BUNDLE THEORY: A REACTION AGAINST CARTESIAN DUALISM

Abstract

One major problem in the Philosophy of mind concerns the nature of the human mind. Descartes argued that the mind is that, which exist in a way that it does not need any other thing for its existence. While it thrives in conscious acts like thinking and having ideas about something, the body is not conscious and is simply mechanical (dualism). However, Hume asserts that we cannot explain the unity of what we call the mind even though people may see ideas as subsisting into a substance. He argued that such a claim is an unknown something in which ideas inhere and are henceforth called a bundle of perceptions. The author aims in this article to examine Hume’s concept of Bundle theory and his claim that nothing holds our ideas together hence cannot be a mind. Using the Philosophical and content analysis method, the author demonstrates that Humes argument against the Cartesian dualism cannot stand because something holds those bundles together and cannot operate on nothing. The author uses wave theory to argue that Descartes dualistic interactionism is defensible because it provides opportunity for an interaction between the mental and bodily substances in spite of their separations or differences.