Exam 5: René Descartes Mind and Body

According to Velmans, "Once a given reference for the term consciousness is fixed in its _______________, the investigation of its nature can begin, and this may in time transmute the meaning (or sense) of the term."

Velmans says, "As with any term that refers to something that one can observe or experience it is useful, if possible, to begin with ____________________, i.e., to 'point to' or 'pick out' the phenomena to which the term refers and, by implication, what is excluded."

According to Velleman, "Under the alternative conception, an object's extension in time is different from its extension in space. Whereas only part of an object can be present at a single point in space, the object can be wholly present at a single point in time. An object that persists through time in this way is said to ..."

James says, "As __________ we say that the experience represents; as __________ it is represented. What represents and what is represented is here numerically the same; but we must remember that no dualism of being represented and representing resides in the experience per se."

James says, "The _________ and the ________ operations form curiously incompatible groups. As a room, the experience has occupied that spot and had that environment for thirty years. As your field of consciousness it may never have existed until now."

Shapiro argues that since Elisabeth "defends neither a reductionist materialism nor a substance dualism, but rather wants to find a way of respecting the autonomy of thought without denying that this faculty of reason is in some essential way dependent on our bodily condition," therefore, Elisabeth is an epistemological monist.

Churchland says, "What drives the left-out hypothesis? Essentially, a thought-experiment, which roughly goes as follows: we can conceive of a person, like us in all the aforementioned Easy-to-explain capacities (attention, short term memory, etc.), but lacking qualia."

Hume asks, "Unluckily all these positive assertions are contrary to that very experience, which is pleaded for them, nor have we any idea of self, after the manner it is here explained. For from what impression could this idea be derived?" Explain Hume's point.

What does Velmans mean when he says, "To avoid confusion, and to enable such research, it is important to reserve the term mind for psychological states and processes that may or may not be conscious"?

James says, "I believe that ____________, when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles."

As defined in the reading, "epiphenomenalism" means ...

Nagel claims that "Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems ..."

Locke asserts that if the same consciousness is preserved, whether in the same or different substances, then the absolute memory is preserved.

Nagel says, "It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their ____________________. For there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to include consciousness."

Explain what James means when he says, "So far, all seems plain sailing, but my thesis will probably grow less plausible to the reader when I pass from percepts to concepts, or from the case of things presented to that of things remote."

For Descartes, "there is a vast difference between mind and body, in respect that body, from its nature, is always impersonal, and that mind is entirely personal."

Explain what Conway means by "virtual extension."

James says that "___________ is only a collective name for all these sensible natures, and save for time and space (and, if you like, for 'being') there appears no universal element of which all things are made."

Velleman says, "we should hope for a more intuitively satisfying solution to the problems of endurance and temporal passage. I think that the solution is to recognize that both phenomena are illusions, and that these illusions are ..."

Nagel says of consciousness, "No doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us, on other planets in other solar systems throughout the universe. But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism." Explain what Nagel means by the phrase "there is something it is like to be that organism."