The Mind-body problem

It's always good to get a little historical perspective on a philosophical problem, especially one as thorny and multi-faceted as the mind-body problem. So let us begin with where the problem, or, at least, the modern version of it, started: René Descartes. For whatever reason, Hollywood has become dominated by Cartesian thinking in the last few years. The most notable of the Hollywood Cartesians are almost certainly Adam and Larry Wachowski, who wrote and directed the remarkable Matrix trilogy, beginning with The Matrix (1999), followed by The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and Matrix Revolutions (also 2003). The latter two films deviate into issues of freedom and determinism, the possibility of choice in a deterministic world, and so on. But the first film is a classic exploration of the sort of epistemological themes made famous by Descartes. The function of Descartes' dreaming and evil demon scenarios is taken over by “the machines”. To cut a long story short, approximately 200 hundred years in the future, almost all humans – there are a few free ones but not many – live in egg-like containers. The machines have designed things this way so that they can use the humans' bioelectric output as a power source. Of course, the humans know nothing of this: the machines are tricking them into believing otherwise. “The body can't live without the mind,” explains Lawrence Fishburne's Morpheus, in distinctly Cartesian mode, and so to keep the bodies alive, the machines create an extremely lifelike virtual reality – known as the matrix – modelled on the world at the end of the 20 th century. Suitable neural stimulation, then, makes the humans believe they inhabit this virtual reality...more here