The knot of mind and body
On the axis: The enigma of consciousness · the reciprocal action of mind and body
My decision raises my arm, a glass of wine muddles my thinking. But if the mind is not material, how does it act on muscles; and if the physical order is self-sufficient, does experience change anything at all in what happens?
Justification
The argument rests on a principle: what I clearly and distinctly conceive as able to exist apart really exists apart, since God could create it so. Now I can conceive my mind, pure thinking thing (res cogitans), with nothing corporeal attributed to it, and body, pure extension (res extensa), with no thought. My essence is therefore to think, and the mind is really distinct from the body, a substance of another nature than the brain. This substance dualism breaks with the Aristotelian soul, form of a body, and at one stroke frees matter for a purely mechanistic physics; yet it bequeaths the problem, which Descartes will struggle to solve, of their union and interaction.
Meditations on First Philosophy, VI
Justification
Descartes makes the will the infinite faculty of the soul, that in which we most resemble God: it is the will, not the limited understanding, that can affirm or deny anything. This freedom of is the most immediate experience we have of ourselves.
Meditations on First Philosophy, IV · The Passions of the Soul, arts. 41 and 152
Anchors: Descartes · Elisabeth of Bohemia
leads to: Freedom of the will (The choice within the order of causes)