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Illustration of mind–body dualism by René Descartes.Inputs are passed by the sensory organs to the pineal gland, and from there to the immaterial spirit.. The mind–body problem is a philosophical problem concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human mind and body.
In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, [1] or that the mind and body are distinct and separable. [2] Thus, it encompasses a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, as well as between subject and object, and is contrasted with other positions, such as physicalism and enactivism, in the mind–body problem.
Interactionism was propounded by the French rationalist philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), and continues to be associated with him. Descartes posited that the body, being physical matter, was characterized by spatial extension but not by thought and feeling, while the mind, being a separate substance, had no spatial extension but could think and feel. [2]
A human was, according to Descartes, a composite entity of mind and body. Descartes gave priority to the mind and argued that the mind could exist without the body, but the body could not exist without the mind. In The Meditations, Descartes even argues that while the mind is a substance, the body is composed only of "accidents". [106]
Illustration of mind–body dualism by René Descartes. Inputs are passed by the sensory organs to the pineal gland, and from there to the immaterial spirit. The mind–body problem concerns the explanation of the relationship that exists between minds, or mental processes, and bodily states or processes. [1]
Although the mind and body remain distinct from one another the union of them can still be considered to be the cartesian self [7] Descartes claims in his sixth meditation further how we are not merely just a soul using a body since he has made the distinction between the mind and body while also proving that the mind and body form a union ...
Descartes was a substance dualist, and argued that reality was composed of two radically different types of substance: extended matter, on the one hand, and immaterial mind, on the other. Descartes argued that one cannot explain the conscious mind in terms of the spatial dynamics of mechanistic bits of matter cannoning off each other.
The problem of the Passions treatise is also the problem of Cartesian dualism. In the first part of his work, Descartes ponders the relationship between the thinking substance and the body. For Descartes, the only link between these two substances is the pineal gland (art. 31), the place where the soul is attached to the body.