As the age of the renaissance was coming to an end, philosophers debated whether the conscious mind of a person was combined or separate from the person’s body. The first philosopher to talk about this dualism of mind and body was Descartes and he stated that they are both separate things. He claimed that, unlike the body, the mind is indivisible and has no physical extensions. In philosophy, this difference between the body and the mind is called Cartesian dualism. Another contemporary philosopher for the time, Elizabeth of Bohemia, claimed that this is not true. Her argument had a base in physics. She reasoned that for movement to occur, there must be another object bumping into another object and causing it to move. She tied this idea to
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Patricia Smith Churchland declared that there is no such thing as the mind and that everything that comes into thinking comes directly from states in our brain. She has stated four reasons to justify her claim (Churchland 305). The first reason is that modern biology, physics, and chemistry have found no proof that a mind exist separate from the body. For example, modern physicists agree that anything that does not have any mass or occupy any space cannot exist. Her second claim was the physical stimuli to the brain has a direct effect on how thinking goes on in the brain. This makes sense because there are mental drugs, such as antidepressants and anxiety medicine, that influences how we perceive the world. The third reason why there is no mind is that computer science has advanced far enough that it could be identical to human thinking. This means that there is nothing special or magic about the human brain that would make it be real, yet not physical in our world. Her final point was that there is no physical data that could prove that the mind exists separate of the body. Churchland is an empirical philosopher and a neuroscientist, so she only believes in data that can be scientifically proved and there is no legitimate data that the mind …show more content…
The idea that there is something special about our mind that could not exist in this universe yet still influence our bodies is hard to believe. We know that animals also have brains, so let’s suppose that they also have a mind separate from the body. What about organisms without a brain? Could they have a nonphysical mind that helps them to survive? There are more than trillions of organisms on earth and that would mean that every one of them has their own separate mind from the body. That doesn’t sound very likely. I think that the reason we think that the human mind is significantly different from other organisms is because we like to think that we are the only intelligent species on Earth, but modern science shows us that we aren’t that much different from other organisms. After all, humans share about 50 percent of their DNA with bananas, so we aren’t that
Patricia Smith Churchland declared that there is no such thing as the mind and that everything that comes into thinking comes directly from states in our brain. She has stated four reasons to justify her claim (Churchland 305). The first reason is that modern biology, physics, and chemistry have found no proof that a mind exist separate from the body. For example, modern physicists agree that anything that does not have any mass or occupy any space cannot exist. Her second claim was the physical stimuli to the brain has a direct effect on how thinking goes on in the brain. This makes sense because there are mental drugs, such as antidepressants and anxiety medicine, that influences how we perceive the world. The third reason why there is no mind is that computer science has advanced far enough that it could be identical to human thinking. This means that there is nothing special or magic about the human brain that would make it be real, yet not physical in our world. Her final point was that there is no physical data that could prove that the mind exists separate of the body. Churchland is an empirical philosopher and a neuroscientist, so she only believes in data that can be scientifically proved and there is no legitimate data that the mind …show more content…
The idea that there is something special about our mind that could not exist in this universe yet still influence our bodies is hard to believe. We know that animals also have brains, so let’s suppose that they also have a mind separate from the body. What about organisms without a brain? Could they have a nonphysical mind that helps them to survive? There are more than trillions of organisms on earth and that would mean that every one of them has their own separate mind from the body. That doesn’t sound very likely. I think that the reason we think that the human mind is significantly different from other organisms is because we like to think that we are the only intelligent species on Earth, but modern science shows us that we aren’t that much different from other organisms. After all, humans share about 50 percent of their DNA with bananas, so we aren’t that