... materialistic form-the mind is a physical substance in the same way the heart or lungs are. It is worth pointing out at this stage that dualists are unlikely to consider the mind/body problem in the sense that a corpse, being a body devoid of a mind, is proof that the two are distinct entities. Clearly, this is irrelevant: dualists, when referring to a body, are basing their arguments on a living one. What happens to the mind after the living body dies is another issue altogether. A central tenement of Descartes' philosophy is the view that the mind/soul is immortal - although it exists on earth inside a body, it is released after death to the next world. A dualist, like Descartes, is of the opinion that the physical body, which the outside world sees, occupies space and is governed by the laws of physics as much any other physical entity ...

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