological argument declares that a greatest being (i.e. God) necessarily exists as existence pertains to God’s essence. Since Descartes attributes omnipotence and absolute freedom to God, a problem arises: God, as the creator of all possible and actual essences (including God’s own), could separate God’s essence from God’s existence. As a result, God would not be necessary, but only contingent. To avoid disallowing God freedom (but also to avoid declaring God incomprehensible), Descartes claims to have an intuition of the idea of God. Descartes’ intuition enables the conceivability...
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...with least logical incoherencies. Substance Dualism is a theory that describes “mind and matter” as “two distinct things” (Nagel Thomas 206). Furthermore, substance dualism categorize matter as “physical or material substance” and mind or soul as “non-physical or immaterial substance” (Lacewing Michael) “Substance Dualism”). So, dualism is the proposal that human being as a living, thinking entity not only includes brain and physical matter but also a non-physical substance to account for the mind. The famous seventeenth century French philosopher René Descartes claimed that as “a subject of conscious thought and experience, he cannot consist of spatially extended matter”. He therefore states that “his essential nature must be non-material, even if in fact his soul is intimately connected with his body” (qtd in.Nagel Thomas 206). Here, we will explore the arguments that tries to support the claim. The Conceivability Argument shows that one can “imagine a robot that resembles a human with no consciousness or inner life”. Furthermore, one can also “imagine spirits or creatures with emotions...
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...The flaw within the conceivability argument above is that what is conceivable may not necessarily be possible. Furthermore, Descartes identifies a physical entity as a point of contact between the mind and body: the pineal gland, which is a mass of tissue behind the brain that secretes hormones in mammals.2 According to TheInformationPhilosopher.com, “For him the body is a mechanical system of tiny fibers causing movements in the brain, which pulls on other fibers to muscles—which is the basis of the stimulus and response theory in modern physiology.”3 In this case, the mind is essentially a brain, and the brain is a physical entity—the mind equals the brain. The human brain can be seen, touched, held, felt, and smelt. It is an organ. Without your brain, you cannot have a mind. The mind does not exist without there being...
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...A Cybernetic Defense of Type Physicalism Abstract In this paper, I examine the tenability of type physicalism within the context of a second-order cybernetic analysis of phenomenality. I begin by describing the philosophical problem type physicalism attempts to resolve and follow up with an examination of arguments against type physicalism. I then describe how arguments against type physicalism tend to rely on the ontological distinction between system and observer. Next, I show that this distinction is purely conceptual and dissolves when phenomenality is analyzed from a second-order cybernetic perspective. Within this context, type physicalism remains a tenable solution to the mind-body problem so long as an isomorphic mapping between physical and psychological processes is possible. Introduction The motivation for type physicalism stems from empirical evidence of pervasive and systematic psychoneural correlations, that is, correlations between mental phenomena and brain processes. These correlations are systematic enough to allow scientists to successfully sense, transmit, analyze, and apply the language of neurons using an assortment of sophisticated imaging techniques and brain-computer interfaces. For instance, in 2003, Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, associate professor of neurobiology at the Duke University Medical Center, used a brain-computer interface system to successfully filter and utilize motor command impulses from the electrical activity of a primate brain to operate...
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...Consciousness and its Place in Nature David J. Chalmers 1 Introduction1 Consciousness fits uneasily into our conception of the natural world. On the most common conception of nature, the natural world is the physical world. But on the most common conception of consciousness, it is not easy to see how it could be part of the physical world. So it seems that to find a place for consciousness within the natural order, we must either revise our conception of consciousness, or revise our conception of nature. In twentieth-century philosophy, this dilemma is posed most acutely in C. D. Broad’s The Mind and its Place in Nature (Broad 1925). The phenomena of mind, for Broad, are the phenomena of consciousness. The central problem is that of locating mind with respect to the physical world. Broad’s exhaustive discussion of the problem culminates in a taxonomy of seventeen different views of the mental-physical relation.2 On Broad’s taxonomy, a view might see the mental as nonexistent (“delusive”), as reducible, as emergent, or as a basic property of a substance (a “differentiating” attribute). The physical might be seen in one of the same four ways. So a fourby-four matrix of views results. (The seventeenth entry arises from Broad’s division of the substance/substance view according to whether one substance or two is involved.) At the end, three views are left standing: those on which mentality is an emergent characteristic of either a physical substance or a neutral substance,...
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...Should We Give Up on Reductive Physicalism? Paul Sperring Richmond Journal of Philosophy 8 (Winter 2004) Should We Give Up on Reductive Physicalism? Paul Sperring Supposing you were a physicalist in the late 1950s, early 1960s, and supposing you were Australian too 1 , it is highly likely you would have thought that mental properties could be reduced to physical properties. Now, suppose you are a contemporary philosopher of mind and suppose further that you are also of a physicalist stripe. Will you be inclined to think that mental properties are reducible to physical properties? It’s by no means certain. These days physicalists fall into two, broadly conceived, camps: (i) the reductionist physicalists who think that minds (or mental properties, or states or events 2 ) can be reduced to brains (or something smaller) and; (ii) the nonreductive physicalists who think that minds are not straightforwardly reducible to some lower level set of physical properties. In truth if one were to carefully classify all the physicalist positions in contemporary philosophy of mind we would need distinctions of a much finer grain than this story suggests. For the purposes of this paper, however, those philosophers who have thought that mental properties can be reduced to lower level properties will be lumped together (and called ‘reductionists’) and those philosophers who, although embracing physicalism, have thought that mental properties in principle defy reduction to something lower...
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...of ideas / Marc A. Hight. p. cm. Summary: ‘‘Provides an interpretation of the development of the ontology of ideas from Descartes to Hume that reaffirms the vital role metaphysical concerns played in early modern thinking’’—Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978–0-271–03383–9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Ontology. 2. Idea (Philosophy). 3. Metaphysics. I. Title. BD301.H54 2008 110.9—dc22 2008002466 2008 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 Copyright The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. This book is printed on Natures Natural, containing 50% post-consumer waste, and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992. For ict and snj and `e in memory of rene elizabeth hight (1968–2006) contents Acknowledgments xi List of Abbreviations xiii Introduction: Idea Ontology and the Early Modern Tale 1 1 the traditional ontology 11 1.1 Substance 12 1.2 Modes 20 1.3 What Is an Idea? 22 1.4 Stretching Idea Ontologies 34 2 descartes 37 2.1 Representation 38 2.2 Perception,...
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...THE B L A C K SWAN The HIGHLY I mpact IM of the PROBABLE Nassim Nicholas Taleb U.S.A. $26.95 Canada $34.95 is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpre dictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9 / 1 1 . For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. A BLACK SWAN Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don't know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate oppor tunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the "impossible." For years, Taleb has studied how we fool our selves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this reve latory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don't know. He offers...
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