- The mind or to be more specific, a person’s state of mind serves as an important factor in determining the incorrigibility of the different forms of knowledge. According to the fundamental that Descartes thought, a person’s existence is present as long as he or she has the capability to think. This can be considered as a method of doubt. This is actually one of the most prevalent and most effective methods of doubt because it allows an individual to doubt anything in a world that can be full of factors, variables, and considerations such as mathematics, physics and other fields of sciences. According to what Descartes tried to teach us, humans are bound to think and doubt because that is what makes them human; like an individual who does not know how to doubt and think or one that merely accepts everything that is being thrown at him can be considered dumb and even nonexistent.
Thinking and the methods of doubt serves as the hallmark of human existence. Our senses can deceive us; we can shape our own thoughts; our actions can be programmed by our thoughts but we can never change the fact that we are born to use our heads to think and doubt and this is true regardless of the situation and environment where we are in. Every individual has their own perspective of an event, an object, or basically anything that can be interpreted, be it a material object or a thought.
Therefore, when establishing standards of thought or even disciplines, thoughts, emotions, or any factor that can be interpreted differently by a lot of people cannot be used because as mentioned earlier, they vary from one person to another and using them to generalize something can lead to confusion and a lot of misunderstanding. The same principle can, in fact, be applied when establishing the truth.
There is only one truth but it should always be considered that people may have their own interpretation or version of the truth so a person’s truth may be different from that of another person. So in establishing truth and other standards, it is important to use measures that are outside the brain (i.e. emotions, thoughts, etc.) because this would only complicate the situation and lead to confusion. A good example of this would be the difference between how the lawyer of a defendant interprets the truth and how the lawyer of a plaintiff interprets the truth; that is, in a criminal justice and law enforcement setting. The reason why the jury or the judge is present is so that they can serve as the mediator that would establish which parts of the two parties’ truth or judgment pertains to the truth. Everything that we experience must come from something external from our body or from god—that is if we consider God as an absolute or abstract being and not a deceiver. The foundations of people’s knowledge are based on the formation of fundamental facts which are in turn formed by a continuous process of methodical doubt.
So, if we humans are to cease to doubt, then it can be inferred that the foundation of our knowledge of everything would cease to exist or at least cease to develop as well. Our knowledge of everything such as science and mathematics should never be based on senses or anything that can be interpreted differently by people, as much as possible, because they can be highly doubted and can therefore be considered unreliable sources of truths, standards, and fundamental facts.
- I have three points of thought that I want to discuss in order the second question for this essay examination. Firstly, I have learned based on the readings and partly from personal life experiences that conscious mental occurrences have corresponding physical effects; that most, if not all, physical effects can be fully caused by purely physical prior histories; and lastly, that physical effects of conscious causes are not always determined by distinct causes.
I have come to conclude that physical causes have a direct correlation with individual consciousness. In fact, in most cases, these two variables must be identical or if not, at the same level in order for a particular cause or effect to occur. An example of this would be the way how our body generates itch or pain. Whenever an individual feels itch, his body would react by signaling the person that there is an itch and the voluntary motor response of the body would be to scratch the itchy part. The same is true when it comes to the generation of pain. Whenever there is pain, an individual would most likely be consciously compelled to say ouch or drink pain relievers in order to relieve that pain. The second point or premise pertains to the train of thought that suggest that physical effects have physical causes.
There are a lot of mechanisms of life that can be characterized by a cause and effect relationship. Let us use the way how our body generates and reacts to pain as an example again. Pain is a mechanism that a person’s body activates in order to protect that person from further cell or worse, a body injury which can either be permanent or just temporary. Pain, in our example’s case, is the physical effect. So, the only remaining unidentified variable is the physical cause. One thing is for sure, however and that is, pain (the physical effect) would not be present in the absence of a noxious stimulus (the physical cause). This noxious stimulus can be anything from a strained muscle, a sprained ligament, an overuse syndrome, a fracture, an insect or animal bite, or any other thing that can lead to pain in a particular area.
The important thing to remember based on that premise, however, is the fact that physical effects cannot occur or be present in the absence of physical causes. In the third point, I mentioned the type of relationship that exists between physical effects of conscious causes and distinct causes. This basically means that there is no more than one cause for a particular physical effect. In the body’s pain generation mechanism that we used as an example, this would mean that in most cases, there is only one factor or variable that causes the person’s pain and that is what the doctors or medical practitioners should point out and address if they want to relieve the pained person of the pain he is feeling.
Sure, technically speaking, there can be more than just one reason behind the presence of that pain but in the field of philosophy, this may not always be the case. Based on the explanation we have in these three premises, the existence of the brain as a tool for thinking can be questioned. What do we need it for if we already have a universal rule that says that all effects have corresponding causes?
This may be the same reason why authors of philosophical texts continuously question the existence of the brain as a tool for doubting and thinking when we can readily explain every physical effect by looking at the physical events happening around us. It is important to remember that this is one of the many abstract ideas or claims in philosophy. There are numerous ways or possibilities how this argument which was raised by Papineau, can be opposed. However, it is important to remember that opposing any one premise or point of thought from the list of three premises just recently discussed would most likely lead to a weaker argument.
- A good example of an objection to the concept that we previously discussed would be that of Jackson. He basically suggests that there is at least one kind of thing that we cannot be reduced to its physical form namely the Qualia which pertain to the subjective quality of an experience.
This may be related to our answer in question number one which suggests that people’s interpretation of an object or an event may be different, hence the term subjective. For example, the pain that an individual experiences may never be the same type or level of pain that other people experiences because as mentioned earlier, pain is a subjective experience and can vary from one person to another due to the presence of some extrinsic and intrinsic factors which may include but may not be limited to the absence or presence of a noxious stimuli, the individual’s pain threshold, among other things. Another example would be that of the urge to scratch. No two people would have the same level of itch threshold.
At some point, some people would be more resistant to the urge to scratch an itch than other people and vice versa. Jackson basically used a theoretical experiment to demonstrate his concept of Qualia and support his objection of the common philosophical train of thoughts. For example, suppose we have a guy named Norman and his pair of eyes only allows him to see a particular set of colors. Suppose that a red-colored tomato for him is viewed as a yellow-colored one. Now, medically, it may be ruled in that he is suffering from a certain form of visual receptor disorder but philosophically, it may be stated that the way how he perceives that tomato or its color to be more specific, is just different from what normal people would usually do.
However, this does not mean that Norman thinks abnormally because as far as his brain is concerned, he can still think and perform basic mental and thought functions normally just like other people. No matter how hard we try to compare the way how Norman sees the red-colored tomatoes to that of another person, we would always fail to find similarities because simply, Norman’s body does not allow him to see the tomatoes the way how other people see it. Also, it is worth mentioning that according to Jackson’s statements about objections, one can study everything about one person’s brain or his way of thinking but there will always be something that will be left out.
One of the most popular critics of Jackson’s principle of Epiphenomenalism suggest that an individual can, at certain point, know about the mind of others by knowing that particular person or group of persons’ behaviors. This, in essence, does not really contradict or object Jackson’s ideas because all that Jackson wanted to say was that an individual cannot fully (take note of the keyword “fully”) copy the way how an individual sees and perceive things because a person’s brain is biologically wired to think and operate differently from other people and any conscious or unconscious effort to counter this biological principle would be nothing but fruitless.
- Locke’s response to the rationalists’ point of view about universally agreed upon principles and the fact that they are based on innate ideas is basically a rejection of the premise that suggests that the principles that rationalists’ arguments are based on innate ideas.
According to Locke, that is a fallacy because by doing observations, it can be seen that not all people have a uniform moral principle because evidently or at least when we apply this principle to what is happening in our society, moral principles, religion and religious views, and political views are divided. There is no such thing as uniform thoughts and or observations. For example, it may not be normal for some people to see people being killed as a result of war but for people living in countries that have been continuously engaged in wars, that aspect of normality may be significantly different.
Locke’s case suggests that the best candidates for an example for principles that are universally agreed upon by people are the rules of logic. Some rules in logic often contain the phrases “what so ever is” or “another one is”, among others. However, it is clearly impossible for the same thing to be or not to be simply because it does not work that way. Even if there is such thing as rationality and logic, the world is still full of chaos and no single rationalist or logical thought can disrupt that chaotic cycle.
Locke also says that there are a lot of principles that may be used in order to disagree to this point. For example there is a high level of chance that there are children or anyone out there who will not recognize rules of logic and other universally accepted agreements as true and if they do not recognize them as true then that means it must not be innate, effectively negating the innate quality of the universally agreed upon principles that we keep on mentioning.
- Kant was dissatisfied with both rationalism and empiricism because it inevitably leads to the formation of dogmas which according to him can be harmful to the natural cycle of beliefs as in the case of religion and Christianity—because dogmas are practically impossible to verify and are just byproducts of speculation
- Also, according to Kant, rationalism alone would not work and the same is also true for empiricism because no individual train of thought is prefect and would never be enough to explain the complicated phenomenon happening in the world and a person’s life.
