心理学导论笔记2

Introduction to Psychology

Dr. Paul Bloom Lecture 2 Foundations: This is Your Brain

Nobel Prize winning biologist Francis Crick

“The Astonishing Hypothesis” is summarized like this:

You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons”.（你不过是一堆神经元罢了）

Most people are dualists. Dualism is a very different doctrine. It’s a doctrine that can be found in every religion and in most philosophical systems throughout history.

Plato（柏拉图）

Philosopher Rene Descarts (勒奈.笛卡尔) explicitly asked a question “Are human merely physical machines, merely physical things?” And he answered “No”.

He agreed that animals are machines, but people are different. There’s a duality of people. Like animals, we possess physical material bodies, but unlike animals, what we are is not physical. We’re immaterial souls that possess physical bodies. The claim is for humans at least, there are two separate things, there’s our material bodies and there’s our immaterial minds.

Descarts made two arguments for dualism:

One argument involved observations of a human action. Humans are not limited to reflexive action. Rather humans are capable of coordinated, creative, spontaneous things. We can use language, for instance. We can choose what we want to say, and machines can’t.

The second argument is quite famous and this he came to use method of doubt.

He started to ask a question, what can I be sure of ? And he said, well, I believe there’s a God, but honestly I can’t be sure there’s a God. I believed I lived in a rich country, but maybe I’ve been fooled”. He even said, I believe I have had friends and family but maybe I am being tricked. He even doubt that whether he has a body.

But He concluded that he can’t doubt that he is himself thinking. There is something really different about having a body, there’s always uncertain, from having a mind. He used this to support that bodies and minds are separate.

And so he concluded, I knew that I was a substance, the whole essence or nature of which is to think and that for its existence, there is no need of any place nor does it depend on any material thing. That is to say, the soul by which I am, what I am, is entirely distinct from body.

I want to illustrate the common sense nature of this in a few ways:

One thing is our dualism is enmeshed in our language, so we have a certain mode of talking about things that we own or things that are closed to us. We talk about owning our brains as if we’re somehow separate from them.

Our dualism shows up in intuitions about personal identity. This means that common sense tells us that somebody can be the same person even if their body undergoes radical and profound changes.

Franz Kafka:（卡夫卡）