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Rene Descartes was an 18th century philosopher who, like many other philosophers, wasa man posing his thoughts on the way that the world worked on both a broad and personalperspective. Through an attempt to resolve personal conflict between his religious beliefs, he wasa catholic, and his scientific intuitions, he took an interactionist view which has been dubbed asCartesian dualism. In this theory he posed a mechanist view where the body was a machine, butit was under control of cogito. Cogito, said to reside in the pineal gland, was the persons soul andis completely non-physical, however it is the reciever of sensations which can be said to be of thephysical world. The mechanical body, being under sole control of cogito, acts after cogito hasappraised sensations and sends out appropriate physical orders to the body. Descartes alsoargued that there are ideas that are so unflawed i.e. God, mathematics, infinity, etc. that theymust have been placed in the minds of humans by a source just as perfect as said ideas. Ofcourse the source for such perfection is the work of God in Descartes view. Although Descartesideas are extremely profound and insightful, it was the scrutinization of his theories which mayprove to be just as important as any of his works. Descartes paved the way for many other greatminds to express there views either by agreeing with, arguing against, or posing a revision of hisideas.

One of the schools of thinking that arose from Cartesian dualism was the Britishempericists. Johne Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume are three of these empiricists. Thegeneral position of the empiricists was the the experience is what shapes the mind. One of theearly minds to come out in protest against Descartes views was Johne Locke. Locke was an

empericist all the way. He completely rejected the notion that there are any innate ideas. He usedthe phrase tabula rosa, which is latin for blank slate, as a metaphor for the human mind. We areall born with no a priori knowledge and everything we know comes from experience. It is throughour reflection on the conscious experience that we form our complex ideas. Although he arguedagainst nativism, he took a stance that the way in which we are able to process our sensationsand reflections was predetermined. Lockes theorized that the way that we experience is due tothe primary and secondary sense properties. The primary sense proporties are the objectiveproperties of the physical world such as motion or solidity. The secondary sense properties aresubjective and are added by our sense organs and can include such things as temperature andcolor.

George Berkelely was a well educated Irish bishop who completely rejected materialism.He took an immatterialistic view and questioned whether matter as we know it even exists.Berkeley believed that only our perceptions exist and it was because of God, who was always

percieving us, that we were able to percieve. The sense properties allowed to us through Godsperception was what formed our reality. This was not Gods reality, rather the reality forced on usthrough Gods perception. So if our reality is all secondary senses, that leads to the questionwhich Berkelely also asked: Is our reality really real? If our reality is a perception of twodimensions, and those two dimensions impose a 3rd dimension never actually percieved thenhow do we know that the 3rd dimension really exists. This can be seen quite simply and right nowas I am writing on my computer I am looking at the monitor. All that I can see is the front of themonitor and I dont even know if there is a back to it. I can turn it around and look at the back but

just as I do, the front of the monitor disappears. It is sort of like a magic trick making somethingdisappear right before your eyes, but this is how we visually process the world. It is theories suchas Berkeleys that question the very foundation of our existence and can still be seen as a topic ofinterest today especially since the movie " The Matrix" where this idea of a three dimensionalworld is brought to trial.

David Hume also did not agree with Descartes idea of the all powerful cogito. Humebelieved that the way in which we organized our thoughts were through experience. Experiencecame about through perceptions which came from ideas and impressions. The impressions weregiven higher status since they came from our direct sensory impressions, or from either calm orviolent reflection. Hume believed that our ideas, simple(single sensation that cant be brokendown) and complex(constituents of simple ideas), were not as important as our impressions. Onthe topic of causation Hume thought that a cause could never be percieved, rather it could onlybe implied from an effect and reflection upon many cause and effect scenarios. Our abiltiy toreflect upon these scenarios and determine cause and effect was due the Law of Contiguity andour ability to see time as a straight line always moving forward. We percieve the cooccurence of

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events temporaly and are able to say, " I turned the handle and then the door opened; Turningthe handle, caused the door to open."

David Hartley was trained as a minister but became a physician which may have beenwhy he was sympathetic to human physiology. Hartley believed that learning took no reflection orthinking and was done involuntarily. This was not to say that there was not voluntary behavior,except that the voluntary behavior was controlled by ideas and stimuli while the involuntary wherecontrolled by reflexes. Once voluntary acts were done to the point to which they are "mindless"they become reflexes. Hartley, like Hume, put great emphasis on the cooccurence of events.While Locke believed that complex ideas spawned from reflection, Hartley believed it took nointrospection and that complex ideas were formed automatically through associations, eithersimultaneaous or successive. Hartley also posed the theory that all ideas were derived fromvibrations in the brain that remain after a sensation. These remenant vibrations were calledvibratiuncles.

James Mill wrote a book that is the takes an in depth look at associationism. He alsocame up with the idea of mental physics where he theorized that ideas were comprised of mentalelements which were dependant on the laws of association. It is this idea that would make him apsychological atomist much like Hume. The degree of assciation was related to the vivednessand frequency of the sensations and ideas. James Mill fathered John Stewart Mill whos worksattemped to discover the laws that govern human nature. J.S. Mill came up with primary andsecondary laws. Primary laws were those which governed a phenomenon such as gravity, and

secondary laws were those which interfered with primary and make it hard to predict. In asituation with gravity being a phenomenon the secondary laws may be something like the shapeof the object and wind resistance which will interfere with the laws of gravity. Unlike his atomistfather, J.S. Mill endorsed the idea of mental chemistry in where certain ideas combine likechemicals to form unique ideas.

Thomas Reid was a rationalist and a commensense philosopher. Commensensephilosophers believed that we should trust our impressions of the physical world because we allnaturally posses the power to make sense of the world. Basically he didn't believe in questioningreality or matter or the whys and hows. He just figured that we are part of the world and weshould be able to understand it.Reid was a naive realist who thought the world is just as weexperience it. He did not place emphasis of impressions or simple vs. complex ideas such asHume or Hartley, rather he felt that God endowed us with all we need to make sense of the worldand was not in the business of tricking us with false reality or lettling us only know the world

through left over fragments of sensations. Reid also believed that there were faculties of themind(43 total) such as attention, consciousness, judgement etc.which acted to bring the mindtogether as a functioning unit.

Immanuel Kant was intrigued by Hume and agreed that we may never truly experiencethe cause, in a cause and effect relationship. Kant however, questioned where we got the veryconcept of cause. This is where Kant, in a similar fashion to Reid's faculties, came up withinnnate categories of thought. Our perception of the world was imposed on us by the categoriesof our mind such as totality, time, reality etc. These categories of thought were the truths of themind, the constants that never change. Kant did not discount the notion of sense perception butfelt that the categories are what shaped the perception of our senses into meaningful thought.This is known as the phenomenological experience and is similar to Berkley's view thatorganization is imposed by our minds. Kant theorized that all of reality was made of noumena andnever be able to know noumena so just as Hume thought the quest for absolute certainty was

pointless, Kant would agree and say that indeed studying the mind was pointless. The mind wasmade of the empirical ego which was conscious thought. Empirical ego was all the sense datathat could be introspected on. The transcendental ego is sort of like Descartes cogito and is neverdirectly experienced and infact is not known.