But you are still faced with the problem of their unity and apparent independence unity. Do you regard yourself as an autonomous agent? If so you are emancipated from the determinism of the physical world. The question remains as to how this integration and liberation has been achieved. You may not consider it important but the answer does affect our view of ourselves and others. So it is important even from the pragmatist’s point of view because it concerns such issues as whether we have a right to life. That is hardly a minor detail!
The Cartesian self does have such a problem. It’s a good thing that I am not interested in playing metaphysics or it would be a problem for me as well. Ok, I like to play a little bit, but the project of trying to get all are ideas to cohere in a philosophical system is just one among lots of other human projects. If I think about metaphysics, I am thinking of it as such a human project rather than as an attempt to get myself in the proper relation to something great, nonhuman, and ahistorical like God or Reality. I don’t see anyway to stand outside of history like Descartes thought he could in making himself the source of ultimate reality.
I see the “emancipation from the physical world” as an evolutionary process rather than the absurdity of mind emerging out of matter. Molecules emerged from atoms, and cells emerged from molecules, and organisms emerged from cells and later organized into societies. Such societies were dynamically created by organisms to preserve themselves, but societies eventually were “emancipated” enough from biology to pursue purposes of their own. Social values are somewhat independent of biology just as biological life has been emancipated from the determinism of physical laws. Societies dynamically created ideas to help preserve and create better societies, but intellect has found purposes of it’s own as well such as the search for truth regardless of what impact that truth has on society. So this “emancipation” has actually been gradual and has occured in stages rather than a leap from atoms to mind. This Cartesian self that is somewhat emancipated from such patterns is supposed to be completely independent of physical, biological, and social patterns. Such a Cartesian self is an absurd fiction.
As Robert Pirsig wrote in Lila, “Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” was a historically shattering declaration of independence of the intellectual level of evolution from the
social level of evolution, but would he have said it if he had been a seventeenth century Chinese philosopher? If he had been, would anyone in seventeenth century China have listened to him and called him a brilliant thinker and recorded his name in history? If Descartes had said, “The seventeenth century French culture exists, therefore I think, therefore I am,” he would have been correct.”
So there are actually a lot of levels of evolution between mind and matter that dissolve the mind-body problem to the point that you wonder why you ever asked the question. The mind-body problem is only a problem if you buy into the Cartesian subject-object metaphysical constructions that presuppose that the world is composed of mind and matter–of two types of substance, mental substance and material substance in which all the properties that are ascribed to rocks, trees, and minds are supposed to inhere. But what is this substance outside of all its properties? In considering the question, we find ourselves thinking of nothing at all. So why make such metaphysical assertions for the reality of essences or substances that properties are supposed to adhere to? Why not instead just drop the idea of such essences and substances in favor of a web of relations of properties and thereby drop all the philosophical problems that essences create such as the philosophical platypi of appearance-reality, mind-body, free will-fatalism, and objectivity-subjectivity, essential-accidental, and absolute-relative–all the “nest and brood of Greek dualisms” that Dewey railed against.
Best,
Leela
. Thank you. 
