...The statement “I know there is a mind-independent, external world” basically suggests 1) that the world and other material objects around us – e.g. tables, animals, other people – can exist independent of our perception and 2) that we can actually obtain knowledge about their existence. In this paper, I will criticize this claim by showing that, even if there exist an external world regardless of our perceptions, we can never “know” if they are actually part of our reality by just thinking about it. As a basis for discussion, I will classify the concept of understanding into three levels: believing, knowing, and having certainty about something. To believe is to accept an idea in our mind that could be innate, adventitious and self-produced. To know is to make judgement on what we believe based on experience, while to have certainty is to know without a doubt that an idea or knowledge is a definite truth. At the end of his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes comes up with a conclusion that an external world does indeed exist regardless of his perception. He begins his meditations by doubting everything he sense and experience, supposing that everything he knows about the external world is just a dream. In this state of absolute doubt, he withdraws the mind from the sense and tries to perceive the nature of reality through a purely intellectual perspective. The first thing Descartes realizes he can be certain of is his own existence for he would have to exist to be able...
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...knowledge is innate, that is, we are born with all the knowledge and the experiences that we have in this world just help us in uncovering/ remembering this knowledge. Empiricist believed that all knowledge is got only through experience in other words we are born with our minds/souls like a clean slate and the experiences write on them. With this struggle between the two schools of thought enlightenment Europe was striving to find ways to arrive at a consensus about some of these aforementioned central issues of theory of knowledge. And the champion of a philosopher who accomplished with task was Immanuel Kant. Kant borrowed many concepts from both empiricism and rationalism. But he felt that the many of the rationalist ideas were too simplistic and dogmatic and some of the empiricist ideas we too skeptic about the ability of humans to acquire true knowledge. As a part of his critical philosophy, with an aim to resolve this problem of theory of knowledge he wrote 3 critiques: Critique of pure reason, Critique of practical reason and Critique of judgment. Critique of Pure Reason talks about the process of knowledge acquisition in natural sciences, the way in which the structures of our mind influences what we understand about the world and the limitations of our understanding. In Critique of Practical Reason, he addresses the issues of moral judgment and preconditions of our minds to arrive at such judgments. Critique of Judgment talks about aesthetic judgment and attempts to unify...
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...The core theme of mind and body is presented throughout the movie, The Matrix. Morpheus, the leader of the resistance, explains to Neo (also known as “The One”) that the “reality” perceived by Neo is actually “a computer-generated dream world…a neural interactive simulation”, which is known as the matrix. Reality, the perception as we know it, in actual fact, is a simulated reality created by machines to subjugate the human race. Throughout the movie, those against the resistance are hooked up to a machine that brings their mind to the simulated reality. Their physical bodies are hooked up to machines in the actual reality whereas their mind is sent to this simulated reality, making it feel as real and tricking your mind to think that you are present in this...
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...places, and objects. Plato’s Theory of Ideas and the Myth of the Cave Plato believed that there were two worlds that existed, the world of the senses and the world of ideas. The sensory world was the physical matter, which was always changing and does not last forever, perceived through our senses. The world of ideas is eternal, and consists of patterns which the sensory world was made from. Plato said that we cannot get true knowledge from the sensory world, because it was always changing, and true knowledge lay in the world of ideas, where we perceived through reason, and not our senses. He said that the human being had an eternal soul that existed in the world of ideas before it inhabited the physical body. When the soul sees the imperfect sensory world, it gives the soul a faint recollection of the idea world, and it longs to return and see that idea world again. The Myth of the Cave is another way Plato explained this. He said that a group of humans are in a cave facing the back wall of the cave, and behind them is a high wall blocking the outside of the cave. Some other human-like creatures hold up some figures, above the wall, and all these humans can see are the shadows on the wall. They have been tied up in this position for their whole life. Plato said that the darkness of the cave represents the sensory world, while the world outside is the world of ideas. These ideas are represented in The Matrix. Everyone grown in the fields by the machines are just like...
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...THE MIND IN IDEALISM Philosophy of mind is widely considered a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness, and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind–body problem, i.e. the relationship of the mind to the body, is commonly seen as one key issue in philosophy of mind, although there are other issues concerning the nature of the mind that do not involve its relation to the physical body, such as how consciousness is possible and the nature of particular mental states. One of these issues that do not presume a relationship of a mind and body is the conception of mind in Idealism. Philosophically, idealism is the view that fundamental reality is the make-up of mind and ideas only. This essay will discuss at length what the mind generally means to the idealist especially in the classical sense as espoused by George Berkeley and then proceed to analyse the concept of mind or self in the radical transcendentalism of Joseph von Schelling and conclude with Edmund Husserl, a 20th century philosopher and reputed founder of Phenomenology Idealism is the form of monism that sees the world as consisting of minds, mental contents and or consciousness, according to Stoljar (2005). Idealists are not faced with explaining how minds arise from bodies: rather, the world, bodies and objects are regarded as mere appearances held by minds. According to Stoljar, accounting for the mind–body...
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...Running Head: THE BUREAUCRATIC MIND! 1 ! ! ! ! ! The Bureaucratic Mind! Aparna V! M2014HRM008, MA (HRM & LR)! TISS, Mumbai! ! ! ! ! THE BUREAUCRATIC MIND! 2 The Bureaucratic Mind! ! Bureaucracy can be defined as a system of administration founded on policies, procedures and, often, a rigid hierarchical structure. In the context of human psyche, this essay argues that the human mind has a tendency to be inherently and naturally bureaucratic in numerous ways. A few parallels are drawn as a demonstration of this argument.! ! Highly Structured Mind An infant’s mind is free from any rigid structures of identity. Over a period of time, many such constructs evolve with which the infant identifies itself. A few of these basic constructs include the notion of ‘self ’ and ‘other’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, the concept of gender, and the notion of a family. As a child grows, several other constructs including that of nationality, caste, and religion are built into the human mind. A growing person might begin to associate herself with such notions, thus fortifying the structures in their mind. The world at large is perceived through the sieve of such structures. Once absorbed, it requires a conscious and sustained effort to unlearn the structures.! Further, there is a tendency to adhere to formal time-tested methods to achieve certain ends rather than being informal and adventurous. It can be observed that the human mind tends to align itself better with the rest of society...
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...Williams Philosophy 180 9.18.12 Personal Identity. What am I? A mind or a body? Between both my mental and physical realities my true self is found in my mind. An intangible but highly influential, very private set of thoughts construct the perception of how I allow the physical world to experience my being. My body is a physical representation of the collective effort of thoughts and experiences of my mind. In essence our body serves as a vessel or shell for our very soul. The question, “what am I?” could also be “who are you?” What constitutes an individual’s identity? I believe between the two options of physical and mental realities that my prolonged mental consciousness gives me my identity. My memories are who I am. Without my memories I am just a body a tabula rasa all over again. This idea of memory serving as our identity can be seen with the example of Alzheimer’s patients. Alzheimer’s is an autoimmune disease that even with today’s modern medicine is still misunderstood. The patient suffering AD experiences a slow wipe out of their memory. Even though, still unclear to how or why this happens to millions of people worldwide we are able to see first hand years of life disappear into nowhere and how destructive this is to families, loved ones, and an individuals identity. They exist physically as a shell and nothing more. Their connection and relationship to the physical world is of no use without the mind. For the record I am by no means stating that an AD patient’s life...
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...Truth and Reality: Are our versions mere mind-created, or real ? Can we ever distinguish actual reality from the synthetic models that mind create ? Or, can we ever know any reality other than what our minds create ? If we clinically analyse the total contents of our mind, we will find that it is a mix of many things that we consider as real, and equal number of things that we know as mere manufactured products of we,or that of the human community in general. What we naively consider as real are objects and relations that we have seen, heard, touched,tasted or smelt. We had learned this criterion of assessing reality from our primeval days when mind was not developed to perceive anything beyond what were just in-front the sense-organs. Animals are still in worlds of reality. Now, man's this category of reality also consists the various scientific facts,that we believe, our prestigious men of science must have either directly observed through their special instruments, or inferred over strong evidences they must have collected through their various false-proof methods. For example, the moon-rocks are real because NASA has its samples displayed at their facilities, or it is Sun there at the center of solar system, and earth and other planets are revolving around it. We believe that Science has adequate proof of these real physical facts. Though these scientific facts are quite different from the reality of a horse or a mountain that we actually see, we generally...
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...There is a wide variety of categories into which all things in the world can be divided. There are natural and unnatural phenomena; things created by mankind and those we consider to be product of the Supreme Mind; there is flora and there is fauna; there are things that we can modify and things that humans have no control over. One of the many ways to differentiate and classify everything and anything in the surrounding environment and, probably, one of the most universal ways, is to classify things as being either material or immaterial. It seems fairly easy to distinguish between the two. If we cannot touch, feel or see something, then it becomes the notion of the immaterial world. The rest belongs to the material things, which we can own, trade, purchase, possess, lose or give away. When Rene Descartes, one of the founders of the modern-day western philosophical science, laid the groundwork for his epistemological perspective called Cartesian Dualism, he was coming exactly from the same universal idea. The thoughts and hypotheses that Descartes tried so hard, throughout his lifetime’s work, to develop into axioms and prove to be fundamentally true, surprisingly remain highly debatable and are still largely in question. Philosophy is very much about the question of certainty. To a great extent, from the epistemological perspective, knowledge is certainty (Harris, 2009). Just as the case is with Plato, whose quest for certainty has driven his metaphysics to take it, as a...
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...AS Philosophy Revision Pack Key topics Epistemology | Philosophy of religion | Perception | The concept of God | The definition of knowledge | Arguments for and against God’s existence | Where do our ideas and knowledge come from? | Religious language | Key info Exam date: Time: Revision sessions: Revision tasks * Make a revision timetable * Create revision topic summaries * Create flash cards * Test yourself – complete practice questions * Create 15 mark plans * Attend revision sessions Don’t leave it until the last minute…start NOW HOW TO REVISE Before you start revising * Make sure you have all your notes in order * Create a revision timetable - follow this link and sign up to help you do this. http://getrevising.co.uk/ The 10 step revision process 1. Pick a topic to revise (e.g. innate knowledge) 2. Read through your notes on that topic and summarise it onto one side of A4 3. Now summarise onto a revision card (about a quarter of an A4 piece of paper) 4. Now take a piece of A4 and begin writing everything you can remember about the topic. 5. Look back over your notes and write down all you missed out in a different colour. 6. Keep repeating the process until you are able to write down everything from that topic. 7. Now look at an exam question. 8. Complete a plan (5-10 mins) 9. Complete the timed essay in 30 mins / 15 min depending. 10. Hand...
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...Matrix of Mind Reality Enoch Tan – Creator of Mind Reality Discover The Greatest Secrets Of The Mind And Reality That Will Get You Anything You Desire, Almost Like Magic! If you want to FINALLY experience the COMPLETE Manifestation of All the Miracles, Success, Wealth, Health, Love and Happiness that you have always dreamed of… then register as member of Mind Reality now! Go here now to discover how to become a Mind Reality Member: ==>http://www.MindReality.com/specialoffer.html © Mind Reality Introduction Preview more of Secrets of Mind and Reality through the Free Newsletter: http://www.mindreality.com/secrets.html Mind Reality contains Universal Secrets that govern every area of life and reality. The deeper the knowledge, the more powerful the knowledge. The more powerful your knowledge, the easier it is to achieve success, because deep, powerful knowledge is the key to inspired thinking and finding intelligent solutions to problems. This book answers a great many questions that you've always been curious about such as: What is the nature of all reality and how the universe really works? Why gaining understanding and truth will get you everything you ever wanted? Why purchasing spiritual knowledge will tremendously accelerate your progress in life? And plenty more incredible knowledge inside.... The VERY reason why I created this free ebook with SOME of my articles is to give a preview of the immense QUALITY and QUANTITY information on Mind Reality. What you get...
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...a) Examine the claim that the mind/soul can survive the death of the body (18) The soul is a defining essence that runs through one or more lives said to be an eternal part of a person that makes them individual. The body is the physical part of a person, which is alive when they are alive. It is debated whether anything can survive the death of the body and many different religions have different beliefs on this matter. Christians believe that the soul is the part of God that remains with a person eternally therefore; the soul survives the death of the body and remains with the person forever. However Buddhists believe that once a personal dies they are re-entered into the cycle of samsara unless you attain enlightenment, your karma stays with you and is carried on in each life, not a soul or the same body. An embodied existence is a soft materialist view where the body is representation in a material form, something that is a whole; the mind cannot survive without the body. A disembodied existence is a dualistic view where life after death may be disembodied (separate from the body) the soul and body are separate. The soul is the spiritual, emotional part of a human being regarded as immortal or sometimes is believed to survive death and makes a person who they are and how they act. Each religion has a variety of beliefs on what they believe a soul to be. Dualism is the beliefs that refers to the mind and body as two separate things and that the soul survives...
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...Aristotle‘s concept of mind with that of Descartes. Introduction In this essay I attempt to show Aristotle’s concept of soul/mind*[1]. Then I compare and contrast it with Descartes’ concept of mind. In order to understand Aristotle’s concepts of mind, I shall consider Aristotle’s De Anima, in which Aristotle mostly concentrates on soul/mind discussion. I will examine the work of Kahn and Sorabji, who both considered Aristotle’s and Descartes’ philosophy in relation to soul and body problem. In order to compare Aristotle’s concept of mind with Descartes’, I am going to introduce Descartes’ most famous philosophical work which involves the question of mind directly, namely hisMeditations. …………………………. …………………………… ………………………………. If we look at Aristotle’s De Anima we can understand that pre-Aristotle thinkers were already concerned with corporeal and incorporeal problems. For example, for Plato soul was an ‘incorporeal’ and immortal thing, but body corporeal and mortal. The first impression we get from reading De Anima is that the mind and body problem was unsolved. Perhaps the resolved problem didn’t satisfy Aristotle. Aristotle claims that an incorporeal thing cannot exist without a corporeal thing. Aristotle’s new theory for solving soul and body problems makes controversial debate among most post-Aristotelian philosophers. Rene Descartes was one of them who rejected the Aristotelian concept of mind in which corporeal and incorporeal...
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...Kant is a philosopher who values humans and thinks they are the smartest and especially due to the fact that they have minds. When saying “The mind is the lawgiver of nature” Kant refers to the fact that humans make rational decisions by basing their decision on morals. When reading the statement one thinks about the word “lawgiver”; this word refers to a fictional weapon. Therefore Kant looks at the mind as a fictional weapon that is not seen but that plays an important role in our everyday life and that helps humans make the decisions they make and gain the experiences they gain in order to succeed and follow their morals. People see reality as it is but according to Kant, mind is what makes our lives true and our realities real. In order to understand the statement made by Kant, first we need to learn more about Kant. Kant’s ethics are all about morals and the steps that people make in order to make things better and people happier around them. Kant uses the idea of acting in accordance to duty and from duty. The only difference between these two was the fact that people need to do something because it is duty and sometimes people need to do things because not only it’s their duty but because they will gain from it and be happy as well from the experience. As it can be seen through his ethics, Kant thinks that all human beings deserve the best life ever and they deserve to follow ethics so that they do not hurt each other. Kant’s theory is that humans should not just take...
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...CH-1: INTRODUCTION TO BRAND MANAGEMENT Did you ever wonder what has made the world what it is today? Isn’t it true that the Nature has remained the same throughout the history, yet the world has changed in astronomical proportion? Indeed, the human beings have brought the change… but what is special in the humans that they could “CHANGE” the world? The answer may sound bizarre, but it’s the raw truth: the unending quest of the humans to conquer the world… Hard to believe? Let’s look at the history: First it was Napoleon who conquered the world and then came the British who dominated the whole world for more than 2 centuries, before the counter came in the form of ‘War for Independence.’ In fact, most of the technological products were introduced during those times to ‘equip’ themselves either for offence or for that matter defences. The world has indeed made a transition form the quest to capture the world ‘physically’ to dominate through ‘Technology.’ In fact that had exactly catapulted the USA as the World’s Super Power. Now we are living in an era of “World in the Hand.” It’s amazing to know that the world has also changed in the way the products are bought or sold – no, this does not refer to bartending to monetary exchange of goods, but more intricate than that. Earlier, products were bought or sold for the physical needs, primarily. But today, the products are bought and sold more for the psychological needs. Thus a mere telephone has become a...
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