1 / 19

Descartes’ Meditations

Descartes’ Meditations. Descartes’ Meditations. Phys obj’s exist. Mind  Body. Math. Geom. C & D perceptions are accurate. God exists. I exist (as a thinking thing). Descartes’ Dualism. If Descartes is right, that mind is distinct from body, what is their relationship?

tdaw
Download Presentation

Descartes’ Meditations

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Descartes’ Meditations

  2. Descartes’ Meditations Phys obj’s exist Mind  Body Math Geom. C & D perceptions are accurate God exists I exist(as a thinking thing)

  3. Descartes’ Dualism • If Descartes is right, that mind is distinct from body, what is their relationship? • Each affects the other-- “Interaction”: • Physical injury causes mental pain. • Mental decisions cause physical actions. • How does interaction occur? • The “common” sense (p. 56) = Pineal gland

  4. Pineal Gland

  5. Mind-Body Interaction

  6. Mind-Body Interaction “Swing your right arm now!”

  7. Satellite : Ground Antenna :: Soul : Pineal Gland?

  8. Mind-Body Interaction • Soul causes things to happen in the brain that wouldn’t have happened if soul had not intervened. • If non-physical soul can influence physical brain, then human brain must not be completely governed by the laws of physics! • Why not?

  9. Solar System What if God changed the course of a planet?

  10. Can we predict an eclipse?

  11. Descartes’ Dualism • Soul : Body :: Captain : Ship? The “Ghost in the Machine”?

  12. Descartes’ Dualism Like a captain at the helm of a ship? • “No” (p. 53): • Soul and body are “commingled”. • I am a “union” of soul and body. • I feel damage, I don’t “learn about it”.

  13. Descartes’ Dualism • How can a physical event cause a non-physical mental event? • How can a non-physical mental event cause a physical event? • Perhaps it’s impossible.

  14. Psychophysical Parallelism • Mind and physical world cannot causally interact. • So God must have arranged them to line up together. • “Pre-established Harmony” Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716)

  15. Psycho-physical Parallelism “Yow!” “Pull back arm!!”

  16. Visual-Audio Parallelism • Relationship of visual track to sound track in a movie. What you see on the screen doesn’t really cause what you hear. It’s just arranged by the director to seem like that.

  17. Nagel’s Dual-Aspect Theory • What Does It All Mean? pp. 33-36. • There is only one kind of substance--matter. • But matter can have two different kinds of states: mental states and physical states. Thomas Nagel (1937- )

  18. Nagel’s Dual-Aspect Theory • Computers are just physical things. • But we can describe them two ways: • Physically: “The circuits are....” Mentally: “It is looking for my document.” or “It is checking the spelling of my paper.”

  19. Positions on Mind-Body

More Related