care, I must finally conclude and maintain that this proposition: I Am, I exist, is necessarily true in every time that I pronounce it or conceive it in my mind (Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy 24).
Inherent in Descartes's argument is the mind-body problem and the need to understand what is the mind and what is the body as well as how they are connected and related. The mind is our awareness, the one thing that we can know is real. It is the site of rational thought. It is subject to the senses in that it acquires information through the senses, but it is not a sense in itself. Descartes says he had no doubts as to the nature of "body," though now he has had to reconsider this position given that he realizes all the elements of the body are known to him only through the senses that he does not trust any longer. He says if he had been asked to explain the nature of the body, he would have explained that it was whatever could be determined by a certain shape, and comprised in a certain location, whatever fills a certain space so as to exclude from i
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