Knowledge you can walk. Read the idea below, then step up to the general, across to peers or down to the specific.
Mental
Mental
The root for everything made of thought: thinking, feeling, remembering, language and the ways people reason.
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The idea
The Mental root holds everything that happens in the mind: thinking, feeling, remembering, using language and reasoning. The mind is the part of a person that thinks, feels, perceives, imagines, remembers and makes choices. It includes conscious processes, which you notice, and unconscious processes, which can shape what you do without your awareness.
The mind plays a central role in most parts of human life, but its exact nature is still disputed. Some thinkers describe it from the inside, as something that changes information and that outsiders cannot see directly. Others describe it from the outside, as a set of tendencies to act in ways that other people can observe.
An old puzzle called the mind–body problem asks how the mind relates to matter. For a long time, many people treated mind and matter as two separate things that could exist on their own. Since the 20th century, the leading view among philosophers has been physicalism, the idea that everything is material and that minds are features of some material things. Most experts agree that at least some animals have minds, though they argue about which ones.
Under this root you can explore consciousness, emotions, language, logic and memory, each with its own branches.
Check yourself
Question 1 of 2
Which view has been the leading position among philosophers of mind since the 20th century?
Composition
what it's made of
- Thinking and Reasoning — Working through ideas, solving problems and drawing conclusions.
- Feelings — Emotions such as joy, fear and sadness that color how we react to events.
- Memory and Learning — Taking in information, storing it and calling it back up later.
- Language — Words and symbols that let people share what is in their minds.
- Conscious and Unconscious Processes — Some mental activity is in our awareness, while other activity can influence us without our knowing.
Connection
how it relates
One of the three roots
Change
how and why it evolves
- Past
- Minds took shape over evolutionary time as nervous systems developed and led to the formation of brains. As brains grew more complex, mental abilities increased and particular brain areas took on particular jobs. As a science, psychology emerged at the end of the 19th century from the experiments of Wilhelm Wundt.
- Now
- Today psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science and philosophy of mind study the mind, using methods that range from experiments and brain imaging to thought experiments.
- Next
- Questions about artificial minds, and whether computers could ever have one, will likely get more attention as computing advances.