#philosophy essay

[plangentia]

if i do one more thing about philosophy this week i'm going to scream

[tinyyoungblood]

i know “with great power comes great responsibility” is a simple quote and has gotten kinda mainstream but damn it keeps me in check. plus, i’ve legitimately used it in my philosophy essays before, including this one:

“when you can do the things that I can, but you don't, and then the bad things happen, they happen because of you”

and the teacher liked it lmao

[lostintheclouds321]

The only thing I know about the essay I'm writing for school is my name :'(

[rokosbasalisk]

I'VE FINALLY FOUND MY LOST PHILOSOPHY ESSAY THAT AO3 MADE ME DELETE

[philosophical-daisies]

dreams are reality.

I think Descartes tripped at the finish line in the Meditations, specifically with how he achieves certainty, and it's because of an avenue of thought that he misses out on at the very start. I'm talking about the invention of the evil genius, and how that thought process came about. Descartes brings up a good point that Montaigne made in his Apology for Raymond Sebond, that the way being asleep and being awake works is completely different, by that I mean their internal logic differs, and as such you're not able to tell which one is which. Am I sleeping or awake right now? What's the difference? Not only that, a point that neither of them really touch on but I will, there are many pharmaceuticals that impact the way you see the world, changing your mental and emotional state, the types of "patterns" you percieve in people and events, changing what you percieve in terms of sense, and so on. That's for another time though.

Notice, though, that we aren't seeing them as the same reality outright; one is clearly different from the other, even if that difference is slight. You can tell dreaming from waking, even if you don't know which is which; the way doors and gravities work, the ability to read, the way you experience sensation...

Or can you? I had a waking nightmare a few nights back, by which I mean I could partially tell I was awake, while still experiencing a dream, which was as wretched as it sounds. Long story short, that nightmare "ended" by me being pushed to the ground and kicked in the back repeatedly, and simultaneously feeling that pain in the waking world, and becoming fully awake with quite a sore back. My usual experience with dreams is that I don't feel pain in them, and certainly don't feel any when i wake up besides the chronic headaches I already have.

Now then, if my earlier posturing was true, how on earth did I not only percieve myself as being awake and asleep at the same time, but experience immense pain from one or the other and not be able to tell from which?

Well, doubtful as Descartes would probably say this is before proving the existence of God, many psychological studies of sleep show that it's a physical phenomenon where your body temperature lowers, your muscles relax, and at certain points, your eyes move seemingly randomly, during which point your brain activity is pretty similar to when you're awake.

Let's back up a bit. First, notice how much prestige we give being awake to being asleep within our linguistic bounds. "Dreams" versus "reality", saying that something's only "in your dreams!" to say that it's impossible in the "real" world, and so on. If it's so uncertain that one state we're seeing is more real than another, how are we so certain that one is merely a "dream" while one is the "real world"? Why do we call it that?

The first answer that comes to my mind is time. Purportedly, in the waking world, our bodies go into that resting state for 7-9 hours typically (though of course just yesterday a good friend of mine slept for 14 hours, so that's not a hard and fast rule), and that's out of 24 hours out of a day. Not only is sleep just a fraction out of a larger measurement, our perception of time is quite different in sleep as well. I've had dreams that lasted days; in fact, the same night that nightmare happened, I fell back asleep and had an annoying week-long dream where the mall I visited as a kid became a battleground where me and my friends fought eachother with large swords. Getting back to the point, we don't control how long we dream, and it can be as long or as short as any amount of time, though of course all of that being a perception rather than some quantifiable measurement, just as it is in the waking world.

That said, because it's not controllable (as far as we know) how long dreams last, insofar as saying that matters, it feels less real than the waking world, where we have time-keeping methods that are beyond our control, such as the movement of the earth around the sun and moon, the movement of the sun around the milky way, measuring the movement of Cesium atoms to make near-"exact" calculations of time, and of course, the watch. As such, we align ourselves with those external time-keeping methods, regardless of if our bodies agree that that amount of time has passed, using bodily time-keeping methods such as the circadian rhythm, menstruation, attention span, patience, and of course, saying "this is how long it feels like it's been."

Time is flexible, but in the waking world, we're in agreement that it exists in some form. Trying to apply that to dreams, it becomes nonsensical. Dreams can last from as small as a second to as long as a decade or more, when on the waking side, you've been doing the same cycle of revving up and slowing down your brain every hundred minutes, for a handful of hours.

What does this say about dreams then? Does this mean dreams are inherently less real because our sense of time is altered? Not to mention smaller things like the ability to read, to see clearly, to move, and so on? No, not at all.

And we've come to my point! I don't think dreams are less real because of this, but rather, they have different rules and concepts that they abide by. The waking world has concepts like time, linguistics, mathematics, history, civility, biology, politics, and religion. These are all very rigid concepts in terms of their definitions, regardless of how different societies might apply them, within this world. Meanwhile, notice that there are many concepts we're vague about, such as music, poetry, emotion, friendship, love, hate, illness, health, beauty, and worth. When we dream, all of this becomes ever so clear, and the things we're so sure about in wake are completely overturned! Dream and wake are equally true realities that specialize in different things.

That brings us back to the waking nightmare. How was it that I was between both realities, and recieving pain in one and feeling it in another? What I believe happened was that I felt the emotion of pain in the complete understanding of the dreaming world, and the physical experience of having a back in the waking one. I've never been kicked in the back before; in fact, I've not experienced much physical pain in my back that wasn't internally inflicted. That means I combined the understanding of the emotion of pain with the understanding of the physical experience of having a back, and used that to create being kicked in the back, despite not knowing that from experience in either.

There's an interesting implication of this, namely that at some point, the line between a priori and a posteriori gets crossed.*

The strong suits of the waking world that I mentioned earlier are things that we can understand a priori; there's not a way to physically experience math, or history, or religion, because those are concepts that we can talk about linguistically to an exactation. But how do you describe love, or music, or worth? You certainly can try, but they will always harbour an opinion of yours. What do you think qualifies as lovely? What do you think qualifies as musical? What do you think qualifies as worthy? You can't say with any totally agreeable certainty, can you? No, you have to feel it. You might stare longingly into the eyes of another, and proclaim, "I love you!"**, or listen to hooligans howling in hearty haste, and hate it horrendously, saying, "this isn't real music!", or gamble at the black-jack table for hours on end, only to say, "this isn't worth my time!".

Meanwhile, in a dream, the opposite is true. You know exactly what love, music, and worth are; it's all around! You feel as though you could quantify it just like you can quantify breathing air. God forbid you try to solve a math equation though, good luck to you! What was once clear becomes unclear, and vice versa. If you really wanted to solve that math equation, you wouldn't bust out the paper and calculator, no, you would have to experience math, inject it into your veins, become one with it and only then understand its' inner workings! The power dynamics are completely reversed, priori et posteriori are flipped on their heads!

Anywho, the connecting tissue between dream and wake is the last pressing issue. How does one interact and inform the other? The answer's pretty simple: memory. If you're quick about noticing it, you can write down what happened when you were dreaming through remembering it briefly. Likewise, what you experience in waking usually causes what you dream about; for how long certainly depends, but that's not here or there. This is pretty common, assuming the truth is being told; for example, Sir Paul McCartney wrote songs for the Beatles such as Let it Be and Yesterday through experiencing a dream and adapting it to music. Taking what's certain in one reality - music, emotion, beauty, and so on - and expressing it with what's certain in another, that being instrumentation, lyrics, production, and so on; and in doing so, dreams become wakes.

This brings us back to the MAIN main point, that being discussing Descartes' evil genius. Going through what we've just discussed, I don't think it's reasonable to claim that we're brains in jars being prodded at by some scientist to give us sensations. Not on the basis of dreaming and waking working differently anyhow; you can make up as many unprovable reasons as you want about how we're actually in some simulacrum of reality. Beyond doing all this to get around proving God exists, the rest of what he covers to give people more certainty about reality so that we can get on with our lives and make scientific advancements is pretty solid. No notes.

There's a lot of places I can go with this though, namely covering how different mental illnesses, neurodivergencies, and pharmaceuticals can impact how we experience the world, and how that plays into all this. I'd wager the short answer would involve mixing in the Nietzschean idea of adding up multiple perspectives from different people to get an approximation of what's actually happening, and talking about how schizophrenic people can get around seeing hallucinations by using a phone camera. For now, this. Have a great day!

*It's silly philosophy jargon; basically, a priori means knowing something without experience, while a posteriori means knowing something because of experience.

**I'm aromantic, so if that's inaccurate, oops!

[nooraalfred]

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[amypetit2020]

Philosophical Analysis of The Human Mind

The human mind is a marvelous mystery of nature. When writing a philosophy essay on the machinations of our mind, you need to glance into the metaphysical aspects of its behavior.

Let us take a peek into the various abstractions that our minds can construe.

The philosophy of mind

When you come to think of it, the question "What is the mind?" is a mind-boggling one.  From a biological standpoint, one can say that it MIGHT be the conscious state of the human brain.

Most plagiarism free essays on workings of the mind dwell into the metaphysical concepts of existence, self-identity, sentience, conscience, and belief system.Are self-identity, consciousness, belief, etc. just mental states? If so, how does our brain bring about such states?

Today, philosophers of mind, cognitive psychologists, information scientists, and neurologists are working to unravel how our brains realise these mental states.

Disposition, Manifestation and Philosophical Behaviorism

It is hard to analyse mental states such as belief, desires, perceptions, etc. under a microscope. Such mental states are knowable through some observable behavior. Thus, our behaviors are the manifestations of our psychological dispositions.

Researchers and philosophers now believe that beliefs and emotions are complex dispositions manifested in specific behaviors. Mental states are considered to be responses to environmental stimuli. This idea of philosophical behaviorism was the brainchild of Gilbert Ryle and was written in his classic The Concept of Mind.

But this ideas had some ingrained flaws.

Conscious Experience and the Unobservable State

Our conscious experience plays a significant role in developing our ideas, beliefs, dispositions, and behaviors. The unobservable states of our brain are another obstacle that Ryle's concepts were unable to address.

·       The fact that some students seek help with their philosophy essay frequently while others do not is a manifestation of not just their predisposed notions but conscious experiences.

·       The Brain Identity Theory offers a much more physical point of view and overcomes physical behaviorism's limitations. According to this theory, the brain's condition and status play a significant role in determining mental states.

·       From the functional perspective of philosophical behaviorism,specific purposes shape our beliefs and behaviors. A person's mindset and behavior at a particular period depend upon the functional role it needs to fulfill at that time.

For example, the fact that you are looking for philosophy essay samples is not only because of some external stimuli but also because you know that it’s one of the best ways to gather information.

 Well, that brings to the end of this write-up. Hope it enlightened your perceptions regarding the human mind. Read philosophy essay samples, research more, and learn about the mystical nature of our mind.

[mark-benson]

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