Philosophical foundations Flashcards
Dualism
The world consists of two different types of substances.
Physical - matter, energy, stars, mountains etc
Mental - subjective, emotions, thoughts etc
Monism
The world consists of only one substance.
Disagrees about the ultimate nature of the fundamental substance.
Interactionism
Two-way causal interaction
Bottom-up and top-down casual pathways.
Cartesian dualism
The mind is fundamentally different form and independent of our body, and may continue to exist without the physical matter.
Mind and body are in intimate connection through the pineal gland.
Epiphenomenalism
Denies mental causation and says that the nonphysical mental reality cannot casually influence physical matter or brain activity.
But allows causation from the physical to the mental.
Conscious events are a dead end.
Gives no active role to our mental life
Parallelism
Denies any causal relations.
Accepts that our external physical reality and och internal psychological reality are on total harmony and synchrony, a perfect correlation.
Pre-established harmony
The physical and mental worlds are deterministic and everything is pre-determined.
‘‘God pushes the start buttons at the same time and there harmony will forever be preserved’’ - Gottfried Liebniz
Occasionalism
The harmony between the two worlds are not pre-established, they are separately established for each event or occasion.
Believes that God rules over this.
Materialism
Based on natural sciences and the modern scientific view of the world.
Main problem is to explain how consciousness fits in with the materialistic scientific picture.
Eliminative materialism
Tries to eliminate the notion of consciousness from science.
If other theories and discoveries can be eliminated, so can consciousness since it isn’t hardly scientific at all.
Reductive materialism
Tries to reduce consciousness to something that science can handle better.
Accepts that conscious mental phenomena exists, and argues that it is a physical entity or process in the brain.
Consciousness can be reduced to the brain.
Microphysicalism
Only the lowest and most fundamental bottom level of physical reality is real.
The macroscopic world is only an illusion.
Emergent materialism
Higher levels of physical phenomena can emerge from lower levels, which are built upon each other in levels of physical organization.
Weak emergence
Once our theories can describe the lower levels of phenomena, we will be able to describe and explain the higher levels of phenomena.
Strong emergence
We will never be able to understand or explain the mechanisms of emergence, and we will forever lack understanding of why the two realities correlate.
Idealism
Mental reality is the primary reality, and physical matter is a mere illusion.
All that exists consist go conscious mental phenomena, and physical objects are illusions or constructs based on and dependent of the mental.
Phenomenalism
We live in a dream world that vanishes when nobody is watching.
Matter is just a permanent possibility of sensation.
Solipsism
Only my own sphere of consciousness exists
Neutral monism
The universe is neither mental nor physical, it consists of a even more fundamental substance. Or one that include both in some primitive form.
Double-aspect theory
The fundamental substance include a mental and a physical aspect, and therefore also does the world.
Panpshychism
Everything physical is always coupled with mental features, and the two are inseparable, fundamental aspects of reality.
Functionalism
The mind works according to an algorithm or a set of rules that describes how to transform sensory input information to behavioral output information.
The mind is distinct ant independent of the physical matter in the brain.
Says nothing about consciousness, subjectivity or qualia
