Thinking without a brain?
On the axis: After death · mind and brain
The mind is born, matures, and fails with the body, is befuddled by its wine, goes out under a blow: do these bonds prove that thought dies with the flesh, or only that the instrument conditions the playing without being the musician?
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
Anchors: Lucretius · Descartes
leads to: The enigma of consciousness