Modern-Day Connection #3

Alberto may be teaching philosophy, but I'm teaching you some psychology.

As I discussed in my analysis blog, Spinoza's take on monism is quite different from what I'd previously learned in AP Psych in that monism tends to be more favored by agnostics and atheists. Since many atheists hold the belief that there is no afterlife, it is reasonable to assume that we don't really have a soul or a part of us that carries on after death. Thus, if the mind and body are connected, once the body has died, the mind has died as well; and there's nothing else after that. It's simply lights out. Dualists, on the other hand, believe that the mind possesses the soul and that when our fleshy vessel expires, our greater energy carries onto whatever our next path may be in the universe. Since Dualists tend to believe in a soul, when we learned about dualists in AP Psych, they tend to talk about near-death experiences. Everyone knows the classic conversion tale of someone during a tragic incident in which they encounter the blinding light and the mysterious voice beckoning, "It's not your time yet", and that person soon recovers. Monist have discredited these near-death phenomenons as nothing more than an altered state of conscious. Because the body is in an unusual state of consciousness, some believe that the unconscious comes into play since the entire body is hyper-stimulated and doesn't know how to react. During this time when the subconscious is active, it produces a dream-like state in which we witness these reported fantastic events. Hence, this is why it is interesting to compare Spinoza's take on monism when I learned a very different approach to it in psychology; Spinoza's monism is spiritual, the monism that I personally interpreted was the antithesis.

I probably should've included this in my analysis, but I just found this. It's humorous to analyze one comment about Descartes' dualism. Alberto mentions that Descartes believed that the mind and body interacted between a part of the brain called the Pineal gland. This is just kind of funny to me because the Pineal gland helps produce melatonin, a natural compound that induces sleep. The only thing the Pineal gland connects our mind to is our unconscious, that is, of course, if you possess a Freudian view on dream analysis. That thought right there I thought was uncanny and oddly coincidental since Alberto discusses the ideas of life just being a dream or alternate reality, and we're currently watching Inception- a movie about alternate realities inside of dreams.