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Dualism Research Paper

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For centuries, philosophers have been contemplating the relationship between the body and the mind, creating a major conflict amongst theorists. Dualism is a theory that claims that the mind, a non-physical substance, is completely separate and distinct from the body, a physical substance. Originally coined by the famous philosopher René Descartes, dualism has since been argued against and overshadowed by numerous opposing theories. This was primarily due to the many weaknesses that dualism faced and the problems that could not be explained under this view. One of the opposing theories, functionalism, did not face the weaknesses that dualism did, and the problems they came across were not an issue for functionalists. This view, most strongly …show more content…
It holds that mental properties are merely functional properties, emphasizing that the existence of a mental state depends on the role it plays in the system, rather than its internal composition. Mental properties are said to be higher-level properties, which are possessed by objects of which posses lower-level properties, also referred to as “realizers”. The ability to account for mental causation is a major strength for functionalism and, in turn, makes it the more preferred and better-understood view over that of dualism.
In the field of philosophy and psychology, mental causation may arguably be the most crucial piece of the “mind-body problem” puzzle. In order to determine how the mind and the body are connected, one must understand the causal interaction that the mind plays with the world and how this …show more content…
A dualist may respond to this drawback by suggesting that the ability of a non-physical substance such as the mind to cause a physical event or behavior is no more complex of a concept than the ability for a physical event to cause another physical event. The quick solution to this problem would be to suppose that minds are spatially located and adopt a view about causation in which causal relations are made up by continuous associations of mental and physical events. This is where dualism begins to break away from its authentic roots, taking on altered forms of the theory, one of which is known as

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