Is there a solution to the mind-body problem?

The mind-body problem can be said to be one of the oldest of philosophical issues and has remained as such. The origins of modern philosophy are often traced to the meditations of Descartes (1596-1650 cited in Law 2003) who is associated with ‘Cartesian Dualism’, the idea that the mind and body were two separate substances. Yet this led to the problem of explaining how mind and body interacted with each other. Spinoza (1632-77 cited in Robinson and Groves 2007) in contrast to Descartes proposed a monist philosophy proposing only one substance, being ‘God’ and that mind and body were identical as they were different properties of this one substance. This essay looks at a number of arguments before concluding that a predicate or property dualist position seems the most plausible, yet the mind-body explanatory gap and thus the debate itself may be an intractable one.