I have been struggling all week with Rene Descartes’ problems of dislocation between mind and body (lazily, because I didn’t read literature on the subject).

It is very interesting, but I wouldn’t go as far as the Descartes follower Nicholas Mace Branche, who argued that it is God who made interaction between mental and physical happen.

Nor do I accept Gilbert Ryle’s 1999 ‘The Concept of the Ghost,’ which, as far as I understand, claims that Discantes is fundamentally mistaken.

To Ryle, it is absurd that the mind is like a ghost in the machine – that something immaterial can pull the levers of the material.

Perhaps my response is unduly simplistic – but I think both are right.

The mind has physical properties (chemical and electrical impulses that raise my arm to drink my cup of tea), but the projection of myself, Cogito, ergo sum (I think therefore I am), is a different, unmechanical process.