Soul, Mind and Body

Question 1

What is Dualism?

Answer 1

The view that there are two different types of existence: mental and physical.

Question 2

What is Substance Dualism?

Answer 2

Descartes’ version of dualism that the two different types of existence are two different substances, e.g. mental (characterised by thinking) and physical (characterised by extension). A substance is a type of existence which cannot be broken down into anything further.

Question 3

What is Monism?

Answer 3

The view that there is one kind of existence.

Question 4

What is Materialism?

Answer 4

The view that the one kind of existence is physical substance.

Question 5

What is Plato’s Dualism?

Answer 5

Plato believed the body was like a prison for the soul, trapping it in this world of appearances. He thought our souls came from the world of forms and had a vague memory of the forms.

Question 6

What is Plato’s argument from recollection?

Answer 6

The argument from recollection is one of Plato’s arguments for the existence of the world of forms and also the existence of the soul.
Plato points out that we somehow do have knowledge of perfect, eternal and unchanging concepts. These include concepts like perfect beauty and justice.

Question 7

How does Plato believe we are born with these concepts, such as beauty and justice?

Answer 7

His answer is that we must have somehow gained these concepts before we were born, a priori. It follows that there must be a part of us (our soul) which existed in a realm where there were perfect forms. In the world of forms there are perfect mathematical forms and perfect forms like the form of beauty and the form of justice.

Question 8

How are we born with a recollection of the forms, according to Plato?

Answer 8

Our soul apprehends them before becoming trapped in this world of appearances. Anamnesis is the process of re-remembering these forms through a posteriori sense experience.

Question 9

How is beauty and justice subjective? A critique to Plato.

Answer 9

Beauty and morality are subjective; in the eye of the beholder. They seem like matters of opinion, not fact. It seems to be culture that determines and conditions what a person finds beautiful or just and as a result, views on what is beautiful or just change over time and differ cross-culturally.

Question 10

What is Hume’s criticism of Plato?

Answer 10

We can actually create the idea of perfection in our minds even if we have never experienced it. We have take our concept of ‘imperfect’ and simply conceive of its negation: ‘not imperfect’ to gain the concept of ‘perfect’.

Question 11

What is the final conclusion to Plato?

Answer 11

Even if Plato was correct that we were born with perfect concepts, it doesn’t mean a soul and world of forms is the only or even best explanation. Evolution could have programmed us to have a sense of morality, beauty and the evolution of intelligence could explain being born with mathematical ability.

Question 12

What is Aristotle’s Materialism?

Answer 12

Aristotle rejected the idea of the world of forms as lacking empirical validity, thus he also rejected the idea of some non-physical soul which could have come from such a world. Nonetheless, Aristotle still believes in the soul, but as the form of the physical body.

Question 13

What is Aristotle referring to ‘form’ as?

Answer 13

Form means essence, which is a thing’s defining characteristic.
However, the essence of a human is not merely its shape. Aristotle claimed the defining feature of a human being is the ability to reason. Aristotle claimed that the soul was the formal cause of the body.

Question 14

How is Aristotle’s from of causation unscientific?

Answer 14

F. Bacon was called the father of empiricism for establishing the modern scientific method. He claimed that formal causation is a metaphysical matter that was beyond empirical study. He gave the illustration of the ‘whiteness’ of snow and explained how science could investigate how snow results from air and water, but this only tells us about its efficient cause. So Bacon thought that form existed, but Aristotle was wrong to think science could study it it.

Question 15

What do Neuroscientists believe about rationality and the material brain? A critique to Aristotle.

Answer 15

For Aristotle, the form of a human is a rational soul, but most neuroscientists would claim that rationality reduces to material brain structure and its physical processes. So again, what Aristotle thought of as ‘form’, actually reduces to material structure. There appears to be no room left in modern science for formal or final causation.

Question 16

Why is it difficult to dismiss Aritotle’s argument of the soul?

Answer 16

The brain is so complicated and while some of it is understood a bit, processes like reason and consciousness have not even begun to be understood. So modern science cannot yet justifiably dismiss Aristotelian soul & form as the explanation of reason.

Question 17

What is Descartes Substance Dualism?

Answer 17

Descartes’ substance dualism is the theory that there are two distinct substances, mental and physical. A substance is a fundamental type of existence which can’t be broken down into anything else. The essence of mental substance is thinking, the essence of physical substance is extension.

Question 18

What is Descartes Indivisibility argument?

Answer 18

Descartes argued that the essential property of physical substance is extension. Anything that is extended in space can be divided, because there has to be some point along which it could conceivably be divided. The mind does not appear to be divisible.

Question 19

What is Leibniz’ law?

Answer 19

Leibniz’ law is that identical things must have the same properties. The physical has the property of being divisible but the mental does not. If the body and mind were identical, then that one identical thing would be both divisible and indivisible, which is impossible. Therefore, the mind and body are not identical.

Question 20

What is an issue with Descartes idea that the mind is indivisible?

Answer 20

The mind can be divided into perception, memory, emotions and so on. So, the mind and body share the same property of divisibility and thus could be identical.

Question 21

What is Descartes response to the issue that the mind is indivisible?

Answer 21

By the mind he means consciousness. Perception, memory and feeling are not divisions of consciousness, they are different modes of consciousness. It is the same undivided mind that perceives, remembers or feels emotions.

Question 22

What is the masked man fallacy?

Answer 22

Imagine someone heard about a masked man robbing a bank. They can conceive that it’s not their father, but if it really was their father then it’s impossible for it to not be their father, yet that was what they conceived. Therefore, we can conceive of the impossible. In that case, something’s being conceivable does not mean that it is possible.

Question 23

What is a critique of the masked man fallacy?

Answer 23

We can conceive of the impossible due to ignorance. The person in the example is ignorant of who is under the mask which is what allows them to conceive of the impossible.

Question 24

What is Descartes assuming through his theory?

Answer 24

That the way the mind appears to the mind is how the mind actually is. He thinks that a clear and distinct intellectual perception of the mind shows us what it really is; a mental substance with the essential property of thinking.

Question 25

What is a criticism to Dualism?

Answer 25

If dualism is correct and the mind and body are separate fundamental types of existence, how is it possible for them to interact? This requires non-physical mental substance to causally affect and interact with physical substance, but it’s not clear how that would be possible.

Question 26

Whys is Thermodynamics important when considering a soul?

Answer 26

Physicists say that the universe is ‘causally closed’ because of the second law of thermodynamics that energy can be neither created nor destroyed – only transferred from one state to another. This means that energy cannot come from outside the physical universe and affect things within it. However that seems to be how substance dualism would have to work since the mental is supposedly outside the physical universe. Therefore substance dualism is false.

Question 27

What is Gilbert Ryle’s Categorical mistake?

Answer 27

“The dogma of the Ghost in the Machine“. I hope to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle. It is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind. It is, namely, a category mistake.” – Ryle.