In Meditation Six, Descartes argues the distinction between substance of mind and matter. He attributes the doctrine of clear and distinct ideas to the indivisible essence of mind and the faculty of sensation with its potentially misleading ideas, to a divisible body. The result reduces the human experience to that of machinated body possessed by some ineffable, diaphanic entity. While the flaws in Descartes’ argument are not as easily discernible as I had originally thought, his attempt at separating mind and body ultimately still fails to meet his own prior established doctrine of causation.
The split between mind and body as separate entities lies within Descartes definition of material and immaterial substances. The mind is an immaterial substance which thinks,wills, desires, reasons and is the whole of our being. Bodies are the material extended mass interacting with other things of extension by use of sense perception. While minds by their immaterial nature are indivisible, bodies can be divided and still function according to their purpose. I may lose an arm or leg but my vessel is still capable of its purpose (perceiving).
The indivisible mind however, cannot be subtracted from it’s part
The problem with this causal resolution is that it still fails to explain how the immaterial mind can communicate with the material brain. Merely providing a spatial tunnel (the common sense area of the brain) still presupposes a physical ability to transcribe the non-physical. If the mind can transcend sensational description then sensations cannot understand the mind. A possible solution would be to ascribe some of the mental thinking power to the brain tunnel so it could decipher mental orders to the body. However, if this explains the interaction then the mind is no longer independent of it’s vessel because it has no way of being known other than through it’s interaction with the world. There will also still be no proof my actions were ordained from this ineffable mind. Descartes even concedes this “ God could have made the nature of man such that this particular motion in the brain indicated something else to the mind”.
Descartes is unable to draw conclusive evidence to explain the mind body separation. In the end, his argument allowing the existence of a god begotten rational soul calls into question the viability of god himself. While the separation of mind and body by his account were ineffective, Descartes’ did reveal the need of philosophers to resolve the nature and purpose of human experience.
Descartes believed because the matter of the body was affected by sense perception it presented a far less clear and distinct picture of what is real. God would not, in
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