I have to write this philosophy paper and I need your imput because i'm not sure what to write about...

The topic is this: Write a paper on the question whether there are immaterial minds.

minds? no minds?

what do you believe.

If i argue that there are no minds, then i need to explain why it seems to us that we have thoughts and feelings even if natural science cannot detect them in our brains. If i argue that there are minds, then i need to explain how its possible that something immaterial acts on something material, such as our body, and vice versa....

Any ideas? what do you think?

so i take it you're talking about cartesian dualism and such?

i've spent the entire semester learning about that stuff, so i know a lil about it.

I pretty much agree with the dualist theory, as the mere fact that you can perceive your mind means that it exists.

You could talk about the 'identity theory' of the mind-body relation if you don't believe in dualism, or you could talk about 'functionalism'. I'm not going to tell you what those things are, as thats your job. But those are just some ideas.

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There are no minds. There is just a clump of cells or squishy things inside everyone's noggin. Sorry for the nerdspeak.

Think about it. If anyone believes in evolution, how can they support the idea of a mind. At what point in the evolutionary process did it come about. What existed before the mind? Do unicelled animals have minds? Did the mind evolve too? In one genration there was a mind, and then in another there was one because one animal experienced a mutation that created the mind? It seems silly to me.

Check out an area called evolutionary psychology (or evolutionary biology) or a book The Moral Animal by Robert Wright, among many goods books on biologial explanations for human behavior.

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Talk about apriori vs aposteriori truths.

thanks guys- i'm slowly getting to the point of desciding what to discuss and what my argument will be...

quote:

Originally posted by iloop I have to write this philosophy paper and I need your imput because i'm not sure what to write about... The topic is this: Write a paper on the question whether there are immaterial minds. minds? no minds? what do you believe. If i argue that there are no minds, then i need to explain why it seems to us that we have thoughts and feelings even if natural science cannot detect them in our brains. If i argue that there are minds, then i need to explain how its possible that something immaterial acts on something material, such as our body, and vice versa.... Any ideas? what do you think?

your stuck. but if u argue the christian worldview than, there are minds, because god created man "in his own image", and so we have a consious mind, with the ability to reason, and souls that dwell within our physical bodies, and therefore influence the body, and body influences the soul, until the soul is released from the body. we are the only creation with the knowledge of good and evil, or right and wrong, which orginally, we were created with the knowledge of only good, but too bad for us adam and eve sinned. animals do not have this capacity.

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The mind is material in the sense that it is directly a function of the brain and cannot exist beyond the confines of the brain. Want proof? Start cutting chunks out of someone's brain and their mind will change drastically. Even just changing the chemical composition of the brain with drugs (legal and illegal) will observably effect the mind of the user. If you were going to argue for an immaterial mind, you would have to explain why its composition can change drastically with just the slightest alteration to the structure of the brain.

If there is an immaterial aspect to the mind though, as tylerc pointed out, it can probably be argued through the paradigm of Cartesian dualism and his bifurcation of the body and mind. While there aren't many strict Cartesian philosophers left these days (most of his ideas have been transcended by more complex, more recent philosophies) the idea that our subjective experience - that is, what we experience in our "mind" - is somehow different and seperate from the "external" world is a re-emerging theme in philosophies all over the world. So, that is, although the mind can be quantified satisfactorily via a perspective of materialistic reductivism, it could still be argued that our subjective experience of consciousness transcends reductivist theory, as the thoughts, ideas and memories that comprise our "mind" can not easily be quantified, or empirically observed even though they unquestionably reside in the brain. In other words, even though we may understand how memories and ideas are stored, created and retreived in the brain, the neural structures we can point to and say "this is where the mind is" do not adequately describe what we directly, subjectively experience. Therefore, even though the mind is technically reducible to materialistic functions, our own subjective experience of the mind and of consciousness transcends materialistic explanations and thus, it could be argued, our mind is in a very real sense "immaterial".

Hope that helps. And yeah, you'd probably get more responses if you moved this to the political forum.

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Originally posted by dj_bas wow awesome!! that's way bigger than mine

wow hey man that really helps- thanks for the help guys i think i'm almost ready to start the paper....

how do you move topics??