Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

To try to address the questions that arise from Descartes, let us assume, along with science and the common-sense view of reality, that there really is an external objective reality that is stimulating sense organs which in turn are transmitting messages to brains. From this, the main problem with dualism is the need to explain how mind interacts with the physical world. Firstly there is interaction in terms of receiving sensory data from the outside world — sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touch. Secondly, there is the problem of how I, as a mind, am able to have control over my own body, which is made of matter and thus forms part of the external world. How does my mind pick up these stimulations in my brain? There needs to be a correspondence between these external stimuli and the effect they have on my mind. Where does this correspondence come from? Does God put it there? Do other people have the same correspondence between their sense input and their mind? The two are completely different substances according to the theory, so how is one affected by the other? (The so-called ‘mind-body problem’.) One interpretation offered for the issues raised above is called ‘interactionism’ — the view that the mind and body really do interact. It could probably be said that interactionism is claiming that, no matter the difficulties we have been exploring, there is no other way to explain things but to say that interaction really does happen, even if we cannot yet explain how it works. There’s a hope, therefore, that we will figure out how it all works eventually, and thus solve the difficulties I’ve described. In fact, even if mind or consciousness is not considered some kind of separate substance, in the manner

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