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Mind

Do people who are blind, deaf and mute since birth dream? If so how?

I don't know the answer to this question -- I mean the how question rather than the whether, for everyone dreams -- and it sounds (from the fact that he is resorting to words like 'presumably') like Andrew Pessin doesn't know either. For it's really a question for empirical psychologists, not philosophers, and the fact is that I haven't read their studies on the subject -- if, indeed, any such studies have been made. Even just anecdotal evidence should be treated with caution, and is likely to be little more reliable than armchair speculation. But, with that caveat, I am reminded of a talk I once heard from the philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe, for she did have some anecdotal evidence to bring to the table here. She recalled speaking to a blind (though admittedly not deaf) friend of hers, and asking him what his dreams were like. She was naturally presuming that he would say something like, "I dream about how things sound, and feel, and taste, and smell." So she was a little surprised by the answer he...
Mind

Many philosophers think that mental states can be reduced to physical states. It seems to me however that properties such as sadness and happiness are adjectives that apply to a person's mental states. It doesn't make any sense to say "this is happy brain tissue" does it?

I might just add one further observation here. At the risk of sounding pedantic, 'happiness' and 'sadness' are not adjectives (as you suggest). They're nouns. The corresponding adjectives here are the words 'happy' and 'sad'. Now, I would agree with you that there seems to be something deeply peculiar about a sentence like "this is happy brain tissue". Admittedly, and as Sean Greenberg indicates, philosophers don't tend to seek to reduce mental states simply to brain tissue but rather to states of that tissue. But still, that doesn't help: the sentence "this is a happy brain state" or "this brain state is happy" doesn't sound much less jarring. However, I think the reason why these sentences sound so harsh is not because we're here talking about a neurological state as opposed to a mental one. It would strike me as equally peculiar to say "this mental state is happy". That's because I disagree with your suggestion that we apply these adjectives to mental states at all. We do apply the ...
Mind

Are humans capable of imagining things, that are not based on other things they've already seen, or a combination of things they have already seen? For instance if I ask a kid to imagine a new animal (there I'm already using things I know 'animal'), he/she will most likely come up with something like a elephant feeted, giraffe necked, winged, crocodile or somewhere in that fashion. Now of course some people are more creative, but when you look at e.g. art, again what you get are the elephants with long feet, crazily constructed houses, people in all kinds of strange and surreal forms. But in the end it always seems completely based on things we've perceived in the past. What is your view on this, are humans capable of coming up with something 'new'? This raises the question, what do you consider 'new' (not based on things we've seen/heard/perceived in any way before)? This also draws me to the question if there is knowledge which is not acquired by learning? I hope some of you are interested in answering...

Descartes ponders this sort of thing in the course of the first of his Meditations on First Philosophy . He speculates about whether everything he has taken himself to be really experiencing might actually just be a figment within a dream; and he initially decides that, yes, it could be. But then, on further reflection, he notices that this only seems to be true of composite things. The basic elements out of which these things are constructed within the dream, he feels, will still need to have been derived from prior experiences. He makes the same observation that you made: "For even when painters try to create sirens and satyrs with the most extraordinary bodies, they cannot give them natures which are new in all respects; they simply jumble up the limbs of different animals." But then he goes a step further than this: "Or perhaps if they manage to think up something so new that nothing remotely similar has ever been seen before -- something which is therefore completely fictitious and unreal -- at...