Mind and Body Problem

Mind-Body Problem

Maria Del C. Perez

PHL/443

Dr. Steve Wyre

Mind-Body Problem

The mind-body problem implies that some philosophers and scientist are debating if the mind is part of the brain or body while others suggest that the mind is its own entity. It is the relation between the mental and the physical.

Moore and Bruder (2008) state that the mind and the body are intertwined and what happens in the mind can affect the body and vice versa. For scientists and philosophers the human is a mystery, no matter how they try to say that the mind is one material with the body there are still some areas that cannot be explain. There lies the problem, what one expert will explain as a fact another will make look like an impossibility. This subject is such a mystery that I think there will never be a concrete answer or definition for it.

Olson-Chapter 7

In chapter 7 – Personal Identity, Olsen (2002) deals with questions about us as persons. Many of the questions Olsen asks we as human have asked ourselves one time or another. Who am I? One often refers to personal identity to what makes us the way we are (p. 67). Olsen presents questions about the personhood, which mainly refers to what it is to be a person? (p. 69). Olsen also explains persistence refers to how one individual can be at different places at the same time and evidence referring to the evidence that the individual who is here today was the same who was here yesterday. The fact that an individual might look like another does not means these two are the same, evidence could be the fingerprints but he says that even this is not absolute evidence because the other individual might not have fingers (p. 68). In population Olsen refers to the number of human organism that are present, he also says that many times there could be a human with multiple personalities suggesting there are two thinking beings sharing one body (p. 69). What am I? Refers to what are we made of? In addition, whether a person is a combination of an immaterial soul and a material body (p. 70).

This chapter is challenging in a way but this questions that Olsen put in paper one has often asked about us (persons). Humans are curious by nature and wonder what makes us special over other beings and what makes us (persons) different from other individuals. One is in agreement with some of Olsen's questions like the fact that one wonders how one came to be, and if one's mother had marry a different husband will one have been born anyway? One wonders if things would have been different or if one would have had a different profession, house, and so on. The part the one disagree with Olsen is the fact that one