Excerpts from a chapter at this URL, Ch.2.pdf (nccu.edu.tw), will be posted identifying the human mind as an immaterial substance. There is ignorance, confusion and contrasting perception concerning the true nature of the human mind. Can it be reduced to materialism? Is it an emergent property of the material brain with no causal effects on it? Is it only supervenient to the physicochemical functions of the brain? Does it really exist? How does it relate to will? I found this chapter informative, and a better understanding of dualist interaction and Descartes’s dualism will be derived from its reading.
“What is it for something to ‘have a mind,’ or ‘have mentality?’ When the ancients reflected on the contrast between us and mindless creatures, they sometimes described the difference in terms of having a ‘soul.’
“. . . many of us seem to have internalized a kind of mind-body dualism according to which, although each of us has a body that is fully material, we also have a mental or spiritual dimension that no ‘mere’ material things can have.
“Your soul defines your identity as an individual person; as long as it exists - and only so long as it exists - you exist. And it is our souls in which our mentality inheres; thoughts, consciousness, rational will, and other mental acts, functions, and capacities belong to souls, not to material bodies. Ultimately, to have a mind, or to be a creature with mentality, is to have a soul.” (For further reading the soul will be defined as mind, will, emotion and conscience.)