Human: Encyclopedia II - Human - Mind

Human - Mind

Consciousness is a state of mind, said to possess qualities such as, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment.

The way in which the world is experienced is the subject of much debate and research in philosophy of mind, psychology, brain biology, neurology, and cognitive science.

Humans, often mentioned with other species, are variously said to possess consciousness, self-awareness, and a mind, the fruition of which are senses and perceptions. Each human has a subjective view of existence, the passage of time, and free will.

There are many debates about the extent to which the mind constructs or experiences the outer world, and regarding the definitions and validity of many of the terms used above.

Cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, for example, argues that there is no such thing as a narrative centre called mind, but that instead there is simply a collection of sensory inputs and outputs: different kinds of software running in parallel (Dennett, 1991) .

Human - Psychology and human ethology

Psychoanalysis, the examination of the subconscious was, devised by Sigmund Freud and expanded and refined by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (initially one of Freud's followers and friends) and others. Freud's influence is, however, often misunderstood, though the principal theory of modern psychology. Behaviorism, as formulated by John B. Watson and popularised by B. F. Skinner, lead to a widespread rejection of psychoanalysis by psychologists due to a desire for empiricism. Behaviourism, however, rejects any study of the "mind" (or cognition), and so during the last decade of the 20th century, the study of cognitive processes within the field of psychology have begun to re-emerge, the field of cognitive science appearing as an independent field. A cognitive revolution is often stated to be occuring within modern psychology.

Freud divided the mind into the id (an individual's basic needs and instincts), the superego (personal and cultural values and norms), and the ego (the central, organising self, whose job it is to satisfy the id but not upset the superego). [10]

C. G. Jung founded the school of analytical psychology and introduced the notion of the collective unconscious, a term taken from philosophy and used by Jung to describe symbols or archetypes that he believed might be common to all cultures.

There are also the Conscious, Subconscious, and Superconsciousness, a related but not identical set of categories.

The behaviour and mental processes of animals (human and non-human) can be described through animal cognition, ethology, and comparative psychology as well.

Human ecology is an academic discipline that investigates how humans and human societies interact with their environment, nature and the human social environment.

Human - Philosophy

Philosophy is a discipline or field of study involving the investigation, analysis, and development of ideas at a general, abstract, or fundamental level. It is the discipline searching for a general understanding of values and reality by chiefly speculative rather than observational means comprising as its core logic, ontology or metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology which includes the branches of ethics and aesthetics. The term covers a very wide range of approaches, and is also used to refer to a worldview, to a perspective on an issue, or to the positions argued for by a particular philosopher or school of philosophy.

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with the study of "first principles" and "being" (ontology). Problems that were not originally considered metaphysical have been added to metaphysics. Other problems that were considered metaphysical problems for centuries are now typically relegated to their own separate subheadings in philosophy, such as philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. In rare cases subjects of metaphysical research have been found to be entirely physical and natural.

The mind is the term most commonly used to describe the higher functions of the human brain, particularly those of which humans are subjectively conscious, such as personality, thought, reason, memory, intelligence and emotion. Other species of animals share some of these mental capacities, and it is also used in relation to supernatural beings, as in the expression "the mind of God." The term is used here only in relation to humans.

There are many Philosophies of mind, the most common relating to the nature of being, and ones way of being, or purpose.

Adi Shankara in the East proposed Advaita Vedanta, a popular argument for monism (the metaphysical view that all is of one essential essence, substance or energy).

Another type of monism is physicalism or materialism, which holds that only the physical is real, and that the mental can be reduced to the physical. Idealism and phenomenalism, on the contrary, assert the existence of the mind and deny, or at the least deny the importance of, an external reality that exists independently of the mind.

René Descartes proposed that both mind and matter exist, and that the one cannot be reduced to the other. This represents the philosophy of mind form of dualism. Dvaita is the Hindu philosophy that incorporates a form of dualism that distinguishes God from souls.

Johannes Jacobus Poortman proposed a Pluralist classification of a number of different mystical and metaphysical views. Vishishtadvaita is the Hindu philosophy incorporating pluralism.

Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Hume, Kant, Locke, Spinoza, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are also philosophers of note in the history of human thought.

Many religions and spiritual traditions hold that humans have both a body and a soul, usually proposing that the soul can in some way survive the death of the body. Although the soul sometimes is equated with the mind, this is not always the case.

As a finer distinction between religion and philosophy, esoteric cosmology is distinguished from religion in its more sophisticated construction and reliance on intellectual understanding rather than faith, and from philosophy in its emphasis on techniques of psycho-spiritual transformation.

In between the doctrines of religion and science, stands the philosophical perspective of metaphysical cosmology. This ancient field of study seeks to draw logical conclusions about the nature of the universe, humanity, god and/or their connections based on the extension of some set of presumed facts borrowed from religion and/or observation.

What might be called the core metaphysical problems would be the ones which have always been considered metaphysical. What most of such problems have in common is that they are the problems of ontology, the science of being or existence as well as the basic categories thereof—trying to find out what entities and what types of entities exist. Ontology has strong implications for the conceptions of reality.

Human - Motivation

Motivation is the driving force of desire behind all actions of any organism.

Motivation is based on emotion, specifically, on the search for satisfaction (positive emotional experiences), and the avoidance of conflict; positive and negative are defined by the individual brain state, not by social norms: a person may be driven to self-injury or violence because their brain is conditioned to create a positive response to these actions. Motivation is important because it is involved in the performance of all learned responses.

Within psychology, conflict avoidance and the libido are seen to be primary motivators. Within economics motivation is often seen to be based on Financial incentives, Moral incentives, or Coercive incentives. Religions generally posit Godly or demonic influences.

For many love is the central motivation in life. The classical Greeks had four words for love:

• Eros : Romantic love
• Philia : Friendship, Love (but especially platonic love).
• Agape : Divine, unconditioned love. Many religious persons will refer to the love that they feel towards, or receive from God as divine love or Agape.
• Storge : Natural familial affection.

Happiness or being happy is a condition which humans can have. The definition of happiness is one of the greatest philosophical topics, at least since the time of Socrates, and is especially central to Ethics, being the starting point of Aristotle's ethical works. Some people might define it as the best condition which a human can have - a condition of mental and physical health. Others may define it as freedom from want and distress; consciousness of the good order of things; assurance of one's place in the universe or society, inner peace, and so forth. Aristotle conceived of Eudaimonia, a society governed by pursuit of happiness.

Human - Self-reflection and humanism

Thales of Miletus, when asked what was difficult, answered in a well-known apophthegm: "To Know Thyself" γνῶθι σεαυτόν (also attributed to Socrates, and inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi).

Humans often consider themselves to be the dominant species on Earth, and the most advanced in intelligence and ability to manage their environment. This belief is especially strong in modern Western culture, and is derived in part from the Hebrew Bible's creation story in which Adam is explicitly given dominion over the Earth and all of its creatures. Alongside such claims of dominance we often find radical pessimism because of the frailty and brevity of human life. In the Hebrew Bible, for example, dominion of man is promised in Genesis 1:28, but the author of Ecclesiastes bewails the vanity of all human effort.

The Ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras made the famous claim that "Man is the measure of all things; of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not." Aristotle describes man as the "communal animal" (ζῷον πολιτικόν), i.e. emphasising society-building as a central trait of human nature, and "animal with sapience" (ζῷον λόγον ἔχων, animal rationale), a term that also inspired the species' taxonomy, Homo sapiens. This philosophy is today called "Humanism".

Humanism as a philosophy defines a socio-political doctrine the bounds of which are not constrained by those of locally developed cultures, but which seeks to include all of humanity and all issues common to human beings. Because spiritual beliefs of a community often manifests as religious doctrine, the history of which is as factious as it is unitive, secular humanism grew as an answer to the need for a common philosophy that transcended the cultural boundaries of local moral codes and religions. Many humanists are religious, however, and see humanism as simply a mature expression of a common truth present in most religions. Humanists affirm the possibility of an objective truth and accept that human perception of that truth is imperfect. The most basic tenets of humanism are that humans matter and can solve human problems, and that science, freedom of speech, rational thought, democracy, and freedom in the arts are worthy pursuits or goals for all peoples. Modern humanism depends on reason and logic and rejects the supernatural.

From a scientific viewpoint, H. sapiens certainly is among the most generalised species on Earth, and few single species occupy as many diverse environments as humans. Various attempts have been made to identify a single behavioural characteristic that distinguishes humans from all other animals, e.g. the ability to make and use tools, the ability to alter the environment, language use, and the development of complex social structures. Some anthropologists think that these readily observable characteristics (tool-making and language) are based on less easily observable mental processes that might be unique among humans: the ability to think symbolically, in the abstract or logically. Others, that human capacity for symbolic thought is a development from the capacity to manipulate tools or the development of speech. It is difficult however to arrive at a set of attributes that includes all humans, and humans only. The wish to find unique human characteristics could be more a matter of anthropocentrism than of zoology in the end.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Mind", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki