Difference Between Functionalism And Dualism

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Dualism is the idea that the mind is a separate entity that has no connection to the physical body.

The discussion of free will and its compatibility with determinism comes down to one’s conception of actions. Most philosophers and physicists would agree that events have specific causes, especially events in nature. The question becomes more controversial when philosophers discuss the interaction between human beings, or agents, and the world. If one holds the belief that all actions and events are caused by prior events, it would seem as though he would be accepting determinism

Descartes agrees with dualism, and stands by the mind being independent of the body and vice versa. We agree with the ideas of dualism every time we say, “I am a …show more content…

functionalism. Functionalism is a theory of the mind in contemporary philosophy, developed largely as an alternative to both the identity theory of mind and behaviorism.

Functionalism is a theory about the nature of mental states. According to functionalists, mental states are identified by what they do rather than by what they are made of. Functionalism is the most familiar or “received” view among philosophers of mind and cognitive science.

Functionalism is the doctrine that what makes something a thought, desire, pain (or any other type of mental state) depends not on its internal constitution, but solely on its function, or the role it plays, in the cognitive system of which it is a part. More precisely, functionalist theories take the identity of a mental state to be determined by its causal relations to sensory stimulations, other mental states, and …show more content…

Hobbes argued that everything in the world, including our thoughts and the states of our minds, can in principle be explained in terms of one thing and one thing only: matter in motion. Thoughts, for example, can be explained, he argued, as matter in motion in the brain. A perception of the world arises in a person’s brain when motion in the external world causes motion in the brain, which is then experienced as an external object, and so on. If everything can be explained as matter in motion, including the mental, then there is no good reason to suppose mind and matter are two fundamentally different kinds of things. Rather, it is more reasonable to suppose that if everything can be explained in material terms then everything is material. So argued

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