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Analysis Of Rene Descartes Substance Dualism

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Rene Descartes published his Meditations back in 1641, eight years after Galileo discovered that the Earth was not the center of the universe but, in fact, the sun was the center. This shook many people’s ideologies on what they knew on religion, their senses, and what it meant to gain knowledge. While Rene Descartes is very well known for his Cogito erg Sum ( I think therefore I am), he also came up with a theory of Substance Dualism. Substance Dualism is Rene Descartes way of explaining the mind/ body problem. The mind/body problem is the question on what is the mind/soul and is it real? If so how does it interact with the body? In this essay, I will explain how Rene Descartes’ Substance Dualism is false and discuss property dualism as …show more content…
The mind is extended from the body and interacts with brain to form our private selves. The body depends on the mind to function, but the mind can live without the body. According to Rene Descartes, “…when my body is hurt, I, who am merely a thinking thing, should not feel pain…For all these sensations of hunger, thirst, pain, ect. are in truth none other than certain confused modes of thought which are produced by the union and apparent intermingling of mind and body” (297). Rene Descartes means that the reason that people have emotions and feelings is because they have a mind. If they don’t have a mind then why would people experience pain when it doesn’t contribute to fixing the problem. Hunger, thirst, and pain are biological factors of the body. When a person feels pain, their body will send signals up to the brain and cause certain nerves to fire off and make the person perceive pain so they can be made aware that something is wrong. During …show more content…
In Substance Dualism, the mind appears to be this all-seeing ghost-like thing that effects people’s life. If Rene Descartes believes that the mind can be independent from the body then why can it be trick? Property Dualism says that the mind depends upon the body. The mind relies on the body to gather information and perceptions from the environment and so it makes conclusions based off perceptions and past knowledge. So sometimes the mind can get it wrong if the body misfeeds it wrong information because it depends upon the body. The third issue is the category mistake. Rene Descartes makes the category mistake when he believed that the mind was a “thing” that held a singular value. Rene Descartes tried to look for a singular thing that would explain all mental capacities but it is actually a series of mechanical functions that make up the mind. Property Dualism realizes that the mind is an abstract concept that is created by the biological functions of the body. It isn’t a thing but the effect of multiple things working

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