What is the mind body problem?

What is the mind body problem?

What are the mental(spiritual) and physical(material) considered the same thing?

Presentation by Ashton Smith

Psychology: Rene Descartes

Rene Descartes is a philosopher, scientist, and a mathematician.

Analysis of the mind/body problem

Rene Descartes reaches the conclusion by arguing that the nature of the mind is completely different form that of the body and therefore it is possible for one to exist without the other.

Philosophy: Daniel Dunnett

The Scientific Motivation

The Religious Motivation

Daniel Dunnett is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist.

What is the mind-body problem?

The mind/body problem continues to be argued and not solved because of the idea that a person can never take another persons first person experience, so you'll never know their consciousness or their own spiritual being, you will only understand your own. There is no way that we can build a persons first person experience which is how the mind/body problem is defined. We can understand from a second or third person's perspective, but we never understand a person's consciousness other then our own

Descartes' conclusion is only that the mind or soul can exist without the body. He stops short of demonstrating that the soul is actually immortal. In the synopsis of Meditations, Descartes claims only to have shown the decay of the body does not logically or metaphysically imply the destruction of the mind: further argumentation is required for the conclusion that the mind actually survives the body's destruction. This would involve both "an account of whole of physics" and an argument showing that God cannot annihilate the mind.

Descartes is claiming that the concept of a substantial form as part of the entirely physical world stems form a confusion of the ideas of mind and body. This confusion led people to mistakenly ascribe mental properties like knowledge to entirely non-mental things like stones, plants, an dyes, even non-human animals. The real distinction of mind and body can then also be used to alleviate this confusion and its resultant mistakes by showing that bodies exist and move as they do without mentality, and as such principles of mental causation such as goals, purpose, and knowledge have no role to play in the explanation of the physical phenomena. So the real distinction of mind and body also serves the more scientifically oriented end of eliminating any element of mentality from the idea of the body.

What is the mind/body problem: Daniel Dunnett

The mind–body problem is the problem of explaining how mental states, events and processes—like beliefs, actions and thinking—are related to the physical states, events and processes, given that the human body is a physical entity and the mind is non-physical.

What is the mind/body problem: Daniel Dunnett

Daniel Dunnett explains a neutral way of understanding the mind/body problem and to be able to understand the problem you must recognize how Descartes failed to recognize language. Language and understanding the dynamics of the first person and how it relates to the second and third person proves the idea of hylomorphism.

Hylomorphism

Works Cited

The theory that every physical object is composed of two principles, an unchanging prime matter and a form deprived of actuality with every substantial change of the object.

Dennett, D. (2014). Daniel Dennett - What is the Mind-Body

Problem? April 25, 2016.

Searle, J. (2016, April 18). Mind–body problem. Retrieved April

25, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_problem

Skirry, J. (n.d.). Rene Descartes: The Mind-Body Distinction.

Retrieved April 25, 2016, from http://www.iep.utm.edu/descmind/