Descartes’ dualism
•The mind is a separate
substance from the body.
–What am I? I am a thing
that thinks. I cannot doubt
this, yet I can doubt
whether I have a body. So I
can be separated from a
body.
–The body has parts, the
mind has no parts. So they
are different kinds of thing.
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Materialism and mental
properties
•Substances can have
different sorts of
properties
•Property dualism:
mental properties are
not physical properties
•Type identity theory:
mental properties are
physical properties
Hmm…
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The problem for dualism
•If the mind is just thought, not in space, and
matter is just extension, in space, how could
one possibly causally affect the other?
•All physical effects have a sufficient physical
cause. Nothing physical happens needs a
non-physical explanation.
•Mental causes would violate the laws of
physics, e.g. law of conservation of energy.
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25/9/12 12
Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/what-is-consciousness/
同一理论
史忠植 意识与注意
Mind-body identity and
reduction
•Ontological reduction: the things in one
domain (e.g. mental things) are identical with
some of the things in another domain.
•Reduction: this makes the ‘reduced’ domain
more intelligible
•If mind = body, then mental causation doesn’t
violate of laws of physics and we can
understand how it happens (usually physical
way).
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功
能主义
史忠植 意识与注意 15
–Functionalism and the inheritance of traits
–Functionalism
•The principle that the best way to understand a
biological phenomenon (a behavior or a physiological
process) is to try to understand its useful functions
for the organism.
25/9/12
追
随
耳
非
追
随
耳
频
率强度等物理特征 分析
选择
性过滤器
意义
分析
O O O O O O O O
O O O O O O O O
自己名
字
反
应
T
r
e
i
s
m
a
n
的
衰
减
模
型
衰减
模型
(Attenuation model)
25/9/12 史忠植 意识与注意 78