PSYC 1100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Materialism, Solipsism, Emergence

• School: UConn
• Department: Psychological Sciences
• Course: PSYC 1100
• Professor: Harvey Swadlow

Document Summary

The deterministic assumption: all events have causes. Some feel things are beyond natural laws. Hard determinism: from laplace and his demon. Believed he could make laws for everything. You know the initial conditions of the system. Have the computational power to apply the laws. Computational power: crunch the numbers to predict what will happen. A softer form of determinism is allowed by modern quantum physics, which recognizes some degree of random events. Everything may be predictable except for human thought and behavior. No antecedent conditions can account for my behavior or thoughts. Goes against religion, our egos, our justice system. We don"t like to believe that our behavior is caused. Grows up and chooses to do the evil thing. Technically his own free will, but it was caused by impacts out of hands. Solipsism: (bishop berkeley) there is only mind, all else are just mental experiences. Psychophysical interactionism (renes descartes) most common view.