Philosophy of mind

Humans’ amazing ability to recognize faces has one limitation; we cannot recognize upside-down faces. Studies have shown that while we can recognize inverted objects, we can’t tell “which of two inverted faces is the original when one has been slightly altered.” Dubbed the Thatcher Illusion, it is a result of our brain evolving a specialized facial recognition area separate from the area used for all other objects. The reason why is very simple; faces are always upright. There’s no need to take…

Another, more scientific way we can look at the evidence of life after death is to dive into the world of quantum physics. Professor Robert Lanza of Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina uses two theory’s to explain how the mysterious world of quantum physics proves there is life after death. His first theory is called Biocentrism. Biocentrism is the view or belief that the rights and needs of humans are not more important than those of other living things. In this theory,…

Nagel believes that conscious experience exists in many different forms of animal life; although, he is not sure that it exists in lower animals or what would count as evidence for consciousness (421). The fact that an organism has conscious experience at all, for Nagel, means that there is something that it is like to be that organism, in other words—what it is like for the organism. This "what it is like" he calls this the "subjective character" of experience. This subjective character of…

Dualism is a view where the mind and body are two fundamentally different things. It’s the thought that the body is a pure physical state, and the mind is a pure mental/non-physical state. The body has an identified location, is led by the laws of nature, and it is open to the world to see. Whereas the mind has no location, isn’t led by the laws of nature, and is not public. Materialism is the view that individuals are nothing more than physical elements put together. For we all are made up of…

experiences. As for the world of ideas, it is known as the mind, as the mind encounters its own experiences and has the ability to reason. Additionally, substance dualism is the relation of both the physical and non-physical world. It identifies how both the body and mind have different features and capabilities, but at the end they both interact with each other as they cannot survive on their own. I defend substance dualism because, I believe the mind and the body have their own important…

Ryle believes that Descartes made the same mistake in his theory because it categorizes the mind and body as separate things, when it should be categorize as one thing. The reasoning behind this is because Ryle believes that the mind is not separate or completely private. For that reason, Ryle believes that we are able to understand…

Your insightful discussion lead me to refresh my knowledge about William James. I had forgotten that he believed that our consciousness was a continuous and unending stream of thoughts, feelings, images, ideas, sensations, conceptions, and emotions that appear before our conscious awareness and then pass away. The most significant role of this stream was selecting what to pay attention to (Carreira, 2013). The visual image of a stream could be another way to explain attention, concentration…

I strongly agree with the cognitive approach where your consciousness is an interpretation of what your thoughts are actively focused upon, rather than the psychodynamic approach, where your consciousness is based entirely on your unconscious thoughts. Baars (2011) discussed the method of contrastive analysis and the famous, well-studied technique, called binocular rivalry. The left eye and right eye are presented with very different images and the brain flips between the two images. Baars…

The mind body problem is “the system of ancient questions about the nature of the mental and its relations to the bodily (Bunge 1980).” It is the question about how one’s mind can at all work with one’s body and the relationship that the two have with each other. How does one’s mind control one’s body? What are the implications of differing beliefs on this point? Does this relationship reframe an idea of freewill or determinism? All of these interesting questions can be raised when this question…

The problem of alienation is one of the, if not the most, important of philosophical questions. Rather than simply an element of cultural philosophy, the question has broad implications that have connotations for ethics, metaphysics and epistemology itself; the question of the nature of the self and it 's relation to others ought to be considered the first philosophical problem. The question has several implications that shape the rest of the philosophical discourse; the relation between subject…