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A phrenological mapping[1] of the brain – phrenology was among the first attempts to correlate mental functions with specific parts of the brain

Design Ethics is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind,

This article draft is based off of the featured philosophy of mind article on Wikipedia.

Dualism and monism are the two major schools of thought that attempt to resolve the mind–body problem. Dualism can be traced back to Plato,[2] and the Sankhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy,[3] but it was most precisely formulated by René Descartes in the 17th century.[4] Substance dualists argue that the mind is an independently existing substance, whereas property dualists maintain that the mind is a group of independent properties that emerge from and cannot be reduced to the brain, but that it is not a distinct substance.[5]

Mind–body problem edit

Main article: Mind–body problem

The mind–body problem concerns the explanation of the relationship that exists between minds, or mental processes, and bodily states or processes.[6] The main aim of philosophers working in this area is to determine the nature of the mind and mental states/processes, and how—or even if—minds are affected by and can affect the body.

Our perceptual experiences depend on stimuli that arrive at our various sensory organs from the external world, and these stimuli cause changes in our mental states, ultimately causing us to feel a sensation, which may be pleasant or unpleasant. Someone's desire for a slice of pizza, for example, will tend to cause that person to move his or her body in a specific manner and in a specific direction to obtain what he or she wants. The question, then, is how it can be possible for conscious experiences to arise out of a lump of gray matter endowed with nothing but electrochemical properties.[7]

A related problem is how someone's propositional attitudes (e.g. beliefs and desires) cause that individual's neurons to fire and his muscles to contract. These comprise some of the puzzles that have confronted epistemologists and philosophers of mind from at least the time of René Descartes.[4]

Dualist solutions to the mind–body problem edit

Dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter (or body). It begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical.[5] One of the earliest known formulations of mind–body dualism was expressed in the eastern Sankhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy (c. 650 BCE), which divided the world into purusha (mind/spirit) and prakriti (material substance).[3] Specifically, the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali presents an analytical approach to the nature of the mind.

In Western Philosophy, the earliest discussions of dualist ideas are in the writings of Plato who maintained that humans' "intelligence" (a faculty of the mind or soul) could not be identified with, or explained in terms of, their physical body.[2][8] However, the best-known version of dualism is due to René Descartes (1641), and holds that the mind is a non-extended, non-physical substance, a "res cogitans".[4] Descartes was the first to clearly identify the mind with consciousness and self-awareness, and to distinguish this from the brain, which was the seat of intelligence. He was therefore the first to formulate the mind–body problem in the form in which it still exists today.[4]

Computer science edit

Main article: Computer science

Computer science concerns itself with the automatic processing of information (or at least with physical systems of symbols to which information is assigned) by means of such things as computers.[9] From the beginning, computer programmers have been able to develop programs that permit computers to carry out tasks for which organic beings need a mind. A simple example is multiplication. But it is clear that computers do not use a mind to multiply. Could they, someday, come to have what we call a mind? This question has been propelled into the forefront of much philosophical debate because of investigations in the field of artificial intelligence.

Within AI, it is common to distinguish between a modest research program and a more ambitious one: this distinction was coined by John Searle in terms of a weak AI and strong AI. The exclusive objective of "weak AI", according to Searle, is the successful simulation of mental states, with no attempt to make computers become conscious or aware, etc. The objective of strong AI, on the contrary, is a computer with consciousness similar to that of human beings.[10] The program of strong AI goes back to one of the pioneers of computation Alan Turing. As an answer to the question "Can computers think?", he formulated the famous Turing test.[11] Turing believed that a computer could be said to "think" when, if placed in a room by itself next to another room that contained a human being and with the same questions being asked of both the computer and the human being by a third party human being, the computer's responses turned out to be indistinguishable from those of the human. Essentially, Turing's view of machine intelligence followed the behaviourist model of the mind—intelligence is as intelligence does. The Turing test has received many criticisms, among which the most famous is probably the Chinese room thought experiment formulated by Searle.[10]

The question about the possible sensitivity (qualia) of computers or robots still remains open. Some computer scientists believe that the specialty of AI can still make new contributions to the resolution of the "mind body problem". They suggest that based on the reciprocal influences between software and hardware that takes place in all computers, it is possible that someday theories can be discovered that help us to understand the reciprocal influences between the human mind and the brain (wetware).[12]

Psychology edit

Main article: Psychology

Psychology is the science that investigates mental states directly. It uses generally empirical methods to investigate concrete mental states like joy, fear or obsessions. Psychology investigates the laws that bind these mental states to each other or with inputs and outputs to the human organism.[13]

An example of this is the psychology of perception. Scientists working in this field have discovered general principles of the perception of forms. A law of the psychology of forms says that objects that move in the same direction are perceived as related to each other.[14] This law describes a relation between visual input and mental perceptual states. However, it does not suggest anything about the nature of perceptual states. The laws discovered by psychology are compatible with all the answers to the mind–body problem already described.

Cognitive science edit

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does, and how it works. It includes research on intelligence and behavior, especially focusing on how information is represented, processed, and transformed (in faculties such as perception, language, memory, reasoning, and emotion) within nervous systems (human or other animal) and machines (e.g. computers). Cognitive science consists of multiple research disciplines, including psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and education.[15] It spans many levels of analysis, from low-level learning and decision mechanisms to high-level logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organisation. Rowlands argues that cognition is enactive, embodied, embedded, affective and (potentially) extended. The position is taken that the "classical sandwich" of cognition sandwiched between perception and action is artificial; cognition has to be seen as a product of a strongly coupled interaction that cannot be divided this way.[16][17]

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ Oliver Elbs, Neuro-Esthetics: Mapological foundations and applications (Map 2003), (Munich 2005)
  2. ^ a b Plato (1995). E.A. Duke, W.F. Hicken, W.S.M. Nicoll, D.B. Robinson, J.C.G. Strachan (ed.). Phaedo. Clarendon Press. ISBN 1-4065-4150-8.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
  3. ^ a b Sri Swami Sivananda. "Sankhya:Hindu philosophy: The Sankhya".
  4. ^ a b c d Descartes, René (1998). Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Hacket Publishing Company. ISBN 0-87220-421-9.
  5. ^ a b Hart, W.D. (1996) "Dualism", in Samuel Guttenplan (org) A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell, Oxford, 265-7.
  6. ^ Kim, J. (1995). Honderich, Ted (ed.). Problems in the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  7. ^ Cite error: The named reference Kim was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  8. ^ Robinson, H. (1983): "Aristotelian dualism", Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 1, 123–44.
  9. ^ Sipser, M. (1998). Introduction to the Theory of Computation. Boston, Mass.: PWS Publishing Co. ISBN 0-534-94728-X.
  10. ^ a b Searle, John (1980). "Minds, Brains and Programs". The Behavioral and Brain Sciences (3): 417–424.
  11. ^ Turing, Alan (October 1950), "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Mind, LIX (236): 433–460, doi:10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433, ISSN 0026-4423
  12. ^ Russell, S. and Norvig, R. (1995). Artificial Intelligence:A Modern Approach. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc. ISBN 0-13-103805-2.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  13. ^ "Encyclopedia of Psychology".
  14. ^ Cite error: The named reference Pinker was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  15. ^ Thagard, Paul, Cognitive Science, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
  16. ^ Mark Rowlands (2010). "Chapter 3: The mind embedded". The new science of the mind: From extended mind to embodied phenomenology. MIT Press. pp. 51 ff. ISBN 0262014556.
  17. ^ Dave Ward, Mog Stapleton (2012). "Es are good. Cognition as enacted, embodied, embedded, affective and extended". In Fabio Paglieri, ed (ed.). Consciousness in Interaction: The role of the natural and social context in shaping consciousness. John Benjamins Publishing. pp. 89 ff. ISBN 978-9027213525. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help) On-line version here.

Further reading edit

External links edit

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