The Influence Of The Mind By Descartes

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Descartes is afraid of being imprisoned if he publishes his book. He then spends his time answering questions that even skeptics cannot doubt. This is when his belief that the mind is separate from the body is developed. He comes to the conclusion that empirical thinking can be wrong, because senses can be deceived. He also makes a point that mathematics cannot be trusted, because God could make a world where he believed he understood, but really did not.
Descartes finally finds something the skeptics cannot doubt. He asks the question “can you doubt that you’re doubting” this allowed him to prove that we humans exist, because if you doubt then you can think, if you can think then you exist. This is when he developed the quote “If I think therefore …show more content…

Since the body cannot function without the mind, than the very essence of ones being is their mind. The body can be harmed or lost, but you can still be yourself unless the mind is lost. Descartes believed the mind was separate from the body, but it controlled the body and gave one the power to have hopes, doubts, beliefs, reasoning capability, judgement, and a will. Therefore, the mind is essential to the body and without the mind you do not have a self-conscious person capable of these things. So Descartes establishes that we are minds since our minds are an essential part of the physical …show more content…

Physicalists believed the mind was not a separate part from the body, but part of one’s brain. There was the problem with mind/body interaction, people questioned where this supposed interaction took place and how it took place. Descartes did not give enough evidence on how or where any of this took place, but I think he did this on purpose since he used the analogy of mind being like a soul. Since no one knows where the soul, but it is still widely accepted that humans have one, he may have felt no need to explain the unexplainable, because it is beyond any humans’ capability to understand. However, with release of Descartes viewpoint of the mind/body many differing views have been developed. There is Reductive Physicalism, which basically says that the mind is a part of the body (brain) and only material things exist. Non-reductive Physicalism basically states that consciousness and subjective experience are not material, but in order to have a mind you need a brain. Functionalism is the idea that everything is input/output and that our minds are like computers and the output is the

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