Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

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 is to just say that the mind and body really do interact. So 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 of Descartes, then there is still an interaction problem to be solved between the body and the brain.

A further explanation of how mind and body are related claims that mind and body run independently but God or coincidence has arranged things so that they appear to be related.

A further theory suggests consciousness is

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