Your Pineal Gland at Work

This is without a doubt one of the more peculiar spontaneous drawings I’ve cooked up.  I think I had been listening to something on NPR about teaching children philosophy and somewhere in the conversation dualism came up.  Dualism “is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, which begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical.”  That is, the belief that there is such a thing as the mind, which is not simply a term for a material state of the brain and which is non-material.  One of the big problems for any belief of this sort is how to account for the interaction between the physical and the non physical, AKA, the “problem of interactionism.”  The French philosopher Descartes, whose particular ideas on this topic are now known as “Cartesian Dualism” wrestled with this problem and theorized that the location in which this odd interaction was supposed to occur was the pineal gland in the brain.  Presumably at the time no one knew exactly what this gland did, so, hey, maybe it’s where the mind and body interact, right?  Of course this really skirted the issue.  The problem isn’t where such a thing would occur, but how.   At any rate, here’s the cartoon.  Anyone other than me probably would have done something that makes more sense and is funnier… like some guys sword fighting, you know “dueling?”