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Gaining justice from criminal courts for acts of brutality can be like trying to gather water with an open bucket full of holes. Such arguments have their basis in carceral politics but extend far beyond calls for specific convictions and punishment.
The Brain
Brains weigh only three pounds, yet they are the organ that creates a human experience. Ours controls things such as learning and memory, emotions, touch, body movement, vision, breathing, and hunger – while unknowingly managing unnoticed functions like how fast our hearts beat or stomach digest food.
The brain is at the core of all events around us, from remembering birthday parties to getting angry over your brother messing up your room. Neurons form an intricate network that forms your nervous system; this includes your brain. Housed within its protective skull known as the cranium and connected via thread-like nerves to the spinal cord, this organ forms what is known as the central nervous system.
The brain consists of two types of cells: nerve cells (neurons) and glial cells. Neurons communicate with each other via sending messages between cells in their neural network, creating huge data storage capacities of trillions of bits. Each neuron contains its own cell body, dendrites, and axon. Neurons fire five to fifty times every second, creating quadrillions of electrical impulses per minute that travel throughout your mind and body, controlling how you move, think, and feel.
As soon as we start learning something new, our neurons send messages back and forth until they create a pathway that makes the task more straightforward for us to complete. When first trying out riding a bike, your brain likely had to consider pedaling, staying balanced, and steering with handlebars simultaneously; with practice, however, this was no longer required until riding it became automatic.
Brain activity includes involuntary movements like blinking your eyes and breathing and sending millions of messages back and forth between the brain and body daily. Researchers have only begun to comprehend how our minds work; using imaging technologies like functional MRI, they aim to study it as best they can.
The Mind
Mind (also called psyche or soul) refers to that part of ourselves that thinks, imagines, remembers, wills, senses, and perceives. This encompasses consciously aware and non-consciously familiar experiences, emotions, beliefs, desires, and intentions. Philosophy, religion, psychology, and cognitive science offer numerous interpretations of its nature – some philosophers have even attributed features of the mind (such as animal cognition) to nonliving entities like plants, rocks, and even deities!
Since humans first realized an inherent connection between the brain and mind, various theories have been proposed regarding its relation. From Friedrich Eduard Bilz’s controversial phrenological mapping of the brain (which later proved false) to ideas regarding how we develop mental models of our surrounding world through modeling activities like modeling an exam paper, for instance, many theories have been floated concerning its function and relationship to brain activity.
One of the latest theories about how the mind emerges from its source involves simulation or pattern recognition. This idea is founded upon the notion that our brains form a model of our environment to predict our behavior and guide decisions, similar to how a computer program simulates robot behavior or software engineers develop algorithms for complex systems.
This notion can be highly contentious; it suggests that our actions may not only be determined by genes and environmental influences but also by what our brain predicts will happen to us. According to Joshua B. Tenenbaum’s argument, this process of model formation resembles how scientific models work: They’re created through experimentation and theory.
Holes provide an ideal example for ontologists and epistemologists as a case study for ontologies and epistemologies since their presence can often explain physical interactions (e.g., “The water ran out because my bucket had a hole”). Although holes cannot be physically seen or felt, we still rely on their explanations when explaining our observations about them. Their existence thus remains hidden until proven otherwise by empirical observation or further discussion with others.
The Heart
The heart is a fist-sized muscular organ that pumps blood throughout your body. It forms part of an intricate network of arteries and veins that deliver oxygen and nutrients directly to cells while clearing away waste products from cells. Furthermore, blood is carried from the heart to the lungs to pick up more oxygen before returning it to its source – the heart.
The human heart comprises solid muscle tissue that contracts and relaxes to pump blood throughout its chambers. It features four rooms with one-way valves to regulate blood flow; these chambers can then be divided into atria and ventricles by walls, with the former serving as collecting sections while the ventricles serve as pumping chambers. Each area is further subdivided with walls dividing atria from ventricles to manage pumping activities easily. The ventricles are protected by layers of protective myocardium covered with protective layers of epicardium tissue for adequate muscle tissue protection against disease.
After the atria fills with blood, they send it to the ventricles. When these contract, they squeeze it like fist-clenching your hand – this process repeats hundreds of times each day and all night to pump blood outward and into your system.
Blood from the right side of the heart enters the left atrium with relatively low oxygen levels, prompting heartbeats to transport this low-oxygen blood into pulmonary arteries to be sent directly to the lungs, where they can take in more oxygen and eventually back out to the right atrium.
As the heart pumps, blood is distributed via the body’s major artery: The Aorta. From there, it branches off into smaller and smaller arteries, which travel throughout your body, delivering oxygen and nutrients directly to cells while taking back waste products for recycling back at their source.
Your heart and the blood vessels that carry its blood work together to deliver oxygen and nutrients to every cell in your body while collecting carbon dioxide from cells to breathe through your lungs – these systems are essential in keeping you alive!
The Soul
Soul refers to an individual’s spiritual essence or personhood and acts as the life force or spirit for natural objects and creatures in their environment, including rocks and trees and the universe as a whole. Soul plays an integral part in many religious beliefs and philosophies and is often associated with ideas of immortality and divine justice.
From the start of Greek philosophy, we can observe an evolution toward an expansive definition of the soul. Phaedo’s poem on the soul already depicted its presence within Greek philosophy as responsible for cognitive/intellectual functions like thought and perception and moral qualities like courage (Long & Sedley 1987).
Plato’s Republic places more emphasis on the soul as the source of all human activity; that is, as its source. Socrates identifies its function as caring for oneself, ruling over others, deliberating over actions to take, and caring for a specific cause – all activities that make living an exclusively human life enjoyable and worthwhile.
At this stage, the soul concept becomes moralized: its association with certain admirable character traits such as endurance and courage becomes apparent through texts such as Euripidean fragments that reference desire associated with an “ensouled” soul or Hippolytus’ claim that men can be saved if their soul remains pure.
The moralizing of the soul carried over into Christian times with the notion that individuals possess individual souls distinct and superior to their bodies, forever parted from one another by death. This idea originated with Plato and Aristotle but was further refined through Scholasticism – mainly through St Thomas Aquinas’ work – before finally reaching its culmination.
