What I would like you to do is to find a topic from section chapter 2 that you were interested in and search the internet for material on that topic. You might, for example, find people who are doing research on the topic, you might find web pages that discuss the topic, you might find youtube clips that demonstrate something related to the topic, etc. What you find and use is pretty much up to you at this point. Please use 3 or more resources.
Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter, and why you are interested in it. Next, I would like you to take the information you found related to your topic, integrate/synthesize it, and then write about it. At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites. Keep in mind that it will be easier if you keep it to one topic.
By integrating/synthesizing I mean to take what your read/experienced from the internet search (and from chapter 1 if you like) organize the information into the main themes, issues, info, examples, etc. about your topic and then write about the topic in your own words using that information. This is hard for some people to do - many students write what we refer to as "serial abstracts." They are tempted to talk about the websites rather than the topic proper and this what you DON'T want to do! They will talk all about website #1, start a new paragraph and talk all about web site #2, start a new paragraph and talk all about web site #3, and then write some kind of conclusion. Serial means one after the other...again, this what you DON'T want to do! If all three sites are on the same one topic it will be easier.
At first it is a real challenge to get out of the habit of writing "serial abstracts," but I assure you once you get the hang of it it is much easier to write using the integration method. And besides this is the way researchers and scientists write their technical reports and findings - many of you will have to be able to do this for other classes and for jobs that you may eventually be hired for so now is a good time to learn this skill. At this point don't worry about a grade, worry about doing your best to have fun with the topic and then integrate it into your own words to share what you found and now know. We will work on citing the sources later....
Let me know if you have any questions.
I chose to learn and talk more about the animal spirits that were described by Rene Descartes. The topic of animal spirits fits into this chapter because Descartes’ idea about animal spirits started the learning and research of how reflexes and the brain work together. I was interested in this topic because I never really heard about this idea really before and wanted to get some more background information and understanding of how this animal spirit idea came about.
Descartes believed that animal spirits were created from the “heat” of blood and that they caused movements within the body. The animal spirits were thought to travel among the brain to the nerves and then to the muscles and each animal spirit controlled a certain muscle. The part of the brain that Descartes felt was responsible for controlling the movements of the animal spirits was the pineal gland. Descartes also believe that the pineal gland was important in other movements, sensation, and memory. Descartes had this idea that the pineal gland was surrounded by ventricles and that the animal spirits were contained in these ventricles. He then noted that these ventricles were actually nerves and he said that nerves were these hallow tubes that were filled with animal spirits. Certain nerves were connected to certain sections of the brain. Descartes idea in how movement occurred went was very interesting. He stated that nerves were connected to the brain, sensory organ, and the pineal gland. When the sensory organ is stimulated, the brain released animal spirits connected with that sensory organ. The animal spirits then created this image, in a sense, that is placed on the pineal gland and that tell the pineal gland the kind of sensation the sensory organ is experiencing that the movement that should be made to be relieve that sensation or feeling.
I feel that this is a weird idea to think that Descartes believe that these were “spirits” that caused the movements within our bodies and that these things were what sent the messages from the brain to the muscles. However I feel that this topic is important because it started the basis and first knowledge of how the brain and muscles work and how the messages were carried from one to the other.
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/Mind/Descartes.html
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pineal-gland/
http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/73/animal_spirits.html
I chose to write about Descartes’ theory about Animal Spirits. It was an important concept in history because it was one of psychology’s first attempts at understanding biological psychology and how our minds and body’s work together. I found this very interesting because it’s such an abstract idea and I wanted to follow up with it and learn more.
According to physicians in Descartes’ time, animal spirits were invisible entities that flowed throughout our bodies and nervous system to essential control the movement of our bodies. Back in these times, physicians had a very abstract way of determining reasonable causes of illness by using the notion of the four humours (blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile) which were causal to how our bodies worked and functioned. The notion of animal spirits and the functioning of the nervous system was related to these concepts and was heavily relied upon during those times.
Before the world came to know of the electrical nature of our nervous system, they had an actually very complex theory about how animal spirits worked: nutrients were absorbed by the liver which were in turn called “natural spirits”, they then moved to the left ventrical of the heart where they became “vital spirits” and then moved, by way of the carotid arteries, to the ventricles of the brain until they were needed where they became animal spirits. Descartes believed that the control center, and where the animal spirits were stored was in the pineal gland of the brain. The spirits flowed through the nervous system to force the muscles into action, this worked because Descartes believed that the nerves in the body were connected to different parts in the brain and when different parts of our body were stimulated, the pineal gland would release the animal spirits which would interprate the sensation and create movement based upon what those were. (in addition, animal spirits also flowed throughout the brain to control intellect, cognition, and memory).
With the theory of animal spirits, Descartes was one of the first to propose the theory that the body and mind were two separate entities, and with that he stumbled upon another concept. He proposed that automatic reactions were a result of external events, which caused an outflow of animal spirits, therefore founding the concept of the reflex theory.
Animal spirits could also be quite devious when one did not take proper care of themselves, fasted, drank too much, or fell ill with fever—the spirits became agitated and would in return produce what we would call today, hallucinations. Therefore, the animal spirits kind of ran the whole show, in a sense, by controlling everything from our thoughts, memories, and movements.
http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2007/07/exorcizing_animal_spirits.php
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/Mind/Descartes.html
http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/73/animal_spirits.html
I decided to write on John Locke and his idea of the proper education. I had heard of John Locke from his social contract theory and his supply and demand theory from economics, but had never heard his opinion on what the proper education entailed. When I read about his ideas in the book I was surprised at just how harsh his ideas were. He believed in the student having a healthy body as well as mind. He believed in things like the child should not be too warm in the winter or too cool in the summer as that would make us weak. We should be able to withstand anything as long as we are used to it. Another aspect to raising a child and about the proper education is that the training and teaching should begin when the child is young so that the child does not create the bad habits that it would otherwise. With this comes the practice of repetition. Locke believed that the best way for children to learn was by repetition, and this has been discounted in the years since Locke some. The third main point that Locke made was that punishment should be used, but not excessively. If used excessively, the child’s mind would break and they would not want to learn or better themselves. Locke’s last point was that concrete rewards should be forbidden as well. The basis to this was that if the child receives a lollypop every time they do something well they will just work for the lollypop instead of to further their education and better themselves.
Locke’s ideas today simply seem harsh and ineffective. To Locke’s defense, this was the way that he was raised as a good Puritan. The ideas that by sleeping in a soft bed would make the child mentally weak and that to better the child’s immune system they needed to dunk their feet in freezing water every day may have seemed somewhat reasonable back then, but as we have furthered our scientific and psychological intelligence, this seems more and more crazy! This was a very interesting topic to research because it is really nice to see that there have been some serious strides made in education and, although it’s not perfect today, we are on the right track.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1692locke-education.html
http://www.faqs.org/childhood/Ke-Me/Locke-John-1632-1704.html
My topic has to do with Hume's idea and rules of Association. It fits into our chapter because it is part of British Associationism and I found Hume's idea's particularly interesting because much of his philosophy on life is similar to my own.
His idea's are empirical, meaning that they come from the senses, through experience and evidence. They are like the scientific method of trial and error, you can never prove anything right or wrong or prove causality, but you can get a better understanding of the relationship between things by comparing them to each other.
He spoke of how we all of our perceptions of things are simple impressions, and through our impressions we make Ideas. For example, you cannot tell me what an apple is. The term "apple" holds no substance. What you can an apple I may call an orange. But you can describe it to me by saying it is juicy, red, spherical, etc. Those impressions of what an apple is makes up the idea of an apple and makes it exist. We may never have seen an object before but we can get an idea of what it is like if someone tells us the components or impressions of that object.
My favorite thing about Hume was the fact that he pretty much believed that you cannot have any causality at all. I always hate hearing religious people and atheist argue with one another on who is right when there is absolute 0 way to prove or deny the existence of God, reality, or anything really. You cannot say guns cause death. Gun's shoot bullets, so the bullets cause death? No. The bullet can hurt you, but may not kill you, if the bullet does hit a vital spot, it is not the bullet killing you, it is the fact that that organ or vital spot hit no longer is functioning correctly, so the organ not functioning correctly caused you to die. No. According to Hume there is an infinite number of steps you can go down in saying what caused the actual death in this situation. There is no absolute cause for anything so people need to stop trying to say there is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundle_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume
The pineal gland was one thing that Rene Descartes was the most famous for discovering. He was one of the early philosophers, and psychology gets its root from philosophy. The pineal gland fits into this chapter because empiricism (based on the idea that our knowledge is constructed from our experiences in it) and associationism (knowledge is woven together through associations between our idesas) rose from Descartes’ influence. I’m interested in it because it’s interesting that what we know to be true today has come so far from what we thought we knew a long time ago.
The pineal gland makes Descartes theory of how men are different than animals make sense. Descartes believes that men are made of a body and a soul. Although the pineal gland doesn’t make sense biologically, it is needed to understand his ideas. He believed that humans had a pineal gland but animals did not. Descartes himself had actually seen pineal glands in farm animals but left out that fact to prove his point. The pineal gland is located between the two ventricles in the brain. He believed it was the seat of the soul. The pineal gland released animals spirits which imagination, bodily movements, and memory. He thought that when a body part was moved, it pulled on fibers that connected back to the pineal gland. Because he believed that animals didn’t have a pineal gland, he also believed that they could not feel any pain. Therefore, he began live animal dissections which became popular across Europe.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pineal-gland/
http://www.crystalinks.com/descartes.html
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ueb31jsWs2wC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1947&dq=descartes+and+the+pineal+gland&ots=_y2kPcZ3PM&sig=Kb6oSjSPFyZCl2idgZC-I2MC66M#v=onepage&q=descartes%20and%20the%20pineal%20gland&f=false
The topic I feel I need to learn more about is David Hume and his empiricist/associationist theries between association, resemblance, contiguity, and cause/effect. Basically that certain things go together. This topic doesn’t intrest me but is the area I feel I know the least or care the least on. Basically he sumarized things into three parts; ideas, thoughts and impressions. Impression means what we experience while just living. What we hear, see, feel, etc. Basically when all put together Hume is saying that everything we experience is then copied from an earlier impression. For example a blind man can never for a notion of color, and a deaf man of sounds. One quick sentence I found to summarize how the ideas and thought are co-dependent of each other. Ideas or thoughts always resovle themselves into simpler ideas copied from precedent feelings or sentiments. Oh and then ideas are basically if you have not experienced it yet your mind must conclude an idea of what the object or shape must be, for example monsters.
Humes ideas are more empirical which means they come from more of the senses through actually experiencing them. We learn from experiencing the world. For infants or children to learn what words and objects are usually the object is presented to them and then followed by the word or deffinition. If I were to hand a child, new to the world a spoon, they would not know what the word “spoon” mean or have an idea of what it looked like untill the spoon was presented to them. His statements of things being associated as occuring together is a great start for understanding our impression of things as well. As the example givin in class we go to a restaurant and see salt on the table but notice something else next to it. Putting salt and pepper next to each other and then observing this over and over we start to associate that when we see salt we should also see pepper.
With Hume the most important thing I got out of me reading is that you can never be certain about the causes of events. This idea of thinking label Hume a skeptic but his ideas tranfered all the way to present day with questions like, “if a tree falls in the forest can you hear it”, how do you know it fell? Was it chopped down? How can you know without seeing it happen? Hence the difference between our impressions, and our ideas about what occurred.
http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/texts/Weber%20-%20History/hume.htm
http://www.bartleby.com/37/3/2.html
http://www.livingphilosophy.org.uk/philosophy/David_Hume/the_Origin_of_Ideas.htm
The topic that I decided to research more about was the idea of Descartes’ animal spirits. I chose this topic because it led to further research on how the brain and reflexes work. I also chose this topic because to me it seemed weird that somebody in the field of the sciences would believe that there were animal spirits that controlled the brain, muscles, and nerves.
The pineal gland is believed by Descartes to be mainly involved in sensation, imagination, memory, and bodily movements. The pineal gland is suspended in the middle of the ventricles. Nerves were hollow tubes filled with animal spirits and contain small fibers that stretch from one end to the other which connect sense organs. It was said that the animal spirits traveled among the brain to the nerves and then to muscles. Each animal spirit was also said to control a certain muscle in the body.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pineal-gland/
http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/73/animal_spirits.html
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/Mind/Descartes.html
The topic I chose is Hume’s third rule of association, cause and effect. I find this one out of the three to be the most interesting because it tends to be more complex. Resemblance and contiguity are for the most part self-explanatory. Cause and effect is directly related to this chapter because we learn through experiences and this enables us to learn about the philosophical ideas that are presented.
Causes and effects are recognized through our experiences in life. If certain events occur together, we will eventually develop some association between the two. For example, if we eat a certain type of food and get sick, we may not eat that food again. If it happens more than once, the association tends to grow stronger. In this situation the cause would be the food and the effect would be the food. We associate the food with the sickness, when in reality there could be another factor present like the stomach flu. Since cause and effect relationships are due to our experiences, we as humans cannot ever be one hundred percent certain that the effect was the result of the cause. We physically, through our senses, do not have the ability to determine cause and effect relationships and therefore we cannot predict what will happen in the future. There was a very good example given on http://www.truthawakens.com/hume.asp that gave me a more clear understanding: After biting into a piece of pizza, we expect an enjoyable taste. This enjoyable taste is expected because of past experiences. Even though we expect the pizza to taste good, it could literally blow up upon biting. This goes to show that anything could happen at any moment and no matter what we have experienced previously, we cannot possibly know what is going to happen.
The idea of cause and effect even comes up in psychological research. Only theories exist, nothing is ever said to be proven. Just because people see connections between events, does not mean that one event actually caused the other to happen. There could always be another unknown variable involved that was overlooked.
All in all, our experiences help us to make relationships between events and may give us an idea of cause and effect, but there is always some uncertainty. There are many things beyond human knowledge and because of this many things will go unanswered.
http://plato.standford.edu/entries/hume/
http://www.truthawakens.com/hume.asp
http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/causeeff.php
The idea of the mind at birth is a "white paper" was only mentioned briefly in our text, but I chose to research the idea of tabula rasa because it seemed very interesting.
Tabula Rasa (which is 'blank slate' in Latin) is an empiricist idea. It basically states that are individuals are born with without any instincts or mental content, and is on the nurture side of the nature vs. nurture conflict.
John Locke talks about the idea of Tabula Rasa in one of his most famous works, Essay Concerning Human UNderstanding. Locke argues that people acquire knowledge from the information and objects around them with their senses.Tabula Rasa is a apart of the simple idea/complex idea.
Locke wasn't the only psychologist to mention the idea of Tabula Rasa, with Frued stating that our traits are highly determined by our upbringing.
The idea of tabula Rasa relies heavily on the notion that our senses teach us everything- our senses allow us to form simple ideas (and put them on our blank slate as I understand it) and then through reflection we turn those simple ideas into complex ones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_rasa
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/john-locke-and-tabula-rasa.html
http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/john_locke_tabula_rasa.html
What I thought was interesting in this chapter was Locke's human understanding and how he was interested in figuring out how our minds develop ideas. He says that our mind is a blank slate at birth (tabula rasa) and later on our mind is filled with experiences. His understanding of human minds were put into two categories of sensation dealing with our senses towards objects and reflection dealing with how we perceive those objects. His description of sensation is passive and reflection as active and passive.
He was against Descartes idea on innate thoughts and believed they did not exist. In his first book he states that a baby has some senses and differences between color and tastes, starting in the womb.
This reminds me of a song I just heard in another class called "7 seconds" and it's about how when a baby is born, it only has 7 seconds on knowing absolutely nothing about right or wrong, colors, hate, crime, ect. This is supposably a fact too. This seems about right to me, but I do believe a baby can feel emotions and sensations even in the womb.
Later on, he describes simple and complex ideas about objects, relating to reflection and sensation. He said we get simple ideas from sensation, or the information coming into our ears, and we get our complex ideas from our simple ideas combined with abstraction in the mind. It seems somewhat confusing, but still makes sense to me. I find it quite interesting how great historians come up with their information.
What I got from this information helps me understand that Locke had many great ideas explaining the human understanding and although I don't quite believe that our minds are blank slates when we were born, I do believe that experience is knowledge, and knowing what happened back then helps the now, and also helps better the future, hopefully.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_Concerning_Human_Understanding
http://www.rc.umd.edu/cstahmer/cogsci/locke.html
http://www.iep.utm.edu/locke/
I was really interested in reading Locke’s theory on education. His ideas of rewarding children with sweets and treats greatly benefit the children and their ability to learn. One of the lines that really stood from the others in the text was “Children should have hard rather than soft beds,” Locke says this because he believes that the children grow to be tough individuals from the experience of tough bed. Rather than a child lying on a bed of feathers every night melts and dissolves the body, in which can make for an early grave. When Locke created his idea on education he had many theories to go along with it like; theory of value, theory of knowledge, theory of human nature, theory of learning, and etc. However, one thing that all these theories have in common is their ability to have positive rewards for individuals. He says training must begin at an early stage due to the fact when children are their brains are like a sponge, and the best time to develop good healthy habits is at the stage of growth. He goes on to talk about discipline and obedience to children and how well they learn from in the later stages of their life. Most of Locke’s views towards education would go on and set forth in a series of letters to a cousin that published Some Thoughts on Education. It would go on and talk about the nature of knowledge and understanding human characteristics. I thought it was pretty fascinating how he would develop all this useful information that is the building for everything we to do today. With that being said An Essay Concerning Human Understanding was written by Locke arguing about how the human mind at birth is like a blank sheet of paper or a tabula rasa. Just like a sheet of paper, it is ready to be written upon the experiences of one’s lifetime.
http://www.newfoundations.com/GALLERY/Locke.html
http://social.jrank.org/pages/375/Locke-John-1632-1704.html
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1692locke-education.html#Some Thoughts Concerning Education
The guy that I wanted to learn more about was Mr. John Locke and his thoughts on how humans attain knowledge. I’m interested in this because I feel as though this was one of the theories that has carried on to today and has not been entirely debunked.
Coming into this class I primarily knew of John Locke as being the guy whose thoughts and writings inspired our forefathers to pen the constitution in the fashion they did. Aside from that I had almost no knowledge of him until doing a bit more research. Locke’s thoughts on epistemology, the philosophy on knowledge and how it is attained and utilized, were one of the first additional things I discovered. He was an odd duck in that he opposed the popular belief that there was this thing called human nature, the belief that we came into this world with some basic knowledge, rationality, and intentions. He thought we came into the world completely blank and learned of the world through our senses. I wonder what he would think of Helen Keller. Anyway, he was one of the founding philosophers who backed the idea of empiricism, the importance of experiencing through our senses, and thus attaining knowledge. This knowledge could be broken into two categories, simple and complex. We begin with simple, those which cannot be broken down any further, and begin to combine them in such a way to develop complex knowledge. I especially liked the example from the Youtube clip.
I was interested in his ideas concerning complex knowledge so I took a look at Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in order to look at specific examples used by him. One example of this was his writings in Chapter 28 of his essay, Of Faith and Reason, and their Distinct Provinces. Locke was convinced that there was a God out there that was nearly demonstrable. Being that Locke was such a staunch empiricist he believed that through our very senses and rationality that we could come to the conclusion that there was a God and that it was ignorant to think otherwise. Locke also thought that faith and reason can and should work side by side in the Church. To block out either train of thought would be stupid and senseless. To cut out all faith would mean to limit our senses and possibilities to the sensory world around us. Lock was very clear that it is God who grants us new simple knowledge and that apart from his revelations we would never progress in our knowledge. To cut out all reason members of the Church could go ahead with whatever superstitions they could imagine and run around wild and unchecked. This is an equally scary thought. Locke stated that God gave us our reason and therefore we should make good use of it.
In conclusion, I learned much more about John Locke and his thoughts as an empiricist and even found one good example. It was enjoyable to read the original words of Locke and to make sense of them. He was truly a brilliant man whose thoughts and ideas are still shaping minds today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-buzVjYQvY
http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/john_locke_tabula_rasa.html#locke_tabula_rasa
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/locke/locke1/Book4b.html#Chapter XVIII
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_Concerning_Human_Understanding
The topic I chose for this blog was David Hume. My topic fits in with chapter two for one, because he was mentioned and had a few pages dedicated to him and his findings, and also because he was what a person might consider a ‘founding father’ in the way we have approached psychology and/or philosophy. The reason I chose Hume was because basically everything in the chapter was interesting to me. In my post for the reading I focused in on other topics and I thought this would be a good place to venture out into some of the other people and things that intrigued me.
I thought it was neat that although Hume was and is recognized for his philosophy, that was not what he was most known for; he was most known for his extensive research on English History. Since Hume was an empiricist his beliefs we based off of the idea that all of someone’s understandings come from his or her experiences. What seems to be Hume’s biggest accomplishment was his three laws of association based on: resemblance, contiguity, and cause/effect. Hume believed that the most important of these laws was the idea of causation. He believed that causation allowed a person to travel past their memories and beliefs and apply this into the real world to determine things from being real or not. In my research I found that Hume liked to go against the grain and be fairly original in all of his pieces, rather than to blend with others. It was also mentioned that because of this, as well as what he published, he found himself at odds with religion and many considered him to be an atheist and non-believer. Just before he died he released a short autobiography entitled “My Own Life”, which was also stated to have caused some sort of minor controversies as well. As I stated earlier, Hume was an interesting man who had a lot of debatable ideas and beliefs. What I admire most is that he did this mostly out of his own interests and curiosities, and did not seem to necessarily care if the public was on his side or not when coming up with his laws and other contributions to the worlds of philosophy, psychology, and empiricism.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/
http://www.iep.utm.edu/humelife/
http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/hume.htm
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/philosophers/hume.html
I decided to write about Empiricism because many of the men in the chapter had empiricist ideas. An in my own words definition of Empiricism is knowing something is real based on hard evidence. It also emphasizes having experienced things. Empiricists believe that when we are born our minds are like a blank slate therefore all of our ideas are generated from experiences we have between the time we are born and the time when we get the idea. . Basically it means when you do an experiment you cannot assume anything. It must be tested in real life and proven to be true. I think an empirical approach needs to be taken to a certain degree. I saw some anti-empiricist you tube ads on the internet about counting apples several times to make SURE you have three, I don’t think it needs to go quite that far, but I think being half way empiricist isn’t half bad if you are a researcher.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism
http://www.answers.com/topic/empiricism
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InO9xLuutuU
Something I found incredibly interesting in Chapter 2 was subjective idealism. Subjective idealism is a concept of George Berkeley, in response to John Locke‘s idea of materialism. Locke talked about primary qualities and secondary qualities. Primary qualities exist as a natural property of an object; like shape or motion. Whereas, secondary qualities depend just on perception; like color, smell, or taste. In Berkeley’s concept of subjective idealism we are told that one can never be entirely certain about something, they can only be certain that they are perceiving something. So Locke’s idea of primary and secondary qualities did not really fit with Berkeley’s idea, considering the fact that Berkeley’s idea only would support the idea of secondary qualities because everything is perceived. In this idea it is said that nothing exists except minds and spirits and perceptions. Basically, all objects are creations of our minds and nothing can be a concrete reality and material things cannot be independent without a perceiving mind. Also, because perceptions are based on experiences, and no two people have the exact same experiences, then no one can have equal perceptions of their surroundings.
http://www.modern-thinker.co.uk/4%20-%20subjective%20idealism.htm
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/570743/subjective-idealism
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Subjective_idealism
I found John Locke’s ideas of education to be interesting and wanted to find out more information on the subject. Locke held a belief that the mind was a bland slate and humans learn everything they know through experience in the world. This was different than some other people at the time who thought humans came into the world with some information already in their brains. I thought his views were interesting because some of them made sense and are in some ways used today, but other views seemed completely ridiculous to me, such as making children sleep on hard beds. I learned that Locke did not like his education that he got as a child and therefore believed the best way to educate a child was through home schooling. At Westminster Abby where he was schooled he was probably whipped a lot, which may be a reason why he did not enjoy his education. One of his views was that children should not be punished like that because then they will come to associate education with negative things. Locke did not think that everyone should be educated. Nobility were the most important because they were the ones that were going to lead the country someday and therefore had to have the best education of them all. In John Locke’s eyes the main goal of education was for one to be better able to serve their country. Locke also thought that memorization was not important to education. Children should learn from experience. The most important part of education was wisdom and virtue. So in some ways his views are like the ones for a hybrid class. We are not just memorizing things from the chapter and writing them back out to the professor.
http://social.jrank.org/pages/375/Locke-John-1632-1704.html
http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/agexed/aee501/locke.html
http://www.newfoundations.com/GALLERY/Locke.html
One topic that I found interesting from Chapter 2 was about Descartes mind-body distinction. A reflex is an automatic stimulus-response reaction that gave a physiological model for Descartes’ position on the mind-body question. He sided with William Harvey’s discoveries about the mechanical heart and the description of muscle action. They believed muscles depended on nerves that all came from the brain and enclosed a slight wind known as the “animal spirits”. After reading this in the text book I felt it was necessary to research Descartes more and try and piece together his thinking. I chose to look up more information on Descartes’ mind-body dualism theory because it sounded absurd to me and was curious to learn more about it. I found a YouTube video that very simply describes his thought processes. I found this to be helpful when trying to put myself in Descartes’ shoes. (Please excuse the naughty words :))
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHihkRwisbE
Descartes’ philosophy is that the mind and the body are distinct features and different than one another. He believed that thinking was an extended thing and it was possible to have a live, active mind without a body and vice versa. My first reaction to this was, how could we move, talk, etc. without our mind AND body working simultaneously together? But, after watching the video I think Descartes was describing mood and feeling more so than the actual brain and its functions. When people say they feel ecstatic, sad, energetic, and so on, where are those feelings coming from? One cannot say exactly where they are feeling this way in their body, but just the fact that they are indeed feeling an emotion. In Descartes’ Meditation VI he states that the mind and body are distinct and can exist even when they are not together. A quote from this Meditation states “Nature also teaches me, by these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and so on that I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but that I am very closely and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit”. So, the main point I got from this statement is that the mind and body do work together in this life but once you die both of these sensations survive, just independently.
http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/DA026SECT8
http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rutherford/phil32/med6.html
http://www.iep.utm.edu/descmind/
This week I chose to do a little research on Descartes' animal spirits theory. I thought it was interesting that he thought that the spirits of animals lived in our brain and created the necessary reaction to a physical touch, burn or ache. The spirits told you what to do and how to react. The example in the book talked about the man that stepped on fire and the spirits in his brain went down the "tubes" and pulled his foot off of the fire. I don't know about you, but if I were living in that era and someone thought that there were animals controlling my brain I would think they were a quack. Essentially Descartes was calling us all animals including himself. Although, they didn't have the science equipment to show that he was wrong either, to me it's just a silly hypothesis, although it is very creative. I give him props for going out there and doing research. He was thinking and trying to rationalize reasons for why our body does what. Descartes also talked about how the brain can differentiate movement of the animal spirits in the brain and how those animals activated the nerves too. He was on to something though about movement and nerves and how they worked together.
http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2007/07/exorcizing_animal_spirits.php
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/Mind/Descartes.html
http://neurophilosophy.wordpress.com/2006/11/16/exorcising-animal-spirits-the-discovery-of-nerve-function/
In researching for this blog, I started thinking about how ironic it is that the field in which I plan on spending the rest of my life is derived from a field of which I think very little. While I actually have an old friend that is majoring in philosophy, married someone who plans on professing in philosophy, I can not seem to bring myself to acknowledge that it has any place in contemporary society. I very much believe that in order to have a stand on something, we need to look at both sides and make an informed decision in order to actively have a real opinion. So I looked up philosophy and psychology together, to see if I could find any information on the other side. Surprisingly, I found a lot of strong opinions that opposed mine.
It is the belief of some philosophers that philosophy is far superior to psychology. That psychology is simply a branch of philosophy. While I see where they get this from, psychology does after all stem from philosophy, it is the opinion of some that philosophy is a more concrete science than psychology. I use the word ‘science’ loosely because I have not seen much that tells me that philosophy does any measuring, or empirical data collection of any kind in order to see how much noise a tree makes when it falls.
It has been said though, that psychology limits philosophy because it does not provide an adequate perspective on life. This argument receives a bit of credit from me. I can see where philosophers could consider themselves to study life, in that they think about the meaning of life, they ponder different life questions, etc. So in that way I’m sure that they have a very well thought out persepective on life. From a psychological stand point, we don’t so much ponder the meaning of life as we do study and learn about the events in it. Our interests lie in discovering how a stripper can mentally withstand (or not withstand) doing his or her job on a nightly basis. Why Charles Manson felt justified in his beliefs and how he convinced people to follow him. Or simply why my roommate feels the need to constantly prove to herself and those watching how smart and attractive she is. Psychology is about people, helping them, understanding them, in an efficient and scientific way.
It was also said that psychology is guesswork. That it works with need more than philosophy, which works with truth. That psychology is a crude type of science that is not truly established. This point kind of blew my mind a little. I feel philosophy is very subjective, who knows if the chicken came before the egg? And how are we ever to find out? The backing argument that it is a crude science made a little sense to me, in that I could see what was trying to be said but the fact that we run studies, over and over, have statistics, I feel dismantles this argument. I also think that the basis of this argument is that psychology is a relatively new science, in comparison to others, but one that is pretty established.
Lastly I read a bit about Aristotle as a psychologist and this was an interestingly odd topic. Apparently he wrote a book and a few articles on the subject but studied not only humans but all living things. He was of the opinion that psychology is a study of the soul and its properties, and so he felt that not just things with minds should be studied.
http://www.williams.edu/philosophy/fourth_layer/faculty_pages/jcruz/courses/philofpsych.html
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-psychology/
http://www.sonoma.edu/users/d/daniels/Greeks.html
modern-thinker.co.uk/1aphilandpsy.htm
I chose to do my topical research for chapter 2 on Descartes' theory of animal spirits. I first found these very interesting in the textbook and was eager to find out more. I found some follow up on the animal spirts and some ways that Descartes was proved wrong. His idea for the time was essentially brilliant and made sense if we did not know what we now know today.
A Dutch microscopist named Jan Swammerdam proved Descartes' theory wrong. He conducted experiments using frogs. His experiments not only proved Descartes wrong, but is essential to what we know about the nerve system today. Swammerdam cut tendons on the frogs legs that made the muscles contract and thus proved that animal spirits in the brain were not responsible for movement as Descartes had proclaimed.
John Locke also had some comments about animal spirits. He theorized that animal spirits were liquid traveling though the nerve system and believed they were responsible for connecting messages between muscles, brain, and organs. I found this interesting because the fact that Swammerdam proved it wrong, Locke made a valid argument that could have passed as well with the theory of animal spirits. It is like a step closer to the truth, but still holding onto something that is false.
Descartes studied animal spirits more than any other philosopher/physisist at the time he was alive. During his time alive, many people rejected what he thought to be true but without his thoughts there would be no way for people to try and prove him wrong to get to the advancement of science we have today. His view on animal spirits brought our attention to movement and what caused it, how we moved, and reasons for moving. Although he was incorrect, he played a very vital part in science and advancement thereof in his day and after his death.
http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2007/07/exorcizing_animal_spirits.php
http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/73/animal_spirits.html
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pineal-gland/
The topic I decided upon for my blog is Descartes and his animal spirits. When i first read about this idea i pretty much knew that's what i would blog about. I found his theory about how the whole body is run by these spirits, which basically function like the simple hydraulic statues that were popular among the wealthy's gardens at the time. While it wasn't Descartes who first came up with the idea, his mention of it was the only one in our book.
The "animal spirits" that are used to control the body are actually a byproduct of absorbing nutrients and breathing. According to the theory at the time the body absorbed the nutrients that you ate, then they would be transported from the left ventricle of the heart, after which they would combine with the air that we breathe in our brain to form the animal spirits. The spirits are then stored in our pineal gland until we decide to make use of them.
I found the use of the pineal gland as the connection between the body and the mind to be an interesting choice. What interested me most is that Descartes knew that some animals had pineal glands, but still said that they didn't have minds.
I believe that my favorite part of Descartes theory is that he had given a fairly accurate description of reflexes and how they work. He basically said that they didn't need the mind's help to move those specific muscles in a reflex because the body had adapted to do it automatically. Which is correct, even though his explanation on how it actually works isn't quite right.
Overall i chose Descartes and his animal spirits because it seemed to be an interesting topic, and even though it was not a correct theory, it was still a very interesting one, and i find it interesting to see how these great philosophers thought the world worked.
http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2007/07/exorcizing_animal_spirits.php
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/Mind/Descartes.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rene_Descartes
Descartes view on the body and soul was described in his work the Treatise of Man. He viewed the body and soul as two separate parts created by God working together. He only described the body, however, and discussed the soul only as being seated in the penal gland. He described animal spirits as moving through hollow tubes back and forth from the penal gland. These animal spirits allowed for sensation and perception of the body parts. Another interesting aspect he discussed were memories and how they were stored. He stated that memories could be stored in the penal gland as well as the muscles of the individual. The movements that Descartes described of the animal spirits is not that unlike how the nervous system operates in an electric fashion. In fact his views, even though wrong, helped in the discovery of the nervous system, as well as modern day Psychology. Another aspect of the unit was John Locke and his view on education. He believed that children should foremost be children and that they should be allowed to act like them. They are to learn through observation of the parents. He is drawn in contrast to another philosopher Immanuel Kant who believed that strict discipline helped to develop a well formed adult and his thoughts are in comparison of the old greek saying “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Locke also believed that no amount of serious work should be given to children because it could be a hindrance and even bad for their health.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pineal-gland/
http://www.stephenhicks.org/2009/11/06/education-locke-versus-kant/
http://www.history.org/history/teaching/enewsletter/volume2/june04/primsource.cfm