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John Locke's Episodic Experience Essay

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Every moment of our lives that we witness within the external world is taken in by our perception of the world, and into our minds. To John Locke, in accordance to his text An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the mind is a blank sheet that is filled by the many experiences that humans witness as they live. The two main aspects that is included in making marks on this mental sheet are sensation, the initial absorption of information, and reflection, the mental process to analyze the information. In terms of sensory experiences, sensation is when our sensory organs receives the external information and reflection is when our minds process what this information indicates. However what about an episodic experience, and can Locke’s explanation be applied to current knowledge? In order to determine if this can …show more content…

The meaning of an episodic experience that this paper will refer to would be any life experience that humans will go through as this live. This can include emotionally related episodes like traumatic experience or more calming experiences, as well as an episode from any given day of a person’s years spent within the external world. A further property can be placed based on Locke’s statement within Section II, paragraph nine of his essay where he says that “To ask, at what time a man has first any ideas , is to ask, when he begins to perceive; - having ideas, and perception, being the same thing” (Locke pg.13). When Locke says having ideas, he means the knowledge and information that one receives as they live and interact with the external world. Life events are included in this since moments of our lives are made up of our perspective and interaction with the world. Therefore the definition of an episodic experience that shall be used in for the rest of the paper is an experience that is created by a person’s perspective of the external

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This is the idea that the mind is like blank paper without any ideas and is furnished by experience alone. While I don’t believe this is entirely true I think the ideas that stem from it are valuable as it is valuable to an extent. Education as Locke desires is a thing to improve the general capacity of the mind, not stuff it with facts or perfect it at a specific task. We see this concept in Franklin’s writing where he says “Experience keeps a dear School, but Fools will learn in no other” which means that experience is the greatest way to learn, and the way that all can learn, even the fool. The idea that education should be “a formation of character, of habits…of mind and body” (256) is one that should be paid attention to, because in the end one’s whole life is the issue, not just learning individual tasks and

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These four great minds are what shaped the future and paved a new way of thinking. They carved the world into what it is known as today. They were the ones who said that people make their own choices and should be given choice. They are the Philosophes. The great thinkers were John Locke, Adam Smith, Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet), and Mary Wollstonecraft.

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These ideas leading from Sir Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes. The ideas of John Locke also coincide with the empiricist view that there are simple ideas that are from sensory qualities and complex ideas coming from several simple ideas. This could mean to say that they were atomists because atomism is reducing complexity to its simplest basic elements. Which is the assumption of many ideas for psychology for example John Watson’s behaviorism. Locke also had a view of empiricist philosophy because he had the idea that those who have different experiences view the world differently.

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Both John Locke and David Hume held similar yet distinguishable views describing the origins of our knowledge. The philosophers shared the belief in a posteriori knowledge, meaning we gain knowledge through our experience in the world. Hume takes a skeptical approach but is also known as an empiricist, and Locke avoids skepticism to maintain his belief that knowledge means certainty. Both scholars theorized where our knowledge comes from and how we create it. Hume’s main argument is that we gain knowledge through habits and recurring events, not because of causal relations.

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According to this quote, Locke explains that people are born with empty minds, but individual learning and experiences will help to shape life. Experience comes from two different sources: outer experience and inner experience. Outer experience comes from the senses and provide sensory details like color, shapes, heat, and sweetness. Since these qualities exist in material objects, every human perception is the same and produce the same impact in each human. Inner experience comes through self reflexion and provides ideas such as beliefs, ideas, and thoughts.

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Accordingly, we should say that the substance plays an important role in personal identity, but this is something that Locke does not do. Since consciousness plays the most important role in our being punished or rewarded at the final judgment for what we have done, and consciousness can be transferred from one soul to another, and we have no ability to re-identify the nature of souls over time, it becomes clear why consciousness despite its unreliability is Locke 's choice for the bearer of personal identity, and why he makes the hazy differentiation between the substance which thinks in us and consciousness. I think Locke is somewhat restrained in his thought by his religious perspective and therefore creates this reliance on consciousness in order to justify the notion of moral responsibility, punishment and reward and judgment. On his account, for example, memory must be completely accurate — at least in the respects relevant for divine judicial purposes. This is an idealistic expression of what personal identity ought to be here is where consciousness is most unreliable because aside from questions regarding its very existence and even if we were to accept the notion that it exists it is contingent on memory which is as I have demonstrated earlier, itself

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A person has memories of itself existing at times in the past and is also able foresees itself existing in the future. This continuation of the same functional organism and the same life constitutes the sameness of the living thing. Therefore, ‘man’ refers to a living body of a particular shape. Locke distinguishes between man and person by using thought experiments and demonstrates that a man and person are not the same thing. If man is a living physical body – in other words, an animal of a certain kind – then a person must be something different.

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In contrast, Locke believes, that knowledge can only have a high degree of certainty but cannot be certain. Since he does not focus much on certainty in his works, he believes that perception can play a major part in the process of knowledge. He further reiterates that knowledge is based on observations and senses. According to his him, ideas come from reflection and sensation while knowledge is founded on experience In summary, I have covered the respective positions and views that both Locke and Descartes hold in respect with self-identity and consciousness.

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Locke also asserted that humans are blank states at birth. According to him, “All ideas come from sensation or reflection. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas” (Locke, 1690, p. 96). However, Baillargeon’s research described earlier in the paper showed that infants possess certain knowledge from birth, such as the principle of persistence. Also, Locke’s claim fell into contradiction later in his paper.

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