Human Mind: Functioning, Language, and Mind-Body Problem
Understanding the Human Mind
Regarding the functioning of the human mind, understand that this is an information processor that receives, stores, and processes data. According to Miller, the human being is a reporter. How does man process information? Mental states are representational facts. These states have meaningful representations. When we have a belief (even if it is false), we establish a relationship between ourselves and the things over which we have the belief.
Descartes identifies the self with the mind and consciousness. Therefore, the birth of psychology in 1879 was taken as the mind’s consciousness. The difference between the importance of the increase in life Freud called for a very revolutionary psychology. Descartes sees that everything you see or hear could be false and that there might be a higher being (an evil genius) who deceives us. Therefore, he doubts everything that exists. This reasoning, however, necessitates that we accept that we think. As we do this reasoning, we must be something. I = Descartes understands the mind as the soul (not just consciousness).
In the 20th century, Freud’s theory asserted that Descartes was wrong. Therefore, mental processes cannot be accessed through introspection (as Descartes believed).
The Problem of Other Minds
Descartes’ solution to the doubt that nothing is real is that we believe we exist because we engage in this reasoning. The problem of other minds arises when we consider that we can be assured that we exist, but how do we know that others exist, that others are also real? It is, therefore, a point on the problem of reality.
Language: A Defining Human Trait
The human being is an animal but differs from the rest of the animals. One of the differentiating features is language, which allows for a high level of communication. Some animals, such as dolphins, also have language, but the level of communication they can achieve is much lower. There are three properties that characterize human language:
- Productivity: This is related to comprehension. We are able to understand speech even if it uses a combination of thoughts or a particular form of expression that we have never encountered before. Productivity not only refers to the understanding of thoughts but also to the production of expressions.
Human language has two basic capabilities:
- Understanding (digestion of inputs)
- Production (creating outputs)
- Compositionality: Languages consist of similarities, which allows for different forms of expression. We match the creations with what we wish to express. All languages have different characters and words, but to understand a language, it is not enough to know the words; we must know how to order them.
Language is compositional, meaning that it is formed by words that are sorted according to specific characteristics. Sometimes, you could swap the parts, but not all sorting possibilities are valid.
- Systematicity
The Mind-Body Problem
The object of study of psychology is the functioning of the human mind. The mind and observable behavior and the brain are not the same, but without the brain, there appears to be no mind. The brain is an organ of the body, but what is the mind? What is the relationship between the brain and the mind, and does one depend on the other?
Materialist thesis: All reality is material, and that reality is what they consider beliefs. The mind and brain are the same in the sense of an ontological thesis. Questions arise epistemologically, but are the mind and brain the same? If epistemologically, the mind and brain are the same, it means that the mind and the brain must be the same, distinguishing you from the same belief. It seems that the laws that govern the mind are not the same as those that govern the brain.
The body and mind are related. We can raise the relationship from two perspectives:
- Ontological: The desire to drink coffee is identical in my mind and in my brain.
- Epistemological: The laws governing the functioning of the brain and mind are not the same.