Tutorial # 15. Descartes’ Meditations VI: The Union of Mind and Body. Discussion Questions

After having read the Meditations II & VI - A Trilingual HTML Edition of Descartes' Meditations can be found HERE Edited by David B. Manley and Charles S. Taylor, think about these questions.

• Think about some example of mental and physical aspects of the world.
• Consider a situation where you are dancing, what are the mental aspects of this situation?What are the physical aspects? Are these aspects the very same thing? Or can you find any substantial difference?
• How does Descartes conceive of the essence of mind and body?
• What is a thinking thing? Is a computer a thinking thing? Is a virus a thinking thing? And a dog? What might be a sufficient condition for being a thinking thing?
• Descartes (Meditation ii) claims “I am the same being who perceives, that is, who apprehends certain objects as by the organs of sense, since, in truth, I see light, hear a noise, and feel heat.”. Now, what is this ‘I’? How our perceptions (of colors, noises, shapes, etc) are unified?
• Do we know better the properties of the mind, or the properties of the body?
• Consider the wax example (Meditation ii). In which sense does the wax remain the same after all the changes?
• If there were no minds to attend the wax, would the wax have a certain color, say white?
• According to Descartes, can a mind exist without a body?
• Imagine that your body were transformed into the body of a bee, do you think your mind would be the same?
• “I am not only lodged in my body as a pilot in a vessel, but that I am besides so intimately conjoined, and as it were intermixed with it, that my mind and body compose a certain unity” (Meditation vi): What does this “certain unity” amount to?
• “When we stand in need of drink, there arises from this want a certain parchedness in the throat that moves its nerves, and by means of them the internal parts of the brain; and this movement affects the mind with the sensation of thirst, because there is nothing on that occasion which is more useful for us than to be made aware that we have need of drink for the preservation of our health.” What is the role of the mind here, and what is the role of the body?
• Can a non-physical mind be investigated scientifically?
• If mind and body are radically different types of stuff, how can they interact with each other?
• If all physical effect is fully caused by physical causes, then can the mind have a causal influence on anything physical?
• Does the mind affect the brain? Make examples.