A Satisfactory account of the mind can be given in purely material terms: critically asses this claim.
...ys, either in our states of mind, which seem to affect our appearance unless we deliberately conceal them or in another less obvious, more scientific way. Neuroscience has established that the stimulation of certain nerve fibres will cause a perception of some phenomenon which may not actually refer to a real object placed before the subject. This is further explained in Davidson’s ‘Principle of Causal interaction’ where it is true that at least some mental events interact causally with some physical events. If this is true then Davidson would have to claim that a mind cannot be described satisfactorily in purely material terms. If we are to describe the mind in purely material terms we must establish first what will constitute material terms. That is to separate the mental from the physical and the physical from the metaphysical. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was the first philosopher to coin the phrase ‘neutral monism’. Russell felt that ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ were just ways of understanding certain events whose essence is reducible to neither description. When applying this to the concept of the mind, Russell rejected the claim that minds are capable of living in a disembodied state, he claimed that ‘mental events are events in a living brain’ when explaining this Russell said “what we perceive is an event occupying part of the region which, for physics, is occupied by the brain….what we perceive is part of the stuff of our brains, not part of the stuff of tables, chairs, sun, moon and stars.” Essentially for Russell the mind could be described in both a physical and a mental way, however, one could not describe the mind in a physical way without relating to the mental way of describing things. I think what Russell was trying to say, in terms of modern physics, is that the mind is an epiphenomenon (something which arises from something else without already being a part of it) arising from the brain, but having properties over and above what the basic brain structure gives it. An analogy can be drawn with a computer program. A program at any given moment is the sum of “on-off” switches or parts in the physical computer. If we knew the precise state of every on-off switch at a given mom...