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CHAPTER FIVE
How Is My MIND CONNECTED TO My
BODY?
Anybody who can read this book, or even this sentence, can think. It is tempting
to conclude, as Descartes did in his Second Meditation, that anybody who can read this
book, or even this sentence, has a mind. In addition, most of us are quite certain that we
have a body, although Descartes attempted to doubt even this. But the question of what
the relationship is between our minds and our bodies is one of the most enduring and
puzzling in philosophy. It is also one of the most immediate, because it has direct
consequences for our views about what and who we are.
Descartes believed that the mind and the body are distinct substances. He was
therefore a dualist, a person who believes that there are two fundamentally different
kinds of “stuff” (mental and physical) in the universe. The dualist is faced with the
difficult problem of explaining what the relationship is between these two fundamentally
different kinds of stuff. The usual view is this. Let’s say there is a song playing on the
radio (a physical event). You hear the song, and that causes you to remember or think of a
summer friend (a mental event). Your remembering in turn causes you to write your
friend a letter (a physical event). Here, a physical event (the playing of the song) causes a
