Distinguish between vitalism and materialism and show how Helmholtz used (a) his
ID: 3451267 • Letter: D
Question
Distinguish between vitalism and materialism and show how Helmholtz used (a) his law of conservation of energy and (b) his research on nerve impulse speed to refute vitalism.What was the problem of perception and what was Helmholtz’s answer to it? Distinguish between vitalism and materialism and show how Helmholtz used (a) his law of conservation of energy and (b) his research on nerve impulse speed to refute vitalism.
What was the problem of perception and what was Helmholtz’s answer to it? Distinguish between vitalism and materialism and show how Helmholtz used (a) his law of conservation of energy and (b) his research on nerve impulse speed to refute vitalism.
What was the problem of perception and what was Helmholtz’s answer to it?
Explanation / Answer
irits According to the scientific philosophy of materialism, reality of a phenomenon such as behaviour can be explained only on the basis of empirical findings about the forces acting on objective matter. It is called materialism because it believes that reality can be explained by matter or energy . Materialism emerged as a reaction to the philosophy of vitalism in the 18th century. The Vitalists attributed behaviour and mental processes such as consciousness to transcendental and cosmic forces such as God, disembodied spirits, etc. the German physician Herman Von Helmholtz was a strong opponent of the vitalist movement in the physical sciences. Using his experiments on the speed of nerve impulse in frogs, he demonstrated that the differences in response to a stimulus in the environment was not a consequence of some divine intervention but was due to the difference in the reaction time or the rate of neural conduction in the nervous system. He showed that time taken by the motor neurons to respond to stimulation of the corresponding sensory receptors in the neuron constituted a reflex arc in the spinal chord. Thus, it was the material composition of the nervous system-including the brain and the spinal chord which provided basis for the occurance of a response rather than unobservable spiritual forces.
Moreover, Through his experiments on frogs' muscles using electrical stimulation, Helmholtz showed that the heat the frogs' muscles produced was accounted for by metabolism and muscular action as contrary to the vitalist theory of it being generated by an inexhaustible source of vital energy. Thus Helmholtz was able to show that the principle of conservation of energy implied that the maximum quantity of work available from a system is a finite quantity if the acting forces do not depend on time and velocity. If the forces act in directions other than that which joins the two material points, then energy can be gained or lost. Helmholtz studies thus paveed way for using the theory of thermodynamics to account for nerve conduction in the process of perception.