On Jun 12, 8:12 am, Jangchub wrote:
On Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:27:09 -0700, Billy
wrote:



Caught in Cartesian dualism are ye? Good luck. You gave the rocks a good
chuckle though, good on you ;o)

What does this mean?

From:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism...osophy_of_mind)

"The central claim of what is often called Cartesian dualism, in honor
of Descartes, is that the immaterial mind and the material body, while
being ontologically distinct substances, causally interact. This is an
idea which continues to feature prominently in many non-European
philosophies. Mental events cause physical events, and vice-versa. But
this leads to a substantial problem for Cartesian dualism: How can an
immaterial mind cause anything in a material body, and vice-versa?
This has often been called the "problem of interactionism".

Descartes himself struggled to come up with a feasible answer to this
problem. In his letter to Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess Palatine, he
suggested that animal spirits interacted with the body through the
pineal gland, a small gland in the centre of the brain, between the
two hemispheres. The term "Cartesian dualism" is also often associated
with this more specific notion of causal interaction through the
pineal gland. However, this explanation was not satisfactory: how can
an immaterial mind interact with the physical pineal gland? Because
Descartes's was such a difficult theory to defend, some of his
disciples, such as Arnold Geulincx and Nicholas Malebranche, proposed
a different explanation: That all mind-body interactions required the
direct intervention of God. According to these philosophers, the
appropriate states of mind and body were only the occasions for such
intervention, not real causes. These occasionalists maintained the
strong thesis that all causation was directly dependent on God,
instead of holding that all causation was natural except for that
between mind and body."

Chris