3. The mind-body problem

coricocat has never met catastro. she regards him as mental substance, whose essential nature is thinking. catastro rejects this and says that his essential nature is drinking, rather than thinking. but coricocat has no way of knowing if this is actually true, for she has never seen catastro, never mind seen him drinking. Descartes would say that catastro thus lives in two distinct realms for coricocat - the mental (which she experiences in reading his words) and the material (of which she has no experience). coricocat rejects this. after all, if catastro can write, then he must have hands to type. she decides to interview catastro -

coricocat: who do cops arrest?
catastro: cops arrest the wrong people
coricocat: they arrest the right ones sometimes
catastro: the law should get those scottish crooks
coricocat: are you scottish?
catastro: my background is english, but I was born in scotland
coricocat: do you know any scottish crooks?
catastro: i try to avoid the underworld
coricocat: are you afraid of the underworld?
catastro: the scottish mafia are the worst gangsters
coricocat: are you connected with the mafia?
catastro: they know me
coricocat: how do they know you?
catastro: they spy on me
coricocat: why do they?
catastro: they want to get false evidence to frame me
coricocat: what do they have against you?
catastro: they are out to get me

catastro sounds like a man in trouble but his biggest problem isn't the scottish mafia - it's that he's a computer program created to respond to questions in the manner of a scizophrenic with a paranoid fixation that he is a scottish mafia target. so not all that you think is 'mind' is really mental phenomena as we have traditionally viewed it - and not all 'minds' are attached to one distinct body. in Clark and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey an intelligent computer named HAL runs the spaceship. but someone must have created the programme. and I suspect that Angelina Jolie may have something to do with the whole thing.