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Descartes’ Meditations

Descartes’ Meditations. Descartes’ Meditations. Phys obj’s exist. Mind  Body. Math. Geom. C & D perceptions are accurate. God exists. I exist (as a thinking thing). Descartes’ Dualism. If Descartes is right, that mind is distinct from body, what is their relationship?

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Descartes’ Meditations

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  1. Descartes’ Meditations

  2. Descartes’ Meditations Phys obj’s exist Mind  Body Math Geom. C & D perceptions are accurate God exists I exist(as a thinking thing)

  3. Descartes’ Dualism • If Descartes is right, that mind is distinct from body, what is their relationship? • Each affects the other-- “Interaction”: • Physical injury causes mental pain. • Mental decisions cause physical actions. • How does interaction occur? • The “common” sense (p. 56) = Pineal gland

  4. Pineal Gland

  5. Mind-Body Interaction

  6. Mind-Body Interaction “Swing your right arm now!”

  7. Satellite : Ground Antenna :: Soul : Pineal Gland?

  8. Mind-Body Interaction • Soul causes things to happen in the brain that wouldn’t have happened if soul had not intervened. • If non-physical soul can influence physical brain, then human brain must not be completely governed by the laws of physics! • Why not?

  9. Solar System What if God changed the course of a planet?

  10. Can we predict an eclipse?

  11. Descartes’ Dualism • Soul : Body :: Captain : Ship? The “Ghost in the Machine”?

  12. Descartes’ Dualism Like a captain at the helm of a ship? • “No” (p. 53): • Soul and body are “commingled”. • I am a “union” of soul and body. • I feel damage, I don’t “learn about it”.

  13. Descartes’ Dualism • How can a physical event cause a non-physical mental event? • How can a non-physical mental event cause a physical event? • Perhaps it’s impossible.

  14. Psychophysical Parallelism • Mind and physical world cannot causally interact. • So God must have arranged them to line up together. • “Pre-established Harmony” Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716)

  15. Psycho-physical Parallelism “Yow!” “Pull back arm!!”

  16. Visual-Audio Parallelism • Relationship of visual track to sound track in a movie. What you see on the screen doesn’t really cause what you hear. It’s just arranged by the director to seem like that.

  17. Nagel’s Dual-Aspect Theory • What Does It All Mean? pp. 33-36. • There is only one kind of substance--matter. • But matter can have two different kinds of states: mental states and physical states. Thomas Nagel (1937- )

  18. Nagel’s Dual-Aspect Theory • Computers are just physical things. • But we can describe them two ways: • Physically: “The circuits are....” Mentally: “It is looking for my document.” or “It is checking the spelling of my paper.”

  19. Positions on Mind-Body

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