section_path: Forms/Faculties and modules
section_name: Faculties and modules
paragraph_text: Faculties and modules
  
  Traditionally, the mind was subdivided into mental faculties understood as capacities to perform certain functions or bring about certain processes. An influential subdivision in the history of philosophy was between the faculties of intellect and will. The intellect encompasses mental phenomena aimed at understanding the world and determining what to believe or what is true; the will has a practical orientation focused on desire, decision-making, action, and what is good. The exact number and nature of the mental faculties are disputed and more fine-grained subdivisions have been proposed, such as dividing the intellect into the faculties of understanding and judgment or adding sensibility as an additional faculty responsible for sensory impressions.
  
  In contrast to the traditional view, more recent approaches analyze the mind in terms of mental modules rather than faculties. A mental module is an inborn system of the brain that automatically performs a particular function within a specific domain without conscious awareness or effort. In contrast to faculties, the concept of mental modules is normally used to provide a more limited explanation restricted to certain low-level cognitive processes without trying to explain how they are integrated into higher-level processes such as conscious reasoning. Many low-level cognitive processes responsible for visual perception have this automatic and unconscious nature. In the case of visual illusions like the Müller-Lyer illusion, the underlying processes continue their operation and the illusion persists even after a person has become aware of the illusion, indicating the mechanical and involuntary nature of the process. Other examples of mental modules concern cognitive processes responsible for language processing and facial recognition.