Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

this is. So there is mystery at every turn. It is not just ‘out there’ — it is within our own minds and bodies and it is there in our encounters with other people and with other creatures who share our world.

In the previous chapter we looked mainly at Cartesian dualism. The two ‘substances’ of the dualism are usually given as ‘mind’ and ‘body’ today (although translations of Descartes still sometimes use the word ‘soul’ instead of mind). But should we be using the term ‘consciousness’ instead of ‘mind’? Up to this point in the book I’ve mostly been using the two terms interchangeably. But to get a proper handle on things, it’s worth taking some time to distinguish clearly between the two.

It has to be said though that it’s not easy to untangle the difference between the terms ‘consciousness’ and ‘mind’. Psychologists have looked at distinguishing between different aspects of mind, and there are many ways in which what is loosely referred to as mind can be broken down into smaller components. Freud identified the id, ego and super-ego, Jung, the conscious, sub-conscious, and the collective conscious. To the physicalist of course, divisions of this kind are mere labels given to mental states that are entirely determined by activities within the physical brain. Whilst clearly some of these activities are sub-conscious — this too is seen perhaps as inconsequential. Meanwhile terms such as soul and spirit are again just labels that indicate perhaps a certain quality of experience but are essentially just ‘poetic’.

More modern theories of mind often see it as

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