Matter & Conscious - 2

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Substance Dualism

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The distinguishing claim of this view is that each mind is a distinct nonphysical thing, an individual 'package' of nonphysical substance, a thing whose identity is independent of any physical body to which it may be temporarily 'attached'.

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Cartesian dualism

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a substance that has no spatial extension or spatial position whatever, a substance whose essential feature is the activity of thinking.

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Popular dualism.

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This is the theory that a person is literally a 'ghost in a machine', where the machine is the human body, and the ghost is a spiritual substance, quite unlike physical matter in its internal constitution, but fully possessed of spatial properties even so.

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Property Dualism

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The basic idea of the theories under this heading is that while there is no substance to be dealt with here beyond the physical brain, the brain has a special set of properties possessed by no other kind of physical object. It is these special properties that are nonphysical: hence the term property dualism.

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Epiphenomenalism

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the oldest version of property dualism:. This term is rather a mouthful, but its meaning is simple. The Greek prefix "epi-" means "above", and the position at issue holds that mental phenomena are not a part of the physical phenomena in the brain that ultimately determine our actions and behavior, but rather ride 'above the fray'. One's actions are exhaustively determined by physical events in the brain, which events also cause the epiphenomena we call desires, decisions, and volitions.

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Interactionist property dualism

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differs from the previous view in only one essential respect: the interactionist asserts that mental properties do indeed have causal effects on the brain, and thereby, on behavior.

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Argument from introspection

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The fact is, when you center your attention on the contents of your consciousness, you do not clearly apprehend a neural network pulsing with electrochemical activity: you apprehend a flux of thoughts, sensations, desires, and emotions.

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Philosophical behaviorism

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claims that any sentence about a mental state can be paraphrased, without loss of meaning, into a long and complex sentence about what observable behavior would result if the person in question were in this, that, or the other observable circumstance.

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Reductive Materialism (the Identity Theory)

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Reductive materialism, more commonly known as the identity theory, is the most straightforward of the several materialist theories of mind. Its central claim is simplicity itself: Mental states are physical states of the brain.

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Functionalism According to functionalism,

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the essential or defining feature of any type of mental state is the set of causal relations it bears to (1) environmental effects on the body, (2) other types of mental states, and (3) bodily behavior. Pain, for example, characteristically results from some bodily damage or trauma; it causes distress, annoyance, and practical reasoning aimed at relief; and it causes wincing, blanching, and nursing of the traumatized area. Any state that plays exactly that functional role is a pain, according to functionalism.

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Eliminative materialist's

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conviction that folk psychology is a hopelessly primitive and deeply confused conception of our internal activities.