Home » Immanuel Kant » Compare And Contrast Humes Theory Of The Mind Body Problem Essay

Compare And Contrast Humes Theory Of The Mind Body Problem Essay

The mind body problem is a how we process things in our life, how our mental status and our physical being can learn from one another. How can the mind process anything and it is a nonphysical entity, how do people learn from using our minds and our body at different times in our lives? If we see something with our eyes and it has a lesson in the thing we saw, how does our mind comprehend what the lesson is in the particular thing that we saw with our eyes? This is what the mind body problem is presenting to us, how are our bodies and mind learning from one another (SUO, 2016)?

The mind represents our conscious and the way we think of things in life, but what is consciousness and how is our mind thinking without the help of the physical body? Locke disagreed with Descartes whole theory of the mind body problem. He thought that as we learn anything in life it becomes and imprint on our mind, he also thought that the body uses the senses to help the mind learn. That anything in life we encounter we will have a memory of it in our mind because we experienced it through our senses. We start our imprint in of the mind at birth and it continues through life.

With everything our body encounters it will stay with us because we will have a file on the mind of this image if we saw it, touched it. We learn things through senses in our body, after the body has experienced it the mind will received the image and store it. Descartes didn’t seem to find any answers to his questions to the mind body problem because he thought of the mind and the body as two different entities, and Locke thought of the as one, but one got the information first and it passed what information it obtained on to the other.

Locke saw them as a team working ogether and Descartes saw them as working apart. Descartes mind body problem was solely built on his fact that we of two separate entities, the body being one, and the mind being the other. He thought that the body was the main front of how we did things in life, how we viewed things, and how we decided on things in our lives. He wondered how the mind would even begin to interact with the body if they are two separate things. How can the mind work with the body if it is a nonphysical entity? Descartes did not believe in the mind because he thought it was a false entity.

Locke sought out to make us believe that the mind and body exists as one, that they work together on the same level but at different times in our lives, that if we use our senses it is immediately sent to our mind so that we can have an image put there of the things we encountered in our lives. The mind is used as our memory bank of our lives. Our senses are the pen and the mind is the paper, and our life experiences is the painting that is left behind. If the mind and the body was two separate things, then how are we receiving the memories of our life?

Humes theory was kind of similar to Locke’s theory on the mind body problem except he didn’t include god in him theory. He based his theory off the senses we use in our lives, and the impressions and ideas we set for ourselves in life. Humes was solely bent on the experiences we had in our lives, the impressions we make, and the idea of things, but those ideas are based on empiricism only (SUO, 2016). I think that between both Humes and Locke they have the better idea of the mind body problem, it is less of a problem when you hear their side of the experiment. They take a ifferent approach on the subject and make it more relatable to people.

I understood their version more because they did not include mostly facts about god’s uniqueness, they actually included facts on how the mind and the body used either our senses to communicate with one another, or how our impressions play a part in our experiences in the mind and the body. Locke’s objection was more understanding that Humes’s because he made more points on the subject, he had more information on the topic and he also made more since of the subject. Descartes objection seemed to be based on the magery of god, Humes objection was us using more of an impression than us using both our body and mind.

Rationalists tend to think that some ideas, at least, such as the idea of God, are innate, empiricists hold that all ideas come from experience. Although the rationalists tend to be remembered for their positive doctrine concerning innate ideas, their assertions are matched by a rejection of the notion that all ideas can be accounted for on the basis of experience alone. Spinoza conceives the mind and the body as one and the same thing, conceived under different attributes. Spinoza denies that there is any causal interaction between mind and body, and so Spinoza denies that any ideas are caused by bodily change.

Just as bodies can be affected only by other bodies, so ideas can be affected only by other ideas. This does not mean, however, that all ideas are innate for Spinoza. for Spinoza, and all such ideas are “inadequate,” or in other words, confused and lacking order for the intellect. “Adequate ideas,” on the other hand, which can be formed via Spinoza’s second and third kinds of knowledge, and which are clear and distinct and have order for the intellect, re not gained through chance encounters with external objects; rather, adequate ideas can be explained in terms of resources intrinsic to the mind.

The mind, for Spinoza, just by virtue of having ideas, which is its essence, has ideas of what Spinoza calls “common notions,” or in other words, those things which are “equally in the part and in the whole. ” (Princeton University Press, 1985). Our innate knowledge is not learned through either sense experience or intuition and deduction. It is just part of our nature. Experiences may trigger a process by which we bring this knowledge to consciousness, but the xperiences do not provide us with the knowledge itself. It has in some way been with us all along.

According to some rationalists, we gained the knowledge in an earlier existence. According to others, God provided us with it at creation. Still others say it is part of our nature through natural selection. Most forms of rationalism involve notable commitments to other philosophical positions. One is a commitment to the denial of skepticism for at least some area of knowledge. If we claim to know some truths by intuition or deduction or to have some innate knowledge, we obviously reject skepticism with egard to those truths.

Rationalism in the form of the Intuition/ Deduction thesis is also committed to epistemic foundationalism, the view that we know some truths without basing our belief in them on any others and that we then use this foundational knowledge to know more truths. Empiricist notion that language is essentially an adventitious construct, taught by “conditioning” or by drill and explicit explanation, or built up by elementary “data-processing” procedures, but, in any event, relatively independent in its structure of any innate mental faculties.

The rationalist approach holds that beyond the peripheral processing mechanisms, there are innate ideas and principles of various kinds that determine the form of the acquired knowledge in what may be a rather restricted and highly organized way. A condition for innate mechanisms to become activated is that appropriate stimulation be presented. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) argued that moral requirements are based on a standard of rationality he dubbed the “Categorical Imperative” (CI). Immorality thus involves a violation of the CI and is thereby irrational.

Other philosophers, uch as Locke and Hobbes, had also argued that moral requirements are based on standards of rationality. However, these standards were either desire-based instrumental principles of rationality or based on sui generis rational intuitions. Kant agreed with many of his predecessors that an analysis of practical reason will reveal only the requirement that rational agents must conform to instrumental principles. Yet he argued that conformity to the Cl (a non-instrumental principle) and hence to moral requirements themselves, can nevertheless be shown to be essential to rational agency.

This argument was ased on his striking doctrine that a rational will must be regarded as autonomous, or free in the sense of being the author of the law that binds it. The fundamental principle of morality – the Cl – is none other than the law of an autonomous will. Thus, at the heart of Kant’s moral philosophy is a conception of reason whose reach in practical affairs goes well beyond that of a Humean ‘slave’ to the passions. Moreover, it is the presence of this self-governing reason in each person that Kant thought offered decisive grounds for viewing each as possessed of equal worth and deserving of equal respect.

Cite This Work

To export a reference to this essay please select a referencing style below:

Reference Copied to Clipboard.
Reference Copied to Clipboard.
Reference Copied to Clipboard.
Reference Copied to Clipboard.