Saving Descartes’ Theory of Mind: Substance Dualism to Property Dualism
Mindfulness meditation is becoming increasingly popular in the west. There’s a good reason for this since it can make us happier, relieve stress and help us focus. Mindfulness meditation often involves simply sitting and maintaining an awareness of your breathing. After a while, you gain a heightened awareness of the content of your inner world: thoughts, beliefs, emotions, moods, sensations, the feeling of embodiment, and everything else. The philosophy of mind examines this content and, perhaps more importantly, the ‘container’ of this content: the mind
Even though it’s difficult to pin down exactly what a mind is, we all have them. We also have bodies composed of bones, organs, muscle, a nervous system, and so on. This is all material, physical stuff. But our minds aren’t material stuff. We can observe that someone feels pain by looking at his facial expression or brain activity. We can observe his behavior. However, we can’t experience his pain. We cannot observe it from his point of view as we can material things. Regarding his pain, all we can observe is his behavior and neural activity. We can only observe minds from the first person. This makes them extremely unique things.
Science fiction often explores the relationship between mind and body. Ghost in the Shell, for example, is about a…
