Philosophy of mind - Test 1

What are problems with introspection?

A lot of cognition/thinking is not conscious

People might use different vocabulary to describe the same internal processes → hard to distinguish between different ways of thinking and different ways of verbalizing it

Not a scientific method - you can’t prove/disprove someone else’s thoughts

Behaviorism

Studies behavior scienfically; empirical with a stimulus and response

“Black box”

Internal mental processing cannot be empirically measured and is therefore unknown. It simply cannot be explained by stimulus-response pairings

Essentially, the goal of cognitive science is to figure out what is going on inside the “black box” to produce certain empirical results

Are cogntivie processes active or passive?

Active; cognition requires effort and info must be processed, not simply absorbed

Reconstructive memory

A theory that memory recall is an active, flawed process of reconstruction rather than a precise video-like replay, leading to errors

Schemas

Prior knowledge that affects how we process new information

New information reforms/modifies existing schemas

Bottom-up processing

New information forms new beliefs; unbiased

Top-down processing

All our previous beliefs help us interpret new info; biased

Dualism

Descartes’ belief that the mind and body (brain) are separate; mind is immaterial and inherently different from the brain.

The soul can exist without the body

Materialism

Einstein’s belief that physical matter is the only thing that exists; mind and consciousness are the result of physical processes in the brain

The soul and body are inseparable