CCS335 _ Neural Networks and Deep Learning Laboratory_Lab Complete Record
Module1A-Philosophy.pdf
1. The Self from Various Perspectives:
Philosophy
Goals:
• Introduce some concepts and
thoughts of psychologists and
philosophers regarding the ‘self’
• Be able to relate such concepts into
our own lives.
Guide Questions:
• With these thoughts considered, try
answering the question of ‘who am
I?’
• How well do I truly know myself?
2. Why is it essential to understand the ancient
philosophical perspectives about self?
• It was the Greeks who seriously questioned myths and moved away from
them in attempting to understand reality and respond to perennial questions
of curiosity, including the question of self.
• The different perspectives and views on the self can be best seen and
understood then by revisiting its prime movers and identify the most
important conjectures made by philosophers form the ancient times to the
contemporary period.
4. Main Ideas to discuss about Socrates:
• 1. Exhortation to “care for your soul.”
• 2. Conviction that knowledge of virtue is necessary to become virtuous, and
in turn is necessary to attain happiness.
• 3. His belief that all evil acts are committed out of ignorance and hence
involuntarily.
• 4. His presumption that committing an injustice is far worse than suffering
an injustice,
5. • Most people dogmatically assume they know what is truly good and what is
truly evil. They regard things such as wealth, status, pleasure, and social
acceptance as the greatest of all goods in life, and think that poverty, death,
pain, and social rejection are the greatest of all evils.
6. According to Socrates..
• Man = Body + Soul
• Individual = imperfect/impermanent (body) + perfect/imperfect (soul)
• Every person is dualistic
• “The unexamined life is not worth living”
8. 3 components to the soul
• Rational soul – Reason and intellect to govern affairs
• Spirited soul – emotions should be kept at bay
• Appetitive soul – base desires (food, drink, sleep, sexual needs, etic.)
• Attainment of these result to the human soul to be just and virtuous
10. According to St. Augustine..
• Man is of a bifurcated nature
• A part of man dwells in the world that is imperfect and continuously yearns to be
with the divine while the other is capable of reaching immortality.
• The body is bound to die on earth and the soul is to anticipate living eternally in a
realm of spiritual bliss in communion with god. The goal of every human person is
to attain this communion and bliss with the Divine by living his life on earth in
virtue.
11. St. Thomas Aquinas alongside St. Augustine
• Man = Matter + Form
• Matter (hyle) – common matter or “stuff” that make up everything in the universe.
• Form (morphe) – essence of a substance or thing.
• “The soul is what makes us humans”
13. According René Descartes
• Human person = body + mind
• The self = cogito (the thing that thinks) + extenza (extension of mind/body)
• “There is so much that we should doubt.”
• “I am a thinking thing. A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills,
refuses, imagines, perceives.”
15. According to John Locke..
• Principle of individuation and place-time-kind principle – which stipulates that no
two things of the same kind can be in the same place at the same time, and no
individual can be in two different places at the same time.
• Person – an entity that can think self-reflectively and think of itself as persisting
over time.
• Self is that conscious thinking thing, which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and
pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for it self.
17. According to David Hume..
• The self is nothing but a bundle of impressions and ideas
• Impressions – basic objects of our experience or sensation, they therefore form the
core of our thoughts. Impressions therefore are vivid because they are products of
our direct experience with the world
• Ideas – are copies of impressions. Because of this, they are not as lively and vivid as
our impressions
18. For David Hume..
• The “self” is simply a “bundle or collection of different perceptions, which
succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux
and movement”. In reality, what on thinks as unified self is simply a
combination of all experiences with a particular person.
20. Agrees with Hume but..
• He recognizes the accuracy in Hume’s account are not that everything starts with
perception and sensation of impressions
• However, Kant thinks that the things that men perceive around them are not just
randomly infused into the human person without and organizing principle that
regulates the relationship of all these impressions
• For Kant, there is necessarily a MIND that organizes the impressions that man gets
from the external world
21. From Kant’s perspective..
• The “self” organizes different impressions that one gets in relation to his
own existence
• The “self” is an active intelligence to synthesize all knowledge and
experience
• The “self” is not only personality but also the seat of knowledge
23. Multilayers of self
• Conscious - contains all of the thoughts, memories, feelings, and wishes of which
we are aware at any given moment. This is the aspect of our mental processing that
we can think and talk about rationally. This also includes our memory, which is not
always part of consciousness but can be retrieved easily and brought into awareness
• Pre-conscious - consists of anything that could potentially be brought into the
conscious mind
• Unconscious - is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that are
outside of our conscious awareness. The unconscious contains contents that are
unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict
24. Simply,
• Conscious – aware
• Pre-conscious – may or may not be brought to the consciousness from the
unconscious mind, keyword: potential
• Unconscious - unaware
26. Denial of the concept of an internal, non-
physical self
• Gilbert Ryle solves the mind-body dichotomy that has been running for a long time
in the history of thought by denying blatantly the concept of an internal, non-
physical self.
• For Ryle, what truly matters is the behaviors that a person manifests in his day-to-
day life.
• He suggested that the self I not an entity one can locate and analyze but simply the
convenient name that people use to refer to all the behaviors that people make
27. Something to think about
• For Ryle, looking for and trying to understand a “self ” as it really exists is life
visiting your friend’s university and looking for the “university”
• One can roam around the campus, visit the library and the football field,
meet the administrators and faculty, and still end up not finding the
“university”. This is because the campus, the people, the systems, and the
territory all form the university.
29. For Merleau-Ponty..
• The mind and body are so intertwined that they cannot be separated from
one another
• One cannot find any experience that is not an embodied experience. All
experience is embodied. The living body, his thoughts, emotions, and
experiences are all one
• “One’s body is his opening toward his existence to the world”
• “The mind-body bifurcation is an invalid problem”
31. Churchland’s perspective
• Churchland disapproves of dualism. He believes in eliminative materialism
which is a belief that only matters exist, “if it can’t be recognized by the
senses then it is akin to a fairytale.”
• Dualism – the mind and body are separate, the same goes for a separate
brain and a separate mind wherein the mind is the seat of consciousness
32. To understand Eliminative Materialism a little
better..
• Think of it this way, when we come to understand how “light” comes to be
through “electro-magnetic” radiation, we DID NOT say that there was no
such thing as light but light was eventually identified with a form of electro-
magnetic radiation. We come to physical explanations of things thus,
“eliminating” our previous beliefs through explanations of “material” or
matter or explained through our senses
33. Group Activity
• Choose one of the many philosopher/psychologist whose views relates to
you the most, explain why. Try relating their views/theories to your lives as
much as you can.
