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Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addressed, such as the hard problem of consciousness and the nature of particular mental states. Aspects of the mind that are studied include mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and its neural correlates, the ontology of the mind, the nature of cognition and of thought, and the relationship of the mind to the body.
The mind–body problem is a philosophical problem concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human mind, and the body. The issue is this. Though it is obvious that mental events and physical events are somehow related, it is not obvious what the nature of this relation is. For example, it is obvious that feelings of sadness (which are mental events) will cause people to cry (which is a physical state of the body), or that finding a joke funny (a mental event) will cause one to laugh (another bodily state), or that feelings of pain (in the mind) will cause avoidance behaviours (in the body), and so on.
In the philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, direct or naïve realism, as opposed to indirect or representational realism, are differing models that describe the nature of conscious experiences; out of the metaphysical question of whether the world we see around us is the real world itself or merely an internal perceptual copy of that world generated by our conscious experience. Indirect realism is broadly equivalent to the scientific view of perception that subjects do not experience the external world as it really is, but perceive it through the lens of a conceptual framework.