PSYC 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Colin Cherry, Sleepwalking, Atony

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Jill L Atkinson

Document Summary

Opinions differ about the exact physical nature of consciousness (whether it is specific brain states or various computations performed by a system). Only the materialist interpretation lends itself to the scientific study of consciousness. You can only ask testable questions about what consciousness is if you assume that its basis is ultimately material. Otherwise, you can never measure anything that could support or disconfirm a hypothesis. Materialism the philosophical belief that reality can be known only through an understanding of the physical world of which the mind is a part. This theory of belief is also known as monoism or physicalism. Another common philosophical belief is dualism, which was famously advocated by the philosopher. Descartes pondered the problem of consciousness and concluded that it must depend on a substance distinct from physical matter, because it does not have properties that we ascribe to matter. Dualism - the philosophical belief that reality consists of two distinct entities: mind and matter (body).