A dispute · spans 2 eras
The Mind-Body Problem
How do mind and matter relate? Are they two things, or one, or neither?
Descartes' dualism — mind and body as utterly different substances — generates the problem more than it solves it: how can two such alien stuffs interact? Spinoza answers: they are not two stuffs but two aspects of one. Leibniz answers: they don't interact at all; God pre-coordinates them. Hume bypasses the question by dissolving the mind into a bundle. The 20th century re-poses the problem as the hard problem of consciousness: how does any arrangement of matter give rise to experience?
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