Thomas Nagel: The Mind-Body Problem

The divide between dualism and physicalism is a driving philosophical question in the discussion of the nature of mind and body. While dualists argue that the mind is an immaterial substance that transcends extension, physicalists believe that everything is physical or supervenes on the physical. A common form of physicalism is set forth in the type-identity thesis, which asserts that every type of mental state is identical to a type of physical state. The token-identity thesis is another, much narrower form which only equates an individual thought to an individual brain state. Physicalism comes to mean that there is nothing in the world that is not physical. Even mental states can be given purely empirical explanations. Frank Jackson objected

In the sixth meditation, Descartes postulates that there exists a fundamental difference in the natures of both mind and body which necessitates that they be considered as separate and distinct entities, rather than one stemming from the other or vice versa. This essay will endeavour to provide a critical objection to Descartes’ conception of the nature of mind and body and will then further commit to elucidating a suitably Cartesian-esque response to the same objection. (Descartes,1641)

This quote that I will be analyzing and explaining why it is the key quote that represents the thesis of Nagel. Nagel’s main goal is to define consciousness and refute any reductive approach to consciousness. Nagel claims that consciousness is the reason why the mind-body problem is so difficult. Consciously being aware and cognizant is unexplainable because it is hard to reduce down to a single entity. The chosen quote is essentially saying that all organisms have conscious states and in order to truly be that organism or understand, you must understand their consciousness while still maintaining your own consciousness. The subjectiveness of one’s conscious experience is what makes it special and unique to that one organism, which is why ant

In this two Christian philosophers, Richard Swinburne and Tim O'Connor, discussed the concept of neuroscience and the soul. The first philosopher, Swinburne, believed in the idea of substance dualism while O’Conner supported the argument for emergent individualism.

Saint Anselm’s Ontological Argument was most likely constructed during a time when the majority of the population was religious, in order to strengthen the belief that God exists. The thesis of the argument is as straightforward as it gets – that God does indeed exist. In this argument, God is defined to be the greatest entity that an individual can ever conjure in his or her mind.

attempt to use it to explain the subjective character of another being we end up at the same roadblock, an inability to imagine their subjective experience. So it is at worst unprovable because the theory cannot explain consciousness we must, therefore, look for another theory that can both incorporate and explain the physical and subjective characteristics of

Consciousness is awareness of one's own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc. Consciousness is central part of our life. Consciousness is the absolute reality. Consciousness is omnipresent and omniscient. The concept of consciousness is ambiguous. It is one of the most mysterious aspects of our life. From a very long time scientist and philosophers are trying to explain nature of consciousness. It is surprising that consciousness is a something that we all experience but it is deemed a ‘hard’ problem to explain. It is widely assumed that consciousness is a thing that is intractable to the human intellect. The difficulty comes in describing the “what it’s likeness” that characterizes consciousness. Whenever a person is in a particular

Humans perceive our surroundings through our various senses; it has been argued that all of these feelings and impressions exist only within the perceiver’s mind. Irish philosopher and Empiricist George Berkeley argues in his Three Dialogues that heat and cold that we directly perceive is no different from pain or pleasure, which are ideas that only exist in the mind, since these feelings stem from the mind as a result of our contact with the outside world (Radcliffe, McCarty, Allhoff, and Vaidya 56). In this essay, I will provide arguments to justify that Berkeley’s pleasure-pain argument fails to justify his claim that pain and pleasure can only exist in one’s mind.

The inquisition and philosophies between the mind and body have been being discussed for hundreds of years. Whether or not we our minds have a practical influence on our body. Or human minds are of its own entity and contain a soul that constitutes how we act and function. Dualism constitutes that the mind and body are not identical and therefore the effect of one does not influence the other. Many philosophers believed in the concept of dualism. Many include Plato and his theory of forms.

Predestination is the aspect of foreordination whereby the salvation of the believer is taken to be effected in accordance with the will of God, who has called and elected him, in Christ, unto life eternal (Bromiley, 1979). Throughout Christianity, the various sects and branches of this religion often have their own understanding and notion of this doctrine.

In “What is is like to be a bat?”, Thomas Nagel claims that in humanity 's attempts to reduce the mind into more basic forms, we have removed an essential part of the mind -- what it’s like to hold the point of view of another (393). Nagel points out that experiencing an event in one’s own way is a key condition to the determination of mental states (392). Moreover, until there exists a form of examining the mind that includes the subjective, Nagel believes we have no objective or universal form of understanding the mind (392-393). This would make it apparent that if someone wished to examine the essence of mental states in order to objectify them, he or she should consider the subjective. However, many of the current reductionist models strive

Thomas Nagel’s conclusion is that death is not an evil for the person who has deceased, but rather for others. He begins his argument by attempting to establish whether death is to be considered as an “evil”, how great this “evil” may be, and of what kind it may possess. If the permanent end to our existence is death, would it be considered a bad thing? That is the fundamental question that Nagel asks and thus explores by formulating two distinct hypotheses. The first of these hypotheses is that death robs us of life, which is all that we have, therefore is the worst possible fate and makes death a certain evil. Loss of life is to be considered an evil because it is the end of our sensations; being alive and having cognizant experiences is a positive state

The narrative by Dennett poses a discussion in the area of identity perception. The story presents an experiment, in which the brain was removed from the body to prevent brain’s destruction, while the body will be operating in the dangerous conditions. Upon the operation took place, a question of where Dennett is located has arisen beyond him. The difficulties emerged in the beginning, when both body and brain were in the laboratory, and the body was looking at the brain in the vat. However, the situation gets even more complicated after the body goes to the field of work. In the process of work, Dennett got dead, blind, and lost control of his body

In Nagel’s “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?” he attempts to refute reductionism by stating that in order to understand the relationship between mind and body, one must address consciousness and reductionism fails to do that. Nagel lays strong emphasis on what he calls ‘subjective character of experience’ which states that everything has its own interpretation of what it is like to be themselves. Fundamentally, each organism has a unique subjective perspective and conscious experience that is only understandable from the organism’s point of view.

For existentialists, emotions or moods play a central role. Emotions are viewed as a sensuous presentation as well as a cognitive experience of human finitude. Existentialists contributed to emotions by claiming that moods signify the relation of oneself to the world, where the emotion of anxiety for example signifies freedom.