User:A1c23/Sensory deprivation

Sensory deprivation as a philosophical thought experiment

Sensory deprivation has been used to help support arguments by philosophers on how minds work. One example is the Floating Man argument proposed by Ibn Sīnā, whose primary objective is to affirm the existence of the human soul.

Floating Man Argument

Ibn Sīnā, one of the most important philosophers of the medieval period, investigated the existence of the self and explored the self’s nature. Like many others, he proposed an argument to support his claim regarding the relationship between the mind and the body. He based his investigation on the Floating Man argument where, he proposes, a man floating in the air or a vacuum where he cannot perceive anything, not even the substance of air. This man is unable to see anything external; his arms and legs are separated from the rest of his body; they do not meet or touch. In other words, the man is experiencing extreme sensory deprivation in order to separate what physical body and any perception of stimuli that a person can experience from what consciousness might be in Ibn Sīnā’s thought experiment. The man later reflects on his existence. He will not question that he exists, but he will not be able to affirm if his legs, arms, or internal organs exist. He guarantees that his essence exists, but he will not have awareness of the length or depth of himself. Therefore, in the thought experiment, what the man can affirm to exist is the man’s self and what he cannot affirm does not make part of his essence, like an arm or a toe. The argument concludes then that since the man can affirm his existence while being subjected to extreme sensory deprivation, his soul is something different from his physical body. His soul is then to said to be an immaterial substance separate from his body. This is considered a dualist argument in the philosophy of mind as it separates the mind from the body to affirm the existence of oneself.  

Dualism

A simple way to explain this theory of mind is to focus on what “dualism” suggests: two fundamentally different substances. Dualism presupposes that the world is made up of physical (perceived through the senses), and immaterial (not perceived through the senses) substances. This

René Descartes was the philosopher who proposed Cartesian dualism, also called substance dualism, since it claims the existence of two kinds of “substances”: mental states and material stuff that takes up space. For Descartes, the mind is an entity, different from a physical entity since the mind, in Descarte's point of view, can exist independently, that is, without a physical body. For this reason, he concluded that the mind is a substance.