All creatures have a material appearance, namely body, but is does not fellows that it all have a mind. The body allows us to perceived knowledge through five senses, which includes touching, seeing, hearing, tasting and smelling. The mind allows us to perceive knowledge through reasoning, including thinking, judging, understanding. Today, Modern science has been able to use the language of biomechanics to explain the structure and the interaction of the body. However, our mind is not yet able to be explained in a physical term. Many people believe it is not possible to do so, one of them is the sixteenth-century French mathematician and nature philosopher René Descartes. Descartes believes that human body is just a machine. Yet, it is the
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For example, tensions can cause people to sweat. Conversely, drinking coffee makes people active, and so on. The effect goes both ways. Insofar, substance dualism fails to solve the problem of interaction. This was also recognized by Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, She write to Descartes on May 6, 1643, that “ I beseech you tell me how the soul of man (since it thinking substance) can determine the spirits of the body to produce voluntary actions….”(11) Descartes has especially noted in the second meditation that body do not have the “power of self-movement.”(81) This shows substance dualism theory fail to provide an explanation for mind and body interact. However, later in Descartes’ responds to Elizabeth, he tried to explain and complete his theory by listing three different common notions for the body, soul and their union respectively. He claims that people who believe the mind and the body as a whole are only using the common notion of their union, namely sense to make the judgment. In another word, the interaction between mind and body should not be a problem, because people who believe mind and body as a whole did not adopt substance dualism. Here, Descartes offers no convincing account for the interaction of mind and body, instead, he just argues people who question his theory are “never philosophize.”(18) Speaking for myself, Descartes’ substance dualism fail to explain the mind and the body interaction and his supplementary explanation even worse the reliability of his theory. Because his argument essentially implied that in order to make people believe in something is simply through believing it. There is no reasonable logic or argument offer in his account, but his personal belief, which is
For example, tensions can cause people to sweat. Conversely, drinking coffee makes people active, and so on. The effect goes both ways. Insofar, substance dualism fails to solve the problem of interaction. This was also recognized by Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, She write to Descartes on May 6, 1643, that “ I beseech you tell me how the soul of man (since it thinking substance) can determine the spirits of the body to produce voluntary actions….”(11) Descartes has especially noted in the second meditation that body do not have the “power of self-movement.”(81) This shows substance dualism theory fail to provide an explanation for mind and body interact. However, later in Descartes’ responds to Elizabeth, he tried to explain and complete his theory by listing three different common notions for the body, soul and their union respectively. He claims that people who believe the mind and the body as a whole are only using the common notion of their union, namely sense to make the judgment. In another word, the interaction between mind and body should not be a problem, because people who believe mind and body as a whole did not adopt substance dualism. Here, Descartes offers no convincing account for the interaction of mind and body, instead, he just argues people who question his theory are “never philosophize.”(18) Speaking for myself, Descartes’ substance dualism fail to explain the mind and the body interaction and his supplementary explanation even worse the reliability of his theory. Because his argument essentially implied that in order to make people believe in something is simply through believing it. There is no reasonable logic or argument offer in his account, but his personal belief, which is