Thomas Hobbes: It's All About The Senses

It’s All About the Senses Intrusive images, which are involuntary sensations often causing disruption in one’s daily activities, are a very common symptom in psychological disorders such as PTSD, other anxiety disorders, eating disorders, depression, and psychosis. The images can occur in many different forms. They sometimes possess many sensory qualities categorized by their content, vividness, claritiy, color, etc. These images are derived from sensory experiences. In most cases, the images are analogous with the events that occurred during the onset of their specific disorder, and in most cases the events that occurred were awful events. An example of an awful event would be a car accident or shooting that an individual experienced …show more content…
He was also considered a materialist, a mechanist, a determinist, and a hedonist. Hobbes’s stressed value of sensory experienced helped him to develop his own definition of empiricism. Hobbes said, as quoted also by Hergenhahn, “The [origin of all thoughts] is that which we can sense, for there is no conception in a man’s mind, which hath not at first, totally or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense. The rest are derived from that original” (Hergenhahn, page 133). This quotes shows that Hobbes believed all ideas came from experience, most importantly, sensory experience. This also shows that Hobbes placed high value on sensory experience as did the authors in the article by Brewin et al,. Hobbes placed such large importance on sensory experienced that he declared sensory related origins to psychological phenomenon like attention, imagination, memories, and dreams. He stated that attention was explained by sense organs retaining the motion caused by objects making them unable to respond to other objects, therefore, causing attention. Imagination was explained by the decaying of sense. He proposed that when a sense decays for a considerable amount of time, it turns into memory. He suggests that dreams are sometimes so vivid because when we sleep, there are no new sensory impressions competing with the imagination. Hobbes’s profound emphasis on sensory …show more content…
Now, there is an explanation for their existence, but how do these images or memories appear and disrupt our lives? Bain and Hume insisted that the mind had “imaginary powers”. Alexander Bain proposed that mind had the power to form new combinations which depicts that the mind can rearrange memories of various experiences into infinite amounts of combinations. Bain’s proposition of the mind’s ability to form new aggregates different from the ones actually experienced can be associated with the article authors’ new treatment implication of imagery rescripting. Imagery rescripting involved replacing negative memories with new, more positive ones helping to limit the occurrence of intrusive images in the patients suffering from the various mental disorders discussed earlier. Imagery rescripting basically involves the mind changing or altering the memories of experiences. If the mind possesses these “imaginary powers” then the mind of the patients should more than be able to achieve imagery rescripting. In conclusion, I would say that the authors of the Intrusive Images article took a very empiricist-like approach. The intrusive images and memories experienced by the mental disorder patients were derived from sensory experiences. The event centered on the onset of their disorder