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Soul, mind and body - Coggle Diagram
Soul, mind and body
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Materialism
consciousness can be explained by physical or material interactions - they reject the idea of the soul as a separate substance
Richard Dawkins
argued the soul is a mythological concept invented by the ancients to explain the mysteries of consciousness
Dawkins strongly rejects the religious or platonic idea of the soul but he does accept that it is possible to use the term metaphorically - this is fine as long as we dont believe it refers to an actual thing
soul 1 - the traditional idea of a principle of life; a seperate thing that contains our personality, the real person - this view is to be rejected
soul2 - intellectual or spiritual power, high development of the mental faculties - this is a meaningful way of speaking provided we are clear that this is not a separate thing from the brain
Gilbert Ryle
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Ryle referred to the idea of Cartesian dualism as the dogma of the ghost in the machine – the physical body being the machine, and the mind being the ghost. Ryle pointed out that Descartes was engaging in a category mistake by saying that mind and body are separate things
key terms
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Substance dualism: Descartes’ version of dualism that the two different types of existence are two different substances, e.g. mental (characterised by thinking) and physical (characterised by extension). A substance is a type of existence which cannot be broken down into anything further.
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