Relationship between Mind and Body Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Relationship between Mind and Body - Essay Example Similarly, the paper discusses whether one is more significant than the other is in a human life. Descartes talks about a possible existence of material outside God and the Self. Accordingly, the author holds that the existence of such objects is only possible because God creates them. Therefore, the author postulates that the materials exist because they relate to pure mathematics. It because Descartes believes that God makes what he thinks in the way it is. Similarly, nothing is impossible for God to create unless someone does not understand a thing (Descartes, Meditation VI: about the existence of Material things from the Body). Consequently, after discovering the possibility of the existence of the objects, the author then turns to the presence of mental pictures as evidence. Therefore, he distinguishes perception and imagination. Accordingly, he asserts that creativity refers to the capacity of knowledge to the body that is immediately present to it, without conception or intellection (Descartes, Meditations, 6), which prevails as a mental image. Understanding is not automatically a picture. He applies an example, that when he has a mental image of a triangle, he does not just perceive it to be a figure with three lines; he says he looks at the lines as if they were present to the mental eye. Therefore, that is what Descartes calls a mental picture. Descartes gives priority to the mind than the body. It is because the mind controls the body. In other words, the body only responds to whatever the mind perceives, conceives, and accepts as reality.