PSYC 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Survival Function, Corpus Callosotomy, Pineal Gland

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Jordan Poppenk

Document Summary

Dualism is a presumption proposed by rene descartes that the human mind and body are two distinct entities that interact with each other to make a person. Descartes reasoned that the mind and the body communicate with each other through a small structure at the base of the brain called the pineal gland. A soul is its own thing, the body is only the apparatus, which the soul lives within it. Mental processes can be identified with purely physical processes in the central nervous system: phenomenalism (also called subjective idealism) believes that physical objects and events are reducible to mental objects, properties, events. Ultimately, only mental objects (i. e. the mind) exist. Bishop berkeley claimed that what we think of as our body is merely the perception of mind. The operational definition of consciousness is awareness of subjective experience can report. Consciousness refers to our awareness of our own mental processes, such as our thoughts, feelings, and sensations.