Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Mind, Body and Soul - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Body
        
        Changes
        
        Bound to empirical world
        
        Body acts as a barrier to knowing the Forms
        
        Can die (mortal)
      - Soul
        
        Immortal
        
        Knows the Forms
        
        Helps us recognise what objects are
        
        Eternal - exists before and after body
        
        Goes back to World of the Forms after death
        
        Tripartite
        
        Rational part
        
        Includes reasoning, intellect and insight
        
        Insight means we recognise truth, so can recognise the Forms and know reality
        
        Represented by charioteer
        
        Guides the other two parts of the soul, as it knows what is right
        
        Represents ruling class in his Republic
        
        Spirited/emotional part
        
        Desires honour and glory, but does not know what is honourable (so needs rational part to guide it)
        
        Represented by noble horse
        
        A driving, motivating force which must be steered/controlled
        
        Represents military class in the Republic
        
        Appetitive part
        
        Includes all of our cravings and desires
        
        Desires should be dealt with when appropriate
        
        Represented by ignoble horse
        
        Chaotic, unruly, motivating force that must be controlled/dominated
        
        If unchecked, it could lead us to destruction
        
        Represents working class in the Republic
        
        Like workers who have power without a positive sense of direction
      - Mind
        
        Wants to understand the Forms
        
        To do this, we must free ourselves from physical requirements
    - - Bernard Williams thought Plato tried to fit his psychological story to his political story by associating soul parts with classes
      - Some say Plato defended his society's flaws (including slavery and dominance of men over women)
  - - - Mind is where all thoughts are personal
      - Body performs physical actions, observable to all
      - Mind and body can interact with each other
        
        Descartes suggested through the pineal gland
      - Mind and body are separate
      - Anything without a physical location is 'mind'
  - - - Descartes could doubt his physical body, but not his mind ('Cogito ergo sum') - suggests they are different things
        
        Led to Putnam's 'Brain in a Jar' experiment
      - The body's properties can be physically measured
      - The mind's 'whole essence is to think' so takes up no physical space
  - - - Believed animals were unconscious machines without minds
      - Imagined minds could exist without bodies - but did he really believe it?
      - 'I am not just lodged in my body like a pilot in his ship, but I am intimately united with it, and so confused and intermingled with it, that I and my body compose as it were a single whole'
    - - Ryle accused Descartes of a category error
        
        He said that the mind could be treated as an aspect of the way that the body functions
        
        He used the example of someone being told they are to see a university, being shown the colleges and libraries and then asking where the university is
        
        Something could be mental and physical according to Ryle, so Descartes assumption that something is one or the other is false
      - Ryle called Descartes' mind 'The Ghost in the Machine'
  - - - Our thoughts and mind appear to be independent
      - Thoughts are produced by electrical impulses
      - Thoughts are above (epi-) the electrical impulses, not the electrical impulses themselves
      - We do not understand how the brain gives our experience of mind
- - - - 'Psyche' (soul) means life in a general sense
      - The soul is the form of the body - it gives us our characteristics (provides us with form, efficiency and telos)
        
        Having a soul is like having a skill
        
        Different organisms have different kinds of soul
        
        Nutritive or vegetative soul
        
        Type that all organisms have - even plants
        
        Powers of nutrition, growth and reproduction
        
        Locomotive soul
        
        Type that all animals have
        
        Can have desires and feelings, so gives ability to move
        
        Ability to reason
        
        Unique to humans
        
        Allows us to grasp 'universals' - the idea of goodness, not just something that is good
        
        We can develop our ethical and intellectual character
      - The soul is in the here and now, not the eternal
      - The soul and the body are inseparable
        
        It gives the body its powers, capabilities and functions
        
        The soul cannot survive death - it ceases to exist when the body dies
        
        But he seems to see thought as immortal
        
        He uses a wax analogy
        
        'One should not ask if the soul and the body are one, any more than one should ask if the wax and the shape are one'
  - - - As the soul is not divisible, then it is able to survive death
    - - The soul that departs the body retains the individual identity
  - - - Humans fear death, so long to be immortal
      - There is nothing but material things, all non-material things are false
      - The entire universe consists of matter in motion
        
        Emotions are the first endeavours of motion (motion on a small scale)
    - - Argues that humans are entirely material - we are 'survival machines'
      - Calls Plato's ideas of the soul 'Soul One' and disregards it as primitive superstition
      - Calls Aristotle's ideas of the soul 'Soul Two' as the precise nature of this is yet to be explained
      - Finds no empirical evidence for the existence of the soul
      - Suggests that DNA may explain the phenomenon of consciousness
    - - Emotions are psycho-chemical reactions
      - Thoughts are electrical impulses in the brain
      - A person is a brain with a body and nervous system
  - - - Sadness can be reduced down to tears
      - Happiness can be reduced to laughter or smiling
      - Pain can be reduced to crying out
    - - Every mental action or emotion is a learned behavioural response
        
        Link to Pavlov's dogs, where dogs salivated before seeing the actual food as they recognised the process that led to them getting food
      - Criticised by Daniel C. Dennett
        
        Human intelligence should not be put on the same level as other animals - we seem to have more mental capabilities
        
        Not everything is a learned response - to suggest that reading is a learned response makes no sense
    - - Pointing to a chess piece is not explained by the action - there are any number of reasons why you would, so more than a physical explanation is required