Dualism is the view that mind and body exist as separate entities. What does it mean that the mind and body are not separate? Because common sense tells us that there are physical bodies and that there is intellectual pressure to produce a unified vision of the world, materialist monism could be said to be the “default option”. If mind and body are different realms, in the manner required by the dualism of property or substance, then the question arises as to how they are related. The third problem concerns the rationality of belief in epiphenomenalism, through its effect on the problem of other minds.
The conceivability argument creates a prima facie argument for thinking that the mind has nothing but a causal ontological dependence on the body. A) At least since the time of Ryle's Concept of Mind (194), it has been assumed that thought can be handled in a dispositionalist way; therefore, only sensations or “raw feelings” constitute a problem for the physicalist. But psychology, it seems to be almost universally accepted, is one of those special sciences that cannot be reduced to physics, so if its subject is physical, in itself it presupposes a perspective and, therefore, the existence of a mind to see matter as psychological. This would involve both “an account of all physics and an argument demonstrating that God cannot annihilate the mind.
And to help with problems of the mind, it's important to work with and through your body. But how can the movement of “animal spirits”, which were thought to be very thin bodies, cause the existence of a sensory idea when the mind is unable to receive modes of movement given their non-extended nature? Once again, since the mind is incapable of movement and a surface, an intelligible explanation of sensations does not seem possible either. At first glance, this may seem ad hoc, but it is also important to note that rejecting the existence of substantial forms with the exception of the rational mind or soul was not uncommon among Descartes' contemporaries. Therefore, Descartes' particular rejection of substantial forms does not necessarily imply that Descartes did not see the mind as a substantial form.
On the one hand, Descartes argues that the mind is indivisible because it cannot perceive itself as possessing any part.
