The consciousness does not. Therefore, Descartes premise is false. The mind is a product of the body-colony, not the other way around. You are shut off during sleep. Your conscious self, or the I, which becomes the ego in the mind, is formed from your unique combination of genetics, memetics, the time and place of your existence, and the people you are acquainted with on the world stage.
Individuality is natural and desired for continued evolution.
This perspective, or reality, is an artificial representation of the material world for the ego, the conscious self, to deal with the material world for the id, urges, and aided by the superego, conscience. The material world is what is really real. In order to understand why the world is the way it is, one has to understand the web of causation. What is happening in the world now is a product of what has come before, which is a product of what came before that, and so on. We are the product of a tragic and triumphant history.