Dualism is the idea that there are two distinct categories of things, or principles. I will be talking about Cartesian Dualism, which refers to Descartes’ view that the mind and the body belong to different categories: immaterial substance and material substance (Άrnadóttir, 2015).
In this essay, I will show why Descartes believed the mind to be independent from the body, and how he explains the interaction between the two. I will then go on to show why his arguments aren’t sufficient by referencing Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia’s objection to the idea of a causal interaction between the mind and body, and then use Jaegwan Kim’s pairing problem to illustrate why Cartesian Dualism cannot satisfactorily account for the interaction between mind and body.
Cartesian Dualism is also known as Substance Dualism, because the mind and the body are seen as two separate substances. According to Descartes,
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Say there were two duplicate bodies with two duplicate minds: how do we know which mind interacts with which body? Let us take a different situation: Two girls each throw a stone at a different window, causing them both to break at the same time. How do we know which stone caused which window to break? In this situation, we would simply trace a path from the girl throwing the stone to the window the stone breaks (Άrnadóttir, 2015). If we could do the same with the mind and the body, there would be no problem in regards to which mind is paired with which body. However, in Cartesian Dualism, the mind is an immaterial thing: there is no visible, physical path to trace! We cannot physically see the mind interacting with the body. This raises not only the question of which mind is paired with which body, but also if there is even a causal interaction at all, like Descartes claims there is. Indeed, how can I know that the mind interacts with the body if there is no evidence that I can see that tells me