Descartes Substance Dualism Essay

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the changes in the physical world that correspond with the mind. For example, when one is to prick his/her finger, no physical activity will reach his/her mind. Instead, an occasionalist would say that God produced the impression in his/her mind on that occasion of pricking his/her finger (“Occasionalism” Para1). Moreover, parallelism rejects any form of interaction between mind and body. The mind and body appear to run on “parallel” paths. Leibniz argued that the mind and body are not causally related, but they follow the same path that has been formerly organized by God. This theory is known as pre-established harmony (Calef, “Dualism and Mind”). Behaviorism and functionalism are also theories that have been expressed by Descartes’s …show more content…
Thus, it was not the experience of delight that caused the behavior of getting another piece of cheesecake, rather the physical events that generated the feelings to produce the behavior of getting another piece of cheesecake. It would seem that, in contrast to Descartes, an epiphenomenalist would believe that there is no mind; there is only body and physical events (W. Robinson 2015). Descartes’s theory of substance dualism, mentioned in his second and sixth meditations, establishes his view that the mind and body are two clear and distinct things. That is, they are two different entities that are nothing alike, and are, as he illustrates in his theory, complete opposites. His theory on substance dualism introduced the world of philosophy with an unsolvable problem that has caused many theories to unfold. Theories like interactionism, occasionalism, parallelism, behaviorism, functionalism, and epiphenomenalism have sought to answer the question: “What is the relationship between the mind and the body?” These theories were developed in response to the lack of information Descartes presented concerning the relationship between the mind and body. He merely presents his belief that the mind is a real non-extended thing, but the body is an extended
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