Mind Essays

H.Narayanan, EE Department IIT Bombay, Mumbai (Text of a lecture delivered on 16th Oct 2012) A dilemma faced by young people, usually at the stage when they leave home for the first time, is that rules that they have lived by thus far seem questionable. On the one hand the …

What is the trouble with television? In MacNeil’s article, “The Trouble with Television,” he states that television discourages concentration. MacNeil wrote this article around thirty years ago, so one may ask of the article’s validity today. The claim that television discourages concentration still contains its prior validity today. The variety …

It was a beautiful day in March, sunny and clear skies with the slightest breeze that was just enough to keep you from burning up. It was what felt like just another day of school. And once school was out, me and my friend, Miranda, where going to go to …

Does Descartes provide a convincing argument for the claim that mind and matter are distinct substances Descartes’ Argument For Dualism In his Meditations Rene Descartes aimed to reconstruct the whole of science by trying to prove the distinction between mind and matter. He gives an argument from doubt, and another …

The Essay” Group Minds” was written by Doris Lessing. In it, she argues that the government retains “hard information” about human actions/behaviour from schools to keep people submissive. “We (the human race) are now in possession of a great deal of hard information about ourselves, but we do not use …

When I read a poem, I get an idea of what the author is trying to convey. When I read it again, it touches something within. The more times a poem is read, the more it grows within, until its very idea takes ground in some part or other in …

In her book, “A Man Without Words,” Susan Schaller describes how the eighteenth century French philosophers continually exercised speculation as to how much of human nature was “given” and native, and how much was dependent on language and culture. She encountered Ildefonso, a Mexican Indian who lived in the most …

A moonlit night is a pleasant and enjoyable night to us. Specially, when it is a full moon lit night, it appears before us with all her magnificent beauty. It then looks like disk dazzling silver. The sparking starts twinkle around it. The sky looks like a large canopy over …

Daniel Gilbert, the author of “Stumbling on Happiness”, questions how a person can have a hard time accurately predicting what can make them happy in the future. Gilbert states that imaginations is what limits our way in understanding happiness. Humans have the ability to imagine the future, but they are …

My assignment is based on the discussion of pro social behaviour through social psychology findings and whether it’s thought to be selfish, selfless or both. Pro social behaviour refers to “voluntary actions that are intended to help or benefit another individual or group of individuals” (Eisenberg and Mussen 1989, 3). …