Descartes Unit 3

18. Descartes thought had proved that the soul was immortal, by indirectly proving the mind and body exist separately. The mind is not made up of any matter, it can not be duplicated by any means (so says Descartes). The body is composed completely of physical matter and could likely be reproduced. These two different entities share no common properties in Descartes' eyes and therefore can exist independently from one another. Descartes used the concept of properties in order to determine the exclusivity of the mind and body. The mind's main property which makes it a mind is thought. Now Descartes believed the mind took up no physical space. While on the other hand, the main property of the body is Extension, or growth, which means they take up space. The mind-body problem arises from this explanation of properties each holds independently, How can something immaterial affect something that is completely made up of material?

19. HAHAHAHA, Descartes has one hell of a time trying to figure out how logically something that takes up no physical space can affect something that takes up a lot of physical space. Descartes had no way to logically explain how material communicates with the immaterial, so he said that the communicator sits atop the pineal gland and communicates responses from mind to body and body to mind.

20. Idealism is the idea that reality and it's truest form are based solely on the mind. Materialism is the idea that "only matter exists". Science has come such a long way that we can possibly say that "only matter exists" because their things that are unforeseen and have little to no physical presence, such as energy. Since we know energy exists and sometimes it has no physical presence we still hold the same empirical values as the materialist did the only thing is now we have changed the name of the idea to Physicalism to allow for all the new phenomenon we are able to observe. Out of all three of these agruments we know that idealism has to many holes for it to logically hold water, and materialism was our first understanding of how the world works which evolved into physicalism as technologies have progressed.