Impact of Technology on Consciousness Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Impact of Technology on Consciousness - Essay Example The cognitive theory, therefore, defines brain and the mind as two independent entities that work in tandem to produce actions and reactions of man, to an event. The need to know the working of mind becomes all the more important because of the fact that all our intentional and non intentional decisions and emotive expressions have a definite voluntary and involuntary actions associated with them. Hence our state of mental causation results in some form of physical actions. In other words, our beliefs and desires are linked with some definite actions that are designed to rearrange the physical aspects of our surrounding through the movements of our body parts which is caused by the directives of the mind. Hence, the concept of mental causation becomes relevant because of the sheer physicalitism of the world, surrounding us. â€Å"Physicalists, according to Jones, means people who believe that â€Å"this world of ours is only physical† (Jones, 2006). Since technology has become embedded into our system of ‘physicality’, the impact of technology on our consciousness can be explained through the impact of communication, inf ormation or other technology on our consciousness. Descartes treated body and mind of a man separately. He believed that body is inanimate object that acts only at the behest of the mind. It is also known as Cartesian dualism. He says that one cannot find out the nature of physical things without the participation of ‘intelligence’ which instead of ‘seeing’ judges them do be so. The mind therefore understands and recognizes other objects like technology because of its inherent ability to represent complex structures rather than relying on sensation and imagination (Descartes, 1901). The theory of dualism, though controversial at that time, was much appreciated and even corroborated by the later philosophers. Kim, through his theory of causal closure and overdetermination, has tried to correlate mind and body. The