Perhaps what has attracted many philosophers to the Cartesian dualism is not its validity but the potential possibility of a mind-body dualism. To be sure, Descartes believed that in reality a human being is an “intimate union of mind and body” . In sixth meditations he says, “I know that everything which I clearly and distinctly understand is capable of being created by God so as to correspond exactly with my understanding of it. Hence the fact that I can clearly and distinctly understand one thing from another is enough to make me certain that the two things are distinct, since they are capable of being separated, at least by God”. They key phrase here is “capable of being separated by God”. What he argues is that in theory, it is still possible that he would exist even if he had no body. The essence of the mind is to deny, affirm, and understand, to be willing and not willing. Norman Malcolm also suggests that we could even continue to have sensory perceptions although it would be illusory. Descartes gives an example of this when he states that it is not uncommon to have people who have had parts of their bodies amputated to continue having sensations in the amputated part. It is the interest in this possibility of a mind-body dualism that has attracted many philosophers to the Cartesian dualism. In trying to understand the dualism and the conditions under which it may hold, new philosophical doors are opened for discussion. Some of these questions include; if I had always been disembodied what how would I have acquired the concepts on which my body turns and what would it mean for me to have a correct understanding of those concepts as contrasted with an incorrect one? So not only does the Cartesian dualism provides a platform for debate but also encourages the discovery of other philosophical thoughts.
However, the Cartesian dualism is not free from difficulties. According to Anthony Quinton, there are three problems with the Cartesian dualism. These are causal, epistemological and logical. The causal difficulty relates to the fact that our mental activities have effect on bodily ones and vice-versa. How do two bodies that are clearly distinct happen to have such a close intermingling? Anthony Quinton suggests that the intermingling between the mind and body is so strong that the mind could sometimes be said to be idle. In other words the physical events that result from our mental exercises could sometimes appear as though they can solely be interpreted by events in the brain and central nervous system.
“The epistemological difficulty arises from doubts of the validity of the analogical inferences by which, according to dualism, one mind must justify its belief in the existence of any experiences other than its own” . The crux of this argument is that we cannot know what someone is thinking and we cannot be sure that their definitions of things are exactly the same as ours. Are our definitions of good and evil universal and how do we know that what one calls good is the same belief held by another. This problem of the Cartesian dualism suggests that not only is the mind and body not distinct in reality but could not be possible.
There have been alternative solutions to the Cartesian dualism. One of these is monism. Monism in turn has its own variations. There are some that say that bodily things are illusions. This is known as idealism. Materialism is another form of monism. The most prominent view of materialism is the one known as scientific materialism and it is the one that is gaining a greater voice with contemporary materialists. This view states that everything in the world consists of the ultimate entities of physics. There is no immaterial thing in the world. There is nothing like mind if mind is non-spatial. It is the view that man and animals are complicated physical mechanisms.
Why Does Descartes Wait Until The sixth Meditation to Draw the Conclusion That the Mind and Body are Distinct? Why does he not do it in the second meditation?
Descartes waits to draw the conclusion that the mind and body are distinct in the sixth meditation because he needed to prove the existence of corporeal things. In the second meditation he was not sure that he had a body. It is not until the fifth meditation that he is able to prove the existence of corporeal nature. It therefore seemed expedient to prove the distinction of the mind and body in the sixth meditation.
Malcolm, Norman , Problems of the mind, p5.
Malcolm, Norman, Problems of the mind, p.5
Descartes meditations: vi-9
Quinton, Anthony the nature of things p313