Mind-Body Dualism

Humans seem to be an entity made up by a combination of both physical properties and mental properties. Folk psychology of soul proposed by Bering (2006) suggested “common-sense mind-body dualism” is a cognitive adaptation that evolved through natural selection. According to this quote, it is believed that individual is fundamentally constituted of body, mind and volition. For centuries, people have tried to discover what makes an individual from philosophical, psychological and physiological perspectives. At different stages of this knowledge in understanding human beings, behaviourism, humanism and the study of consciousness will be critically evaluated in this discussion.
The ontological position of behaviourism can be viewed as a materialist
If so, the different levels in the performance of the students in the same class are hard to explain while they were taught and trained under the same stimuli? Whilst behaviourism did contribute to shaping and modifying the behaviours, it has its limitations in understand humans as a whole because it has neglected the free will of an individual. Though people learn new knowledge through observation and repeated training, however, observational learning performs parallel with cognitive processes (Bandura, 1977) in which massive information are collected and filtered, and respond only to the selected information. In addition, individuals under the same condition may not generate the same behaviour – response if the stimuli do not meaningful to them. Individuals are less likely to react to stimuli that have less relevance with innate nature determined by physiological needs or motivation drives (Maslow, 1943). For instance, a hungry dog is very unlikely to salivate if a book was rewarded after the bell rang because it could not make any association with the book. Behaviourism, which adopts a reductionist approach of only regarding the stimulus- response processing of the environment neglects the interaction of the mind, the body and the external social environment (Bem, 2001). This phenomena increases the possibility of prejudice on objectivity, generalisation and validity of the study
It is based on the epistemological belief that the subjective concepts interpreted by the therapist would project certain levels of predisposition based on the therapist’s point of view. In addition, the study fails to consider overemphasizing of unconditional positive regards would lost the authenticity to identify the hidden characteristic of an individual, and focus on the here-and-now failing to investigate the real origin of the individual’s problem to make further prevention will cause the individual to be unable full insight about themselves. Perhaps the most serious disadvantage of this approach is individuals in these positive atmospheres will develop adaptability and independency incompetence, eventually lead to the evolvement of discrepancies between idealism and phenomenalism (Higgins,