MP favorite  Erik Hoel discusses the appearance of the mind-body problem in the correspondence of notorious villain Rene Descartes. This post expands

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2023-05-27 10:00:04

MP favorite Erik Hoel discusses the appearance of the mind-body problem in the correspondence of notorious villain Rene Descartes. This post expands on a comment I left there.

When you have a thought in your mind, or feel hot sand under your feet on a blazing-hot day at the beach, these experiences seem to us as private, personal, intangible, immaterial, and even ghost-like.

By contrast, material objects, which we can touch, lift, move—and which often bite back if we move them the wrong way—are not like this. We don't experience them as ours, the way we might experience a pain in our hip or the taste of sugar on our tongue. They don't obey our wishes, except through crude and indirect means.

How is it then that colors, sounds, feelings of heat, pressure, and pain, and all the rest can get from Out There and inside your private skull-kingdom?

The fissure that Descartes introduced between the mind and the world must be understood as more than a simple division of the mental from the material. It is that, but there is more much to say. Because of his peculiar way of doing philosophy, Descartes begins with some (at the time) strange assumptions.

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