Concise Formulation Of The Descartes' Substance Dualism (Term Paper Sample)

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Philosophy of the mind
The Mind/Body problem involves the following two positions: Substance Dualism and Materialism.
Concise formulation of the Descartes’ Substance Dualism.
Most philosophers support dualism because they believe that what we know about the physical and what we know about the mental suggests that the mental and the physical are in fact ontologically different. Descartes upheld that there were two different types of substance: mental substance, and physical substance. Dualism can be based upon religion, belief in life after death, or belief that people are more valuable than mere material objects. Most dualists are dualists because they believe that descriptions of the mental cannot be reduced or replaced by descriptions in terms of the physical. However, our minds are not the same as our brains. Most dualist, says a mind has no weight, mass, size, or location.
Concise formulation of Materialism.
Materialism is any theory that maintains that human beings consist of only the physical bodies. The materialist argues that dualism could never be the basis of a science of the mental. Since mental states are alleged to occur outside of physical space, it follows that they cannot be studied by observation and experiment.
Distinction between Reductive Materialism and Eliminative materialism.
According to reductive materialism we have two vocabularies that furnish us with two different ways of talking about the same thing. The identity theory or reductive materialism claims that there are mental states, but they are identical with certain states of the brain. This theory attempts a theoretical reduction, which is the process of substituting one theory for another by means of a law-by-law correlation. We have the language of the mental for describing sensations and pain. Reductive materialist can point to many examples where the same thing can be described in two quite different ways. Furthermore, the reductive materialists claim that the case is the same with common sense psychology and neuroscience.
Eliminative materialist on the other hand argues that the day is approaching when neuroscience is so well developed that we will discard common sense psychology. The reductive materialist can reply that although some of common sense psychology might be dropped, enough of it will remain so that reductive materialism is the more warranted view. Although time will tell, there is some call for optimism regarding this claim, as the recent cognitive turn in psychology and the rise of artificial intelligence has seen the use of terms like belief and thought or the use of terms that really amount to the same thing, such as information flow and information parser. If these areas produce adequate psychological theories that use terms much like the ones in common sense psychology, then reductive materialism might seem like a better choice. The reductive materialist agrees that pains cannot be described by the terms of science, but that it doesnt follow that pains are nonphysical. The dualist will object to eliminative materialism on the grounds that neuroscience will only be able to explain how the brain works, but not how the mind works, and that the descriptive terms available to the eliminativist are not adequate to describe mental states.
In light of the criticisms offered of both Substance Dualism and Materialism, which account is more plausible? Explain why.
Reductive materialism is more plausible. This applies only if common sense psychology is more or less as powerful and sophisticated a theory as neuroscience. This is seen as a requirement because there is no reduction that can take place unless the laws in one theory play a similar role in that theory as do corresponding laws in the reducing theory. In some cases, the law was written in terms of one theory that described the behavior of some natural phenomenon were seen to correspond with the laws of a second theory, which may have been a better theory in other respects. In other cases the second theory is obviously a better theory, because it explains all that the first theory did since its laws correspond to laws in the first theory, but also has virtues that the first theory does not
The philosophical problem of personal identity involves two positions offered by John Locke and David Hume.
What make the problem of identity of persons more perplexing are the added dimension of consciousness and the subsequent emergence of self. The problem of personal identity concerns how we can identify a single person over a time interval.
Competing accounts as they are provided by the authors included in our course readings.
John Locke relational account argues that the sameness of consciousness makes someone the same continuously existing person over time. The significant associations, on his view, are those that obtain among present conscious memories and the earlier experiences or actions remembered. He is a transitional figure because despite his belief in substances, he initiated the view that personal identity may be understood in terms of relations. He distinguishes between identity as determined by unity of substance and identity as determined by the idea of the kind to which an individual belongs. Locke’s theory of real and nominal essences, the idea of the kind, and consequently the kind itself, is framed by us. Locke then suggests that the identity of a person is of the latter sort. Furthermore h...