the problem of mental causation was one of the most important problems in philosophy of mind at least from the time of descartes. since cartesian philosophers found the causal interaction of the soul and the body problematic, they explained away the direct relation between the soul and the body in different ways. however, the problem was not resolved in contemporary philosophy of mind when the ...

Obesity remains an important risk factor of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. However, it has been observed that increased body fat and body mass index predicted longer survival after the occurrence of a cardiovascular event. This observation has been named the obesity paradox. Initially, the term obesity paradox referred to the observation of the better outcome of cardiovascular dis...

The argument of this paper is that the modern brain-consciousness debate has left out one important element: the question of a transpersonal or spirit-like element of consciousness. Thus the problem really is not a mind-body-problem or brain-consciousness problem, but a mind-body-spirit or brain-consciousness-soul problem. Looking at the history of the debate it can be seen that, explicitly or ...

We are still far from full understanding of the precise relations of mind and body in health or in illness : and as often in medicine, the study of the latter may lead to more knowledge of the former. Developments in this field are therefore of interest not only to the doctor, but to the student of sociology, and certainly to anyone concerned with mental health. Work has been proceeding for yea...

[Michael Polanyi's "The Body-Mind Relation" was a paper delivered at a 1966 conference sponsored by the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences and the University of California, San Diego .. The conference and the book that grew out of it, Man and the Sciences of Man, edited by William R. Coulson and Carl R. Rogers (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Pu...

Taking a bite of a Granny Smith apple releases a torrent of sensory experiences—a tart tang on the tongue, a savory smell in the nose, a crisp crunch at the ear, a firm feel in the hand, a chartreuse color at the eye. This bite also releases a torrent of neural activity in multiple areas of the brain. It is natural to ask: What is the relation between sensory experiences and neural activity? Th...

II. The denial of strict psychophysical laws would not undermine the claim that mental events are causally efficacious. § The three premisses from which AM is derived: (1) that mental events are causally related to physical events (2) that singular causal relations are backed by strict laws (3) that there are no strict psycho-physical laws ⇒ AM + P § "supervenience" ___ a predicate p is superve...

JERRY A. FODOR Jerry A. Fodor is professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. He is renowned for defending the view that we think in an inner language, akin to the symbolic codes used in ordinary computers. Fodor's highly influential works include The Language of Thought, The Modularity of Mind, and Psychosemantics. Copyright @ 1981 by Scientific American, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the ...

Method of Production: First the appropriate supplied data files (150000 data points, 500Hz sampling rate, corresponding to 5 minutes of acquisition) were given headers so that they could be recognised as 16 bit aiff 44.1kHz audio files. A Python routine was written to do this; the purpose of this was to permit using them as audio files with realtime audio rate reading and manipulation of the da...

Human beings, and perhaps other creatures, have minds as well as bodies. But what is a mind, and what is its relation to body, or to the physical in general? 1. Mind‐Body Dualism The first answer to the mind‐body question proposed since medieval times was that of Descartes, who held that minds are wholly distinct from bodies and from physical objects of any sort. According to Cartesian dualism,...