... a means of communicating to people around us. This makes it very much public. We assume that mind and body must interact. Much of what we do with our bodies, how we move, where we move to, is a result of thought and therefore resulting from mental processing. In the same way, our bodies can receive information from the outside world through senses, and this can then affect the mind. For example, when we view a mountainous landscape through our eyes this is relayed to our brain which deciphers the image. We may then think that the landscape is beautiful and this could change our emotional state - which I have already ascertained to be controlled by the mind. Descartes argument for Cartesian dualism is then specifically that the mind and body are distinct, but still have the capacity to interact. He accepts that they are different, describing this in his ...

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