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What does the word I refer to?
Mind-body problem – What are the mind and body, and how are they related to each other?
Dualistic theories hold that the mind and body are two different substances
Interactionism – causal relationship between mind and body; mental events can cause physical events
Parallelism – A physical event occurs, and parallel to that event, but uncaused by it, a mental event occurs
Epiphenomenalism – mental events are by-products of physical events

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Monistic solutions to the mind-body problem deny that the mind and body are two different substances
Identity theory – mental events are identical with brain processes in much the same way as lightening flashes are identical with electrical discharges
Idealism reduces matter to mind
Double-aspect theory – mind and body should be thought of as qualities, characteristics, or aspects
Neutral monism – view that what exists is neither mental nor physical but neutral

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Descartes believed that physical objects exist outside our minds
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He believed that he existed because he thought
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Believed in the existence of a perfectly good
God
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Material things are essentially different from mental things
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The mind exists as a mental substance

René Descartes
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Establishes mind-body dualism and supports interactionism. The mind causally interacts with the body.
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The essence of a person is that they are a thinking thing (mind or soul)
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The person is distinct from the body, which is an extended and unthinking thing
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Body is divisible, but mind is indivisible

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How can an immaterial substance that is nonspatial cause a material substance (the spatial body) to do anything?
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If the mind can act on physical bodies, it contradicts the law of the conservation of energy
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Can human behavior be explained in physical terms according to the activity of the brain?

Eve Browning Cole
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Critiques Descartes from a feminist philosophy
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Argues that Descartes’ pays insufficient attention to the fact that self is embodied and exists in a network of relations to others
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Descartes’ ideas have reinforced masculine notion of self as autonomous, detached, and dominant over matter

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What if our conscious life is the result of a particular pattern of rules (software) being imposed on fixed structures (hardware)?
– materialistic theory of the mind; so-called mental events are the same thing as behaviors or dispositions to behave

Bruce H. Hinrichs
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Argues that the brain, which creates the mind, is a computing machine
The brain is a computer in that it is a computational device
How does the brain create a mind?
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The mind is a property or quality of the brain
The scientific answer would examine the physical activities of the brain that create a mental experience
The brain is a physical thing in the natural world, but the mind is personal experiences produced when brains are in a state of awareness of their own functioning

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Can computers have consciousness?
– mental states are defined completely by their functions or causal relations
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“the mind is to the brain as a computer’s software is to its hardware”
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The behavior of the computer is not explained by it’s physics and chemistry (hardware)

John Searle
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Argues that machines cannot think (be conscious) and thus, by implication, that functionalistic theories of the mind fail
The Chinese room argument – shows that computers will never be able to produce consciousness and hence the human brain must be significantly unlike a computer because the brain can cause consciousness
Computers manipulate symbols according to syntax, or a set of rules, but that does not mean that they understand the meaning (semantics) of the symbols

John Searle
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Premises:
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Brains cause minds
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Syntax is not sufficient for semantics
Computer programs are entirely defined by their formal, or syntactical structure
Minds have mental, semantic contents
Conclusions:
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No computer program by itself can give a system a mind
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The way that brain functions cause minds cannot be solely in virtue of running a computer program
If anything other than the brain caused the mind, it would have to have causal powers equivalent to the brain
Any artifact we might build would have to have powers equivalent to the brain in order to produce equivalent mental states

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What if intelligent, conscious, and feeling robots visited earth. Would they be amazed that flesh and blood humans can think, feel, and communicate?

Terry Bisson
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Science fiction in which robots visit a planet to study creatures that have been sending radio messages into outer space