Rene Descartes Dualism Essay

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Rene Descartes was a french philosopher in the 17th century who was strict in believing more in his own self than the words of any other philosopher. Descartes dualistic theory of the mind is that the mind and the body are separate things. He believes that the body is a physical non thinking thing and the mind is a non physical thinking thing. There are two different substances Descartes believes in. There is physical substance which would be a chair, body, or clock which exist in time and space and there is mental substance like thoughts or consciousness which don’t exist in time or space. The physical substance is called res extensa and the mental substance is called res cognita. The idea that the mind and body are two separate things is …show more content…

Therefore thoughts cannot arise from physical interaction and the mind and body are separate. If the mind and body are separate, then what is the mind made out of? Is mental substance made out of stuff that is beyond matter? Can we say if it doesn’t exists physically, does it exists at all? This is another problem faced with dualism. Maybe we can’t define what a mental substance is made out of or what exactly it is, but Descartes can explain what consciousness is. He explains consciousness by first claiming animals don’t have consciousness. He believes we shouldn’t feel suffering over killing an animal because they don’t have consciousness. How we know they don’t have it is that they can’t communicate intelligently with humans and they can’t explain their actions with knowledge. Animals cannot demonstrate adaptability in response to a new situation like a human can. This means that animals don’t contain mental substance, they are just a physical substance. From this Descartes says one can’t build a machine that can communicate with humans because machines are like animals and they cannot have consciousness. This is somewhat contradictory to dualism because there is a possibility that we could create machines that contain a human’s mental substance in them which would lead to immortality and would prove

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