...Professor. Williams Philosophy 180 9.18.12 Personal Identity. What am I? A mind or a body? Between both my mental and physical realities my true self is found in my mind. An intangible but highly influential, very private set of thoughts construct the perception of how I allow the physical world to experience my being. My body is a physical representation of the collective effort of thoughts and experiences of my mind. In essence our body serves as a vessel or shell for our very soul. The question, “what am I?” could also be “who are you?” What constitutes an individual’s identity? I believe between the two options of physical and mental realities that my prolonged mental consciousness gives me my identity. My memories are who I am. Without my memories I am just a body a tabula rasa all over again. This idea of memory serving as our identity can be seen with the example of Alzheimer’s patients. Alzheimer’s is an autoimmune disease that even with today’s modern medicine is still misunderstood. The patient suffering AD experiences a slow wipe out of their memory. Even though, still unclear to how or why this happens to millions of people worldwide we are able to see first hand years of life disappear into nowhere and how destructive this is to families, loved ones, and an individuals identity. They exist physically as a shell and nothing more. Their connection and relationship to the physical world is of no use without the mind. For the record I am by no means stating that an AD...
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... The human mind is quite a mysterious machine. While we can break down and examine every detail and trait of the human brain, we cannot dissect the human mind. We can only observe its distinctive traits and behaviors. Brain states and mental states go hand in hand but do not equal each other. If they were identical, there would not be the case of whether they relate, but more so of how the relationship between the two works. Brain states and mental states have different characteristics than one another. The mind resides inside of the brain, but it is not the actual brain itself. The only way to prove that the brain and the mind are one, would be to perform a successful lobotomy to test whether or not the receiving person would assimilate the previous owner’s mind, memories and traits and characteristics. If this were if at all possible, the receiving person would no longer have their original mind or memory of being their original self or anyone else for that matter. Brain state regulates and controls the body’s activities, receiving and decoding sensory impulses and communicating information to the muscles and body organs. The brain employs the ability to live and function. It is but an involuntary organ within the body, the nucleus, which controls all of the vital organs automatically by default. We cannot will the brain to keep the heart pumping or to send signals throughout the nervous system; those things are uncontrollable by the human mind, however, we...
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...Reflections upon the nature of identity and the self Reflections upon the nature of Identity and the Self Ernest F Brierre South University Online PHI 2301 Introduction to philosophy Professor Thomas Pieragastini 01/25/2013 Who Am I? We’ve come to realize that this simple question holds more answers than we can possibly think about. Is the nature of Identity the same as the Self? When thinking about identity what are the first things that come through mind? Many great thinkers such as Descartes, Locke or Kant have given us some pretty good insights about the concept of the self. Do we agree and accept it as such? Dr. Rollo May, a psychoanalyst, joins both Descartes and Locke in an attempt to expose to us this complex idea of the self. In his book, Man’s search for himself, he does an exquisite analysis of understanding the knowing of who we are while incorporating the nature of identity with the consciousness of the self. What do we make of Descartes’ affirmation of his concept of existence when he said: “I think, therefor I am”? This has become a very famous quote as the essence of the meaning of it comes from the concept of realization of the self through thinking. This statement seems to be reduced to simply the factual idea of thoughts, yet it surpasses the many answers to the search of knowing and understanding the questions of one mastery concept of his existence. This act of thinking is a conscious one. This fundamental realm of consciousness is a very...
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...that personal identity being attached to the soul (Heide 06 Apr). His own account of personal identity, while compatible with there being immaterial souls, does not depend on such entities existing. Instead, he connects personal identity to continuous consciousness, or memory, a position which does not rely on the soul to do any explanatory work. This paper will first explicate René Descartes's view of personal identity, and it will be argued that Locke's critique provides compelling reason to reject the argument that personal identity as tied to an individual soul. Locke's...
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...Consciousness: being aware of external and internal stimuli at any given moment, which also gives a: * Sense of personal identity and individual way of perceiving the world. It can include your senses and * Perceptions of the world around you as well as memories, beliefs and attitudes Consciousness is also described to be: * Personal - it is subjective and your own perception of your internal world and the external world * Selective - you are able to limit and restrict your attention and channel your focus onto whatever * Continuous - there is never a break in your consciousness or a time where it is empty * Changing - your thoughts are constantly changing as they are easily influenced by external stimuli RENE DESCARTES - MIND & BODY ARE SEPARATE BUT INTERCONNECTED The mind-body problem debates whether the mind and body can interact, and how, or if there is even a ‘mind’ or ‘body’. Rene Descartes dualism theory states the two substances are distinct, as one is physical and one is non-physical. He believes they are able to interact through the pineal gland, which is the center of the brain (it was later discovered that’s actually where hormones are) and that the two substances can affect each other. He defined consciousness as ‘encompassing everything we are aware of, including our own existence’. It exists in the mind or ‘soul’, but also in our body because the soul does not occupy space. His quote ‘I think, there I am’ supplies as evidence of...
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...constitute man * Man as a dualist * Man as a monad * Man as a socialist * Man as a spiritual entity * Man as a physical entity * Intrinsic characteristics that man have in common * Illustration of the mental essence(when man is abnormal is he still half or full) INTRODUCTION The essence of man is the constituent of man which goes beyond his body alone but extends to his mind, soul, spirit and other attributes of man. But we cannot talk about the essence of man without the existence of man because without an existence of man, man’s essence is of no use and nothing to talk about. This brings about the proposition ‘existence precedes essence’. The proposition that existence precedes essence is a central claim of existentialism, which reverses the traditional philosophical view that the essence (the nature) of a thing is more fundamental and immutable than its existence (the mere fact of its being). To existentialists, human beings—through their consciousness—create their own values and determine a meaning for their life because the human being does not possess any inherent identity or value. By posing the acts that constitute him or her, he or she makes his or her existence more significant. Also Saint Thomas Aquinas specifies that a true human being has both essence and existence. Man is rather different than any other beings like animals, plants and inanimate creatures. And it is apparent that man cannot only be evaluated in terms of physical features. Some describe...
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...an immaterial mind that has an essence which is the result of a highly complex brain; Both the body and mind die, however, while living, they make their own choices and create their own outcomes because of their immaterial mind; The memory and body are what makes a person who they are and without either of them, the same person does not exist; We make our own choices but without others, we would be unable to define ourselves. The Dualist view of human nature is similar to these ideas. Dualism is the “view that human beings are immaterial minds within material bodies.” (Velasquez. p. 105) The man that ran this show was René Descartes (1596-1650). He claimed that if we can conceive of one thing without the other, than they are not the same thing. He used this notion to state that the self and the body are different. From this, it can be reasoned that there is a soul, which endures. Human nature accepts the idea of an immaterial mind and a material body because of the fact that they can be viewed as separate things. In the words of Descartes, body is: …all that which can be defined by a specific shape: something which can be confined in a certain place, and which can fill a given space in such a way that every other body will be excluded from it; which can be perceived either by touch, or by sight, or by hearing, or by taste, or by smell: which can be moved in many ways not, in truth, by itself, but by something different, by which it is touched. (René Descartes. p. 106) Human...
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...Essay 1. Existence of God 2. Religious sects The debate concerning the existence of God is one of the oldest and most discussed debates in human history, and has raised many philosophical issues. A basic problem is the existence of both monotheistic and polytheistic views. A wide variety of arguments exist which can be categorized as metaphysical, logical, empirical, or subjective. The existence of God is subject to lively debate both in philosophy – the philosophy of religion being almost entirely devoted to the question – and in popular culture. The ontological argument has been formulated by philosophers including St. Anselm and René Descartes. The argument proposes that God's existence is self-evident. The logic, depending on the formulation, reads roughly as follows: 1. God is the greatest conceivable being. 2. It is greater to exist than not to exist. 3. Therefore, God exists. Aquinas' Five Ways 1. The unmoved mover argument asserts that, from our experience of motion in the universe (motion being the transition from potentiality to actuality) we can see that there must have been an initial mover. Aquinas argued that whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another thing, so there must be an unmoved mover. 2. Aquinas' argument from first cause started with the premise that it is impossible for a being to cause itself (because it would have to exist before it caused itself) and that it is impossible for there to be an infinite...
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...Andrew Davis December 12, 2013 English 181 Professor Kappeler Postmodernism and Identity in Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World Since the Age of Enlightenment, the ideas of identity and consciousness have been explored by philosophers, psychologists, writers, and more. Since then, the definition of what identity is has changed and evolved, leaving the true, overarching definition unknown. In his novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Japanese author Haruki Murakami explores the ideas of identity and the consciousness through ideas brought up by postmodernist philosophers and psychologists such as Karl Marx, C.G. Jung, and Sigmund Freud and uses them to create characterization, themes, plot, and symbolism. An important point many notice when reading this book is that the plot is split into two plot lines: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World. Wonderland is set in a modern-esque Tokyo, where the narrator is a Calcutec - a data manager that shuffles data in his head. In this arc, the story revolves around the job the narrator is doing for an old man known simply as the Professor. The other story arc, The End of the World, revolves around a narrator known as the Dreamreader. He is trapped in a walled-in town, where he is told his shadow must be removed and that he cannot leave. He is then made to read dreams from the skulls of unicorns, which live outside the town wall. While the story arcs seem to not connect to...
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...Psychology Paper Historical Roots of Psychology Psychology as defined in the Merriam Webster dictionary is the science of mind and behavior. It has been around for 130 years in the realms of science. In the history of psychology, there are different people who studied different aspects under this topic. One of those people were Plato who was Aristotle’s teacher. He stated that the soul could exist even when away or separated from the body. This concept is known as “dualism”. “In dualism, ‘mind’ is contrasted with ‘body’” (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/dualism). Another person is René Descartes. He agreed with Plato about the concept of dualism and he believed that the “pineal gland” which is the small organ at the base of the brain involved in sleep was the “seat of the soul” (Saundra K. Ciccarelli, 2012). “The pineal gland played an important role in Descartes' account because it was involved in sensation, imagination, memory, and the causation of bodily movements” (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/pineal-gland/). By this information we can connect the pineal gland being the seat of the soul by it being involved in sensation, imagination, memory, and the cause of bodily movements. It is said to be the seat of the soul because it is where the soul from being “individual”, becomes one with the body. Gustav Fechneris who was a physician and a physicist, often credited with performing some of the first scientific experiments that...
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..."Metaphysics," and Fichte’s "Doctrine of Science") because all say farewell to the common sense view of things. The three types of transcendental thinking converge in conceiving rational autonomy as the ultimate ground for justification. Correspondingly, the philosophical pedagogy of all three thinkers is focused on how to seize and make that very autonomy (or active self-determination) intellectually and existentially available. In the concrete way of proceeding, however, the three models diverge. Descartes expects one to become master of oneself and "the world" by methodologically suspending his judgement on what cannot qualify itself to be undoubtable. Kant leads us to the point where we can triangulate universal conditions of the possibility of knowledge through individually acquiring the competence to judge the legitimacy of encountered propositional claims. Finally, Fichte confronts us with the idea of the identity of self-consciousness and objectivity. (1) Transcending ordinary life and experience to a somewhat higher being is surely not the scope of transcendental philosophy. What the revolutionary achievements of Descartes, Kant, and Fichte have generically in common is to account for the legitimacy of our knowledge claims or, in other words, for the possibility of autonomy. The business of that kind of philosophy is to rationally reconstruct the rightness of judging. For that design the architecture of those authors' theorizing is necessarily opposed to normal experience. (First...
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...Social Sciences and Humanities prof. Coleridge Chris Final essay “Brain vs Mind” [pic] Alessandro Acquaviva E060478 INDEX The Mind-Brain Problem 3 Background of the problem 4 Evaluating the three proposed solutions 6 Weak Dualism 7 Strong Dualism 9 The relevance of Parapsychology 11 Conclusions 12 The Mind-Brain Problem The mind-brain problem raises the question as to whether the mind is no more than the idle side-effect of our brain processes or whether the mind can, in some degree, influence behaviour. Here we rehearse the arguments on both sides plus some recent attempts to eliminate mind altogether. However contentious, the philosophical problem, as distinct from the physiological problem, can be stated quite simply as follows: What, essentially, is the relationship between events in the brain and those private, subjective experiences that together constitute our inner mental life? We need not assume here that consciousness is synonymous with mind - consciousness may well be no more than just one aspect of mind - but, with respect to the problem at issue, it is the existence of consciousness that is critical. Stated thus, the problem admits of only three basic answers: 1) Events in the brain, operating in accordance with the laws of physics, determine completely both our behaviour and our subjective experiences. 2) Mental events may be elicited by events in the brain or they may, in turn, elicit brain events and so influence...
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...including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of INTELECOM Intelligent Telecommunications, 150 E. Colorado Blvd., Suite 300, Pasadena, California 91105-1937. ISBN: 0-495-10302-0 Contents Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v Lesson One — What is Philosophy? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Lesson Two — What is Human Nature?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Lesson Three — Is Mind Distinct From Body?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Lesson Four — Is There an...
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...expect, there have been many alterations 修改 to these moral principles throughout the years. What was considered ethically correct by some was rejected by others and replaced with their own concept of what constituted moral or ethical behavior. A Comment about Philosophy: Philosophy, unlike science, addresses issues that cannot be solved. In fact, some philosophers state that if a problem can be solved, philosophers will not even address the issue, feeling that it should be considered by other disciplines. One of the most notable examples of philosophical inquiry is the commonly quoted question posed by Bertrand Russell: “If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, will it make a noise?” While these types of mind games may interest some, they become difficult to apply when ethical issues need...
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...HLSC120: Society, Culture and Health eLearning Lecture Enhancement eModule Module 2 – Week 2 by by Dr Monica Nebauer (Queensland) Revised 2014 Introduction Welcome to the second of six eLearning Lecture Enhancement Modules for this unit. As explained in your first eModule, the purpose of these eModules is to extend the content of your weekly two hour lecture, to create knowledge links for you to the Seminar Questions that you and other students will be planning to present in your Student Seminars, and to help you enrich your learning as you develop your reflective learning and writing skills. In this eModule, you will be able to explore further: social changes from world globalizing processes, health care and globalizing processes, and finally, globalizing processes and cultural diversity in Australia. As you will be aware there is one Reflective Learning and Writing proforma on LEO that you are asked to use for your Reflective Learning and Writing task (2,500 words). At the end of this eModule (look under the green box) there are five questions from which you can choose a question to answer for your second assessment task. Learning Outcomes and Graduate Attributes The Learning Outcomes (with numbering from your Unit Outline) that will be addressed in this eModule are as follows – 1. explain changes in contemporary Australian society, culture and health related to world globalising processes; 2. discuss the impact of societal changes and an increasing cultural diversity...
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