Ask Mark 1.4 - "Pure mind" without body (podcast)
Channel: UCT CILT
Date: 2016-04-29

Ask Mark 1.4 - "Pure mind" without body (podcast)

Professor Mark Solms from the University of Cape Town (UCT) a question (see below) posed to him on UCT's free online course, "What is a Mind?", hosted by FutureLearn. For more information on visit http://bit.ly/1JB2Dxf .

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Question: Professor Solms asks us to imagine what it would be like to be a body without a mind. But he doesn’t ask the opposite question, supposing you were a pure mind, sans body - without eyes, ears, skin or any sensory data whatsoever. Not only will you not sense the physical world, including the people in it, you couldn’t even contemplate abstractions like Pythagoras’s theorem if you never saw / felt a triangle. there would be no you if there were nothing but you. Often-quoted Peripatetic school axiom - which is Descartes’ version: ‘‘There’s nothing in the mind that doesn’t appear first in the senses”. According to this school at least, the mind and even the non-brain body aren’t separable. Does Professor Solms agree or does he think that pure mind exists in some way?