Philosophy - Module 7

Personal identity persists over time because you retain memories of yourself at different points, and each of those memories is connected to one before it

Memory theory

Human beings are composed of both a conscious spirit-mind and a non-conscious physical body.

Mind-Body Dualism

Conscious minds are the product of physical brain activity, and nothing more.

Mind-Body Materialism

One's present life is followed by a series of new lives in new physical bodies.

Reincarnation

True or False: Philosophers agree that human consciousness must consist of at least three common features; conscious experiences must be private, non-localizable, and unintentional.

False

True or False: The case of Phineas Gage proves that the mind (e.g. personality) is not affected by what happens to the physical body.

False

True or False: The two foundational sources of knowledge about the mind are behavior and physiological monitoring.

False

The world is made only of physical stuff—including us.

Reductive physicalism

Two things must share all the same properties

Indiscernibility of Identicals

Traits that could be taken away from an object without making it a different thing

Accidental properties

Attacking Cartesian dualism as a Ghost in the Machine, Gilbert Ryle held to this view, which claims that all we can ever know about the human mind is what we can observe about how the body responds to different external stimuli.

Behaviorism

Personal identity persists over time because you remain in the body over time.

Body theory

When I die, my mind is released from my physical body, and it continues to live in a non-physical realm--as a "spirit" realm.

Disembodied theory

On this view, Mental states are caused by brain activities. The notion that you "love" someone would simply mean that you were having something like a Section 2-J neural state coupled with a little Sector 4-B activity.

Eliminative materialism

Physical states can give rise to mental states, but mental states cannot affect physical states

Epiphenomenalism

Core elements necessary for a thing to be the thing that it is

Essential properties

At the moment of death, everything about my personal identity that is encoded in my present physical body is copied over into the new ethereal body, such as my physical appearance and my brain patterns.

Ethereal body theory

True or False: According to John Locke, if you wish to accept the view of mind-body materialism then you will need to reject any faith in God because the two are mutually exclusive views.

False

On this view, mental experiences are simply the result of various patterns of stimulus inputs. Since all that "mind" requires on this view is a processor, and not necessarily a human brain, this means that such a mind could technically arise from non-human mechanisms as well.

Functionalism

The property of being interchangeable with other objects of the same kind

Fungibility

Rather than believing that physical and spirit realms are radically different, with no overlapping areas, this view holds that body and spirit are made of the same kind of stuff, but that they differ only in degrees on a spectrum of lightness and heaviness.

Gradualism

Our physical stuff and mental (non-physical stuff) seems curiously able to affect one another. Our body affects our mind and our minds can affects our body.

Interactionism

The question of consciousness is unsolvable by human minds due to the compartmentalized nature of our minds.

Mysterianism

On this view, bodies and spirits operate in their own realms, having no causal connections or interaction with each other. And yet my mental experiences and physical events occur simultaneously within both realms.

Parallelism

This refers to instances of subjective, first-person experiences

Qualia

The world is made of both physical and nonphysical stuff, and the mind cannot be reduced to the body

Substance dualism

This refers to the philosophical investigation into how the human mind and human body are related to each other.

The Mind-Body Problem

I could never know for certain that you are a conscious being rather than an robot. Nor could I ever confirm that your claims concerning your own experiences are true.

The Problem of Other Minds

The identity-dilemma of determining whether anything remains the same throughout time, if small pieces of the original thing occasionally change, until, eventually, no single piece of the original body remains.

Theseus' Ship

True or False: Mary's Room is meant to serve as an argument against reductive physicalism.

True