The philosophy of mind

One answer to the mind-body problem is dualism. In the Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes discusses what has come to be called the Cartesian dualism, which refers to the theory offered by Descartes that the mind and body are separate and that the mind is incorporeal:

Throughout his life Descartes firmly believed that the mind, or soul. . . was essentially nonphysical. . . The thesis of the incorporeality of the mind seems, from first to last, a fixed point in Descartes' thinking (Cottingham 236).

The one thing that cannot be doubted and that is true each time it is expressed by a person is that that person exists. Descartes finds that he might doubt everything else because his senses may deceive him. He can thus deny that he has a body and senses because he perceives these things only through what he has called the senses, and all this data might be false. He asks then if it is possible that he can exist without the body and without the senses, and of course he can because

. . .
s the fact that he is sitting in his chair by the fire in a dressing-gown with a paper in his hands--these things are not to be doubted (Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy 25). Descartes uses as an example what happens when he is asleep. He says that what the insane represent to themselves when they are awake he may represent to himself when he is asleep because dreams are often improbable. This fact raises issues about the validity of the senses, for when Descartes is asleep, he may have dreamed precisely that he is sitting in front of this fire in just the same pose. When he is, he is beset by the illusion that what he senses is real, when in fact it is a dream. How is it possible to tell the difference? Descartes finds that he is uncertain now whether he is awake or dreaming, and so the experience of the senses has to be doubted because it is indistinguishable at the time from the dreaming state. Descartes suggests that we pretend we are asleep and accept that all that we sense is false and illusory. He says that we must agree that the things we see when we are asleep are like painted images and that they have to have been formed in the likeness of what is real and true (Descartes, Discourse on Method and the M
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