The Problem of Consciousness and the Mind Body A Dualistic Approach in the Philosophy of Mind

INTRODUCTION A river never dries just by bailing water with a picota1; a pot never fills just by incessant sobs. In the same way the quest in philosophy is not going to end, it doesn't matter how long we have been doing philosophy. As well whatever we have learned cannot be enough to fill the desire of knowing our own nature. Even though the MindBody problem is, as John Searle says, "the source of so much controversy over the past two millennia," yet the philosophy needs to be reflected upon again and again. The MindBody problems raises questions like, "Are human beings a duality of Mind and matter, or are they simply physical beings? If the humans are no more than heaps of atoms, then how does one square this notion with issues like personal identity, life after death, human rationality, and morality? If a person is a Mind that has a body, how do these two existents interact with each other? Is it possible, in this framework, to know other minds? How could the Mind, totally lacking in physical properties, cause things to happen in the body or vice versa?" The aim of my research is to understand the problems of Mind/consciousness and try to address the problem by going through the varieties of solutions that have been offered by classical as well as contemporary philosophers of Mind. When we talk about the Mind, either from a philosophical point of view or a psychological point of view or from a scientific point of view, the first question to be raised is; what is Mind? We will find different kinds of answer to this question. Some says that Mind is a substance; some others say that it is a form of energy or a kind of force; some others say that Mind is part of the Soul; some have treated Mind and Soul as identical, some others have treated them as entirely different entities; some recognize the Soul from a religious point of view and some others recognize Mind from psychological point of view. Some others ignore the existence of the Soul completely; dualists say that the Mind is an independently existing incorporeal substance; materialists say that the Mind is an ordinary piece of matter. In the context of contemporary research the concept.