Philosophy Survey (Brain Workout)

[Guest]

Just For Fun....Recently I've been doing a lot of reading and a lot of thinking about how much our mind is connected to our bodies. Descartes (one of my favorite philosophers) has VERY strong opinions concerning mind/body separation and dualism. While I have some elementery thoughts onl this I find myself going in circles and would like to start a discussion. What are your thoughts?I'm so curious in other's thoughts. There are so very few intelligent people to discuss philisophical things with around here..... what are your thoughts on the following:Do you agree that there is a mind/ body separation?What role has a higher-power in your self-knowledge? In your everyday life? In your understanding or reason?Can faith be justified by reason?Does faith still have a place in a "thinking" person's life? Are our thoughts bore valuable than our bodies? Are they equal?So many things to consider..... lets excercise our brains.........

[Guest]

Interesting questions. Ok, I'll take a shot at putting my opinions and beliefs into words. Do you agree that there is a mind/ body separation?Depends on how you define mind/body seperation. I know that my mind can go many places that my body cannot. Whether my mind can exist without having a home in my body, however, I don't know. I'm inclined to believe that there is some part of us that will continue to exist even after the body ceases to function, but I have no empirical proof.What role has a higher-power in your self-knowledge? In your everyday life? In your understanding or reason?Practically none. I have no proof of the existance or non-existance of any sort of higher power. So I try to maintain a balance, living my life as I see fit, and doing what I perceive as being right.Can faith be justified by reason?If anything, reason would seem to indicate that a LACK of faith is the more logical course. There is a clear lack of any proof of any sort of higher being, thus having faith in one is unreasonable. Show me solid, incontrovertible proof of the existance of a deity, then and only then will I concede my non-belief. Does faith still have a place in a "thinking" person's life? If by "thinking" person, you mean one who reasons from logic and tries to act accordingly, then my previous answer applies. If you mean a "thinking" person motivated more by emotion, then the answer could be yes or no. I try to apply logic and reason to all facets of my existence, though being human, I am imperfect in this.Are our thoughts more valuable than our bodies? Are they equal?I'd have to conclude that in one sense, they are equal, as it's the body that provides the base from which the mind can exist. In another sense, the mind is more "valuable", since all of our advances in knowledge originate in our thoughts, and are later proved or disproved, and applied to our lives. Consider technology, which, among its effects, makes our bodies more comfortable, healthier, and longer lived. Without mind, without the thoughts of those able and trained to think logically and clearly, technology could not progress.

[GSnicklegrove]

Do you agree that there is a mind/ body separation?I don't agree. I think we think there is a seperation, and this is the dualism we think and take for real.What role has a higher-power in your self-knowledge? In your everyday life? In your understanding or reason?I don't believe in a higher power, we are answerable to ourselves, to life. In my understanding, everything leaves ripples, every moment birthing a new one. I like the old Chinese saying, the beat of a butterfly wing in China is felt around the world. Everything is a playing out of cause and effect.Can faith be justified by reason?This is only answerable if there is a consistent definition of faith and a consistent definition or reason. Faith and reason are very interdependent upon circumstances, and its understanding and hence labeling by another mind and its perspective, and its history of moments...this is too open a question. Faith and reason are not altogether seperate or alike.Does faith still have a place in a "thinking" person's life? To define a "thinking person's life" is needed. Do you have faith that you will automatically inhale your next breath? Faith is a phenomena of many contexts. A thinking person often has the strongest of faiths, faith in their thinking process and other phenomena, regardless if a secular label is attached.Are our thoughts more valuable than our bodies? Are they equal? A penny for your thoughts. Thoughts are the forefunner of action, every action, whether good, bad, or of neutral consequence. Without our body, we could not think our throughts, and without thoughts, what would propel action. In this statement I take it as assumed all animals think, even if it is but a quarter of a second thought of hunger. There are no higher thoughts without the intellectually lower ones. Don't eat, won't live to think.I think these are wonderful questions to think about, I think about such things often as well. Everything is open to perspective, this world is filled with different perspective. What we may think is reasonable and logically, even concerning science and technology, was birthed from some of the craziest, flightiest, off the wall people in history. Who defines the reason in any giving circumstance or time, and what prevents that definition from changing fluidly from time to time and person to person? It is illogical in my examination to expect there is any stagnent interpretation of reason, faith and logic... it is fluid motion. Let me try to explain in another way.What did people think of those freakin crazy Wright Brothers? They risked life, money, reputation for those crazy airplane inventions.What about Newton and his Theory of Universal Gravitation and is ground work invention of Calculus, all the while, sitting there decoding the bible, trying to match up codes with the planets. His alchemical research he nearly completely confined himself to do. What about Galilei? Noted for his theory of the solar system revolving around the sun, the man died a herectic. Newton, building his work and understanding off of Galilei, nevertheless, was an undistinguished student at Cambridge, and couldn't work land for anything. It gets crazier than that, all in all, looking for constants gets one thinking in a deluded fashion. From Beethoven to Frank Whittle (noted Rolls Royce aircraft engineer and inventor), Freud, Einstein, Kopernikus, (excuse me if I do not get the exact spellings), Franklin, Kirchoff, Lambert, Pascal, Gibbs, Heisenberg, Planck, J.S. Bell,Schrodinger, the list goes on and on for these crazies, in so many fields.If it is a given that logic, reason, and faith are constantly in flux, then where in the world does thinking thoughts, creativity come to play? Life is complex, and human life is expecially so.GertieSo many things to consider..... lets excercise our brains.........

[jojo7]

I dont know if i will be able to answer all of those questions...although i find them to be very intense questions, its hard for me to explain my thoughts in words...(too much Sesame Street I think...lol)I can only speak for myself here, but i do have a strong faith in a higher power...and because of that faith i feel there is a separation between mind and body...it is our minds that makes us in charge of our bodies while living in the physical world...My faith is what helps me determine how certain situations/issues that are part of my everyday life (my children, husband, family) should be dealt with...it's what helps me deal with my own issues within myself as well...As far as our thoughts being more powerful than a bodies, i can only explain my answer in a overwhelming situation i had in my life...when i gave birth to my 2nd son, i went through a extremely bad case of post partum depression...it was my thoughts that were so overwhelmingly powerful, that i was consumed with fear,grief,anger,and every other possible emotion!...my body reacted to these emotions in a way that i could not care for my newborn son...it was almost like i was rejecting him...it was all of those emotions grouped into one that caused my physical body to reject him...i could not get myself to care for him in the middle of the night when he cried (he had colic) for hours in the middle of the night... i never had feelings of anger towards my baby...but i have to say, that i had thoughts of suicide...thank God for the support of my husband and family...after one night of crying almost 12 hours straight i called my ob/gyn and was immediately put on medication...although i understand it was a chemical imbalance that caused these thoughts and emotions,but it still had a major effect on my physical body...I dont know if i'm going way off the topic here, but i could only think of how controlling my thoughts were over my body...which is what set me into a deeper depression...the mind is such a powerful gift we have...just imagine how this world would be if more people would just take the time to see how much knowledge we are able to consume...where there is no knowledge, there is ignorance...Hope i didn't get to chatty and off the topic...but thanks for making me think above the Nickelodeon level!!!...lol

[Guest]

Hmmm...Okay, let me give this a try. This is all just my opinion, and I can get a bit long-winded, so bear with me, it's gonna be a long post.Do I believe there is a mind/body seperation? Yes. Not exactly a clear-cut one, but at some point there is a definite seperation. I think that our minds (not our brains) are intimately entwined with our physical bodies to the point where we can accomplish seemingly mystical things, such as self diagnosis of medical ailments through our dreams. Our minds have the same kind of connection with out bodies that oxygen has with water. You need both oxygen and hydrogen to make water, yet you can have oxygen and hydrogen seperate for other reasons. This is the same kind of relationship I think our bodies and minds share. Our minds and bodies are connected, but are also seperate in themselves. LOL, did that make any kind of sense to anyone else? What role does a higher-power have in my self-knowlege? In everyday life? In my understanding and reason? Well, I tend to be more like my father in that I am scientifically minded. I tend to believe what I can see and touch. But I have inherited from my mother an undeniable ability to percieve things that cannot be so easily categorized. I think we all have this ability, just some people have a stronger sense than others. Like eyesight. Some people are born with better eyes than others. I happen to have excellent vision. And because of my life experiences, I have joined the 85% of all humans who believe in a higher power. (I may be off slightly with the actual percentage) I have had several events take place in my life which I cannot explain with my logic and reason. Only my overwhelming sense of what I know to be true. Before you ask, yes, it sacres the bajeebus out of me.So, yes, I often think about the reprocussions of my actions. I live with the knowlege (belief) that some day I will be called to answer for my life.Can faith be justified by reason?I think it can. Reason is nothing more than the deduction of "fact" by logical succession. It's all a matter of perception. Society has swallowed the pill that scientists know what they're talking about. They are educated, informed, and brilliant. Yet (whatever their excuse) they still can't find the cure for the common cold. We accept their theories (facts) about the universe because we percieve them to be more aware of those things. In reality, they are only taking what evidence they have (viable or not) and using their extensive education and personal interpretations to come up with comfortably complex but believable answers.Here, try this for perception:If ***** (nasty guy, right?) believed - as we know he did, that the world was being poisoned by the genetically unclean (non-arayan) then his perception of what was right dictated that he should do the world a favor and purify the genepool. He had faith in a pure race. He did not see himself as evil, rather, he was a do-gooder for all humanity.Now, pretend he wasn't a raving lunatic for just a second longer. And think about cocroaches in your house. They are unclean, disease-carrying vermin, and they have no place in our homes. Our precious children would be made to suffer if they were allowed to run amok in our living rooms. So we fumigate and bait trap them. We commit genocide on entire colonies of insects to keep our little part of the world "pure". We are justified in our faith that we have done the right thing. We are not evil. Yet I doubt the roaches would see it that way. Now we have done the same thing as *****,(albeit much less severly) The action was the same. We tried to rid ourselves of the sullen, and because of our perception, we are not evil. He didn't see himself as evil, either, yet many people did. Perception makes all the difference.Are our thoughts more valuable than our bodies?Wow, good question. I think yes, they are. But again, the interdependance between our thoughts and our bodies is just like hydrogen and oxygen. We cannot accomplish what we think up without the use of our bodies, the mind's greatest tool. Think about history for a moment. How often do we celebrate ideas, revelations, inventions? The 4th of July? People decided they wanted to be free, and they used their bodies to make it happen. Martin Luther King Jr. has his very own personal holiday because of what he thought, believed, and stood up for. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. What about the telephone? Video games? Cell phones? Wireless networking? Ideas, revelations, inventions. Our thoughts are quite arguably the greatest resource of the human race.On the other side of that coin are the pyramids, the Panama Canal, Stone Henge, the Great Wall of China. Attributes to the power of physical human labor. Yet, all of those monuments stand today because someone first thought them up.Whew! I think I need to sink into the sofa with a bowl of ice cream and loose myself in The Wiggly Safari. My intellect has had enough stimulation for today!

[KittyCaller]

Do you agree that there is a mind/ body separation?What role has a higher-power in your self-knowledge? In your everyday life? In your understanding or reason? Well, I think about life and death (especially death) a lot. From what my siblings and other people have said, it's probably more than a lot of people do. (I find myself either scared by it or thinking about it a few times a week and almost every time I get into a car) The thing is, I simply don't know that there is a higher power. I think there is probably something, but I'm not going to try to prove it, disprove it, or persuade anyone else. Everytime I try to come up with a difinitive answer, I usually wind up with "I'll know when I know and until then I can wait. Meanwhile, I'll try not to hurt anyone." Do I really think I'll be punished eternally for hurting or killing someone? Honestly,no. But I don't see that as license for causing others suffering. Can faith be justified by reason? Depends on what the faith is in. I have faith that the walls aren't going to suddenly turn into jello. Mostly, because it's pretty much scientifically impossible, so I guess I do justify some faith by reason. But not all faith is going to be justifiable by reason. That's fine, I just figure that it should be recognized as not based on reason, though. Does faith still have a place in a "thinking" person's life? Again, faith in what? Medical students have faith that not all the docs who wrote the textbooks were quacks. If you're referring more to religion, then absolutely. Some people have no problem melding "conventional" scientific knowledge with the belief that a "higher power" or what have you is involved.Are our thoughts more valuable than our bodies? Are they equal? I don't know if any of you saw the movie What Dreams May Come. It's one of my favorites, and brings up a lot of interesting thoughts and ideas. The movie also sort of explores what a soul is, which in the movie is really personality and basically, consciousness. I think some people feel more connected to everything when they're doing something physical while others feel more connected when they're doing something more mentally active. I don't think one is any more valuable than the other in the large view of things, but maybe one is more valued to the individual. Well, I've ranted on confusedly long enough, I'm sure.