Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!MathWorks.Com!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!utnut!utgpu!pindor
From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: Dennet and Dualism
Message-ID: <Cx9Gy3.89B@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCC Public Access
References: <36ut06$jet@sunserver.lrz-muenchen.de>
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 1994 17:08:27 GMT
Lines: 33

In article <36ut06$jet@sunserver.lrz-muenchen.de>,
Michael Pietroforte <ua352af@sun4.lrz-muenchen.de> wrote:
>
>Dennet (Consciousness Explained, chapter 2, paragraph 4) mentions 
>the following argument against Cartesian Dualism: Everything  that is 
>able to interact with matter must by itself be matter (by definition). So 
>there can't exist a substance (called mind stuff) which is not material 
>but interacts with matter.
>
>I think that this argument is wrong: Descartes claimed that res cogitans 
>(mind stuff) and res extensa (matter) are two totally different 
>substances. Both can exist without the other (that's why they are 
>substances), but they have different properties. Matter for example is 
>extended an mind stuff is not, mind stuff thinks, and matter does not. 
>But why should two substances (with different properties) not interact? 
>Descartes would have said that the statement "everything which 
>interacts with matter is matter" is simply wrong.

Don't you think that it depends on how you define what is matter and
what is not?
How do you know that mind stuff is not extended and that the matter does
not think?
BTW, according to the best available physical theories, electron is
point-like i.e. it has no extent. Is it not matter then?
How about energy? Is it extended? Or is it not matter? (Remember E=mc^2 ?)


Andrzej
-- 
Andrzej Pindor                        The foolish reject what they see and 
University of Toronto                 not what they think; the wise reject
Instructional and Research Computing  what they think and not what they see.
pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca                           Huang Po
