Talk:Cartesian dualism

I would consider this article to be biased against Cartesian dualism. It suggests that many later Cartesians did not come up with more reasonable solutions to the problem of mind/body interaction. In a contemporary context, I would use a term like energy to describe the nature of mind. “Mind is an energy that does not have to traverse space to have its effects [on the brain],” said Dallas Willard during a personal interview with him discussing this key philosophical issue.

Agree with you about the bias. But it might be a question whether these later dualist solutions you speak of are correctly described as Cartesian. I think the more general term is substance dualism. -Trovatore 18:25, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

It also should probably be somehow clarified that when we say "Most modern philosophers are materialists", that is true, but it doesn't necessarily mean materialist in the sense of reductive physicalist that many people might assume—many, possibly most, modern philosophers are nonreductive physicalists, which is a rather subtle sort of materialism not entirely dissimilar from dualism in some respects. --Delirium 04:48, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

As an aside, it might also be better to use "physicalism" instead of "materialism", as the latter in some contexts means something more specific. --Delirium 19:29, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Antonio Damasio on Mind and Body

<From Cartesian Dualism (3rd paragraph)—For this reason and others, most professional philosophers and scientists have abandoned this view and prefer other accounts of the mental. For example, other accounts of the mind-body problem present competing philosophical positions and cognitive science is the generally accepted way of understanding the mental, which is based on the assumption that the mind is matter: the material brain.>

Kindly see Spinoza on Mind and Body and Descartes' Error. Yesselman 22:28, 28 January 2006 (UTC)