Descartes, hairsplitting on First Principles, Material and Immaterial models of the mind, and other partially disjoint thoughts.
Ok. I’m really tired, but I can’t sleep because this stuff keeps rattling around in my otherwise empty skull. So I’m just going to spill it and go to sleep. Fuck presentability, this isn’t an essay and I’m not being graded.
(1) Descartes’ worldview holds no distinction between mind and soul — the mind and soul are the same Aristotelian “anima” that they were two thousand years before him, and up to about three hundred years after him.
In modern terms, this is still a largely acceptable viewpoint, if you don’t want to apply Ockham’s Razor.
Let’s set up two models for this: for a modern materialist (not in the “material girl” sense, but in the “not willing to conjure up a metaphysical entity to explain processes that can be explained with biochemistry” sense), the brain functions as the sole and complete center for thought. In this model, damage to the brain impairs the function of the mind itself (albeit perhaps not tangibly because of the brain’s resilience). Essentially, the brain is the hardware and firmware itself, and thought is the software. Damage enough transistors and the software crashes, etc. A useful, albeit perhaps primitive, model.
In contrast, Descartes conjures the anima (mind, soul, etc) as a strictly external entity, something apart from the body. His rationalization for modern understanding (and also lack of understanding) of brain functions would probably be to treat the brain itself as an interface between the body and the soul. Plato’s Idea (note the capital “I”) is in the same realm as the soul, and the brain is essentially the strings to which the puppet of the body is attached. Consider it as a very low latency, very high bandwidth bus — say a processor socket. The brain itself doesn’t do the processing, that happens elsewhere, in the metaphysical. All the brain does is connects the processor to the body.
Incidentally, this would also rationalize brain damage cases. Specific areas of the brain could have specific mappings — that is, they could be the bindings of the “strings” of the soul to the body itself. Damaging them enough would cause them to cease to work (ie: destroy the language center, and you’ve actually not damaged the “mind” per se, but you’ve damaged the ability for the mind to communicate with the body).
In this model, the mind (soul, whatever) is only aware of itself through introspection. It can do things that are strictly internal to the soul, but those things can’t leak over other channels to the brain, to be removed far enough for the soul to perceive.
I think this is at least a defensible model. The only thing that really REALLY breaks it is Ockham’s razor (just a refresher: “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily”). But if you’re not an Ockham subscriber (say, you’re a theist with an agenda), you could really get behind this theory to rationalize neuroscience without destroying the soul.
(2) Descartes tries to argue the existence of God as a justification for that as a First Principle (that is, a principle which is so fundamental to everything that it needs no justification). By attempting to justify it, I think he undermines his own position of it as a First Principle. But then, that’s fine, because the only REAL first principle is logic itself. Everything else hinges on the simple idea that logic is not an ultimately broken tool.
But, Descartes starts out by putting forth the principle of Material and Objective reality (or is it truth, whatever). I forget which is which, but the idea is that something itself can’t have more reality than the idea of that something. Once again, a little Plato jumps out and smacks you with a big capital Idea…
Using that principle, though, Descartes comes up with the premise that anything that he distinctly and clearly thinks of must exist. The argument for this is based on material and objective realities — the idea that something can’t have more realness than the idea that inspired it — or in other words, that we can’t think of something without having encountered it first in some form or another. This seems to actually be a pretty sound argument, despite my hand-wavey explanation. MICROSLEEPS is all I have to say for that though.
Anyway, Descartes uses those premises to demonstrate God’s existence. He thinks God exists, and it seems like it’s got a high degree of validity, because he really really thinks that God exists, so God must exist.
This … sort of begs the question, and doesn’t it just smack of wishful thinking? I mean …yeah he’s obviously a theist, living among theists, in a world surrounded by better than a millenium of militant theism.
But that doesn’t change the fact of the matter, which is that his argument still asks you to essentially assume that God exists, as a concession in his argument that God exists.
Now, I don’t know. I’m not saying God does or doesn’t exist. But it’s time for a left turn, namely
(3) God as a concept really boned a lot of good thinkers. Descartes wasted a LOT of his life trying to rationalize his beliefs in the scope of fundamentalism. He didn’t publish an early work when Galileo was condemned, because he essentially argued logically how the principle of Inertia couldn’t conceivably be wrong, and everything else Galileo was endorsing (a copernican worldview) just totally smacked of correctness. Seeing a great thinker and innovator get smacked down by the intellectually paralyzed church in turn inflicted such an intellectual paralysis on Rene himself.
And look at today. Again, fundamentalism is totally boning science. And science is going to ultimately win, because we need it. But the fundies are going to keep being themselves too.
Further Up and Further Left!
Earlier tonight I watched an ep of Penn and Teller’s “Bullshit”, with the subject of creationism. And in it, one creationist Georgian says this: “You see, what we have here tonight is two world views. There’s a man-centered world view, and there’s a God-centered world view”.
It’s interesting to me, that religion to the extent of shutting out science is ultimately NOT a God-centered world view at all. The whole purpose of religious fundamentalism is, in fact, to keep man on his pedestal as the central pivot around which the universe revolves.
No, really, give this one a bit of thought. God created everything but man, and then created man, in His image, as His ultimate work. Yep, that’s right, Man is more important than anything else in ALL OF CREATION.
Descartes wrestled with this, thanks to Copernicus and Galileo. He came to the conclusion (as a premise, actually) that man has an immortal soul that is distinct from his physical existence. Today, religious people say the same thing.
But ultimately, by not ascribing that same spark of divinity to all living, or at least all sapient beings (that is, whatever other sapient entities exist besides us … I dunno, dolphins, mice, great apes, gray-skinned guys who get off probing flabby pink-skinned people), we set ourselves up as the center of and meaning of existence. Science has progressively rejected man as the sole purpose for creation. In that sense, it’s a purely destructive practice: in its quest for truth, it rejects the comfort of our false sense of self-importance as a species, putting bigger things than us as the center.
There’s a tangent on determinism here, but I think if I walk down that one I’m going to wake up with a face full of impressions of the letters “vbnm”, which won’t be cool … so I’m going to stop that for now.