The Cartesian Problem
I like the way Chomsky sets the stage for understanding Descartes' concept of mind. He says Descartes was firstly a scientist living during the scientific revolution (read physicalism). Descartes made progress seeing humans as machines, but couldn't complete the project due to volition. He could see no way to mechanize it.
Chomsky continues the narrative by saying that Newton destroyed physicalism, but it was resurrected again in the 20th Century...only to die again. But this means we should all be pretty familiar with the problem facing Descartes. What do you think of his solution?
Chomsky continues the narrative by saying that Newton destroyed physicalism, but it was resurrected again in the 20th Century...only to die again. But this means we should all be pretty familiar with the problem facing Descartes. What do you think of his solution?
Comments (45)
While physicalism had been pretty much destroyed by quantum physics you wouldn't know it from standard academic curriculum.
It's tough finding really original and forward thinking works of people. Such people are quickly marginalized, ostracized, and banished.
Thanks, it looks fairly long (nearly 2 hours). I'll watch it and write my thoughts later. :)
Consciousness always appears singular and so by definition couldn't be a mechanism because it is without parts. The argument from the anthropic-mechanists (Dennett) would be that the appearance is an illusion, although the illusion can have causal effect which in new-mechanism isn't a problem since the produce of the mechanisms can alter them (new-mechanism accomodates system science).
I think the challenge then would be to discover other irreducible things in nature like the holistic 1st person pov, or accept consciousness as a special snowflake (which is close to original substance dualism).
For myself I see this as in its turn probably mistaken. A way of speaking, writing, thinking is likely not going to come in which such dualism is magicked away. We are pluralist creatures and we like it that way.
So I don't see Chomsky as providing a 'solution' except by trying to ride roughshod over ways of thinking and speaking that are indeed ineradicable.
(Y) So do you agree that Descartes' dualism was in some ways a response to the scientific revolution? The rise of physicalism brought the concept of mind into sharp relief?
"Physicalism" is an unfortunate word, because of its two distinct meanings...a philosophy-of-mind meaning, and a metaphysical meaning. So I've begun to say "Materialism" instead of (metaphysical) "Physicalism", and I'd use a substitute for (philosophy-of-mind) "Physicalism" if there's a suitable one.
Maybe my term "Animal-ness" is a good substitute for "philosophy-of-mind Physicalism".
...or maybe the abbreviation-acronym "pomp".
I'll start using one or the other, or maybe alternating them..
Quoting Mongrel
Yes, the old "Hard-Problem-Of-Consciousness". ...a nonsensical, non-existent, philosopher-imagined "problem".
If Descartes perceived humans and other animals as purposefully-responsive devices, he was right.
If he thought that that somehow contradicts volition or consciousness, then he was wrong...like a proud tradition of head-up-the _ _ _ academic philosophers who followed him.
As I've explained, there's nothing in our experience that differs from or contradicts or is inconsistent with how our surroundings, feelings, intents and efforts would be perceived by the purposefully-responsive device that we are.
Michael Ossipoff
I can't believe that the blatantly unparsimonious Dualism is still being considered, or the various silly Spiritualist circumlocutions used by some modern followers of his.
Michael Ossipoff
All right, I take it back.
It's unfair to the Spiritualists.
At least they usually only express their belief about people after death. ...whereas philosophical Dualists believe in an unparsimonious division of theliving animal into body and Mind, or body and Soul or Spirit.
I've admitted that we are, or closely approach, pure consciousness at the end of lives (or at the end of this life, if you don' t believe in reincarnation), though we're obviously nothing other than the animal during life.
Michael Ossipoff
The problem wasn't really from Descartes, as from the separation of primary (i.e. 'measurable') qualities from secondary (including mental) attributes. The rejection of the mental by consigning it to the internal, subjective or personal sphere, is where the problem lies. But know that all materialists - which in the modern academy is most people - still obtain to this basic view.
As mentioned by , there's nothing contradictory in that, except when messing up anything with anything else, self with other, ...
Maybe "'partitioning' thinking" is better wording, e.g. self-awareness versus not-self/other.
We're still part of the same world, along with whatever else, though.
Same thing with mind? What is Descartes' bigger picture? What is the Cartesian problem?
That really has no bearing on dualism, JD. Descartes' model was an abstraction: let's say the world comprises two substances, one extended but unthinking (matter), the other thinking but not extended (mind). These two are exhaustive and exclusive, i.e. everything that exists consists of just these substances and nothing else. God is pure intelligence, matter is pure extension. and us humans are a combination of both. (In Descartes' thinking, animals are purely mechanical, as depicted in this well-known engraving):
You wrote:
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Dualistic in the sense that there are all those things, and us, instead of Advaita’s single Fundamental Existent.
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But, in Western philosophy, doesn’t Dualism have a narrower meaning, and refer only to the separation of us, the animal, into body, and a separate different substance, Mind?
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But I’m not mixing separate things. I’m just not unnecessarily separating, dissecting, the animal (including us humans) into artificially separate body and Consciousness.
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Our self consists of an animal, the whole unitary animal.
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But when it partitions the animal into separate body and Consciousness, then I feel that it’s artificial and unnecessary, and therefore unparsimonious.
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Quite so. The possibility world that we all live in is the setting for each of our separate life-experience possibility-stories.
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And it could be asked (Locks implied this question), how is it that all of our life-experience possibility-stories are set in this same possibility-world.
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Well, why not, and how could it be otherwise?
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Obviously there must be a species that you’re a member of, and it must have other individuals in your world.
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There are infinitely-many life-experience possibility-stories. So it’s no surprise that there’s one for each possible being, including every being in the possibility-world that is the setting for your life-experience possibility-story.
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Of course you don’t experience any other being’s life-experience story, in this world or any other. But it’s obvious that there’s a life-experience story for every possible being, including each of those other beings in the possibility-world that is the setting for your life-experience possibility-story. …including each being on this forum. Intuitively, and by social instinct, you know that each of them is an inhabitant of this world in the same way that you are, and has at least roughly similar experience in it (within the large diversity of human character and circumstances, of course).
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Michael Ossipoff
I meant to answer one additional aspect of what you said:
As you said, my life-experience possibility-story includes a lot of things other than me, and those things and I are all part this life-experience possibility-story.
But I’m central to my life-experience story, primary to it, and its essential component. It’s about me, and for me, after all.
(But that isn’t egotism—your life-experience story is about and for you, too.)
Maybe, instead of “for”, I could say, “From the point of view of”. But, “for” is alright too, and could be regarded as a more personally-perceived way of saying the same thing.
Why you’re in this life, or any life at all:
Your centrality and essentialness to your life-experience possibility-story means that your own predispositions, inclinations, needs, wants, etc., and your sense of individuality (something reportedly not possessed by the most life-experienced people, who have completed their lives, and completed/discharged all of the above things, and even their sense of individuality) made you someone about whom there could be a life-experience story…and that’s the reason why you’re in a life. …because there’s one about someone who meets your description and is you.
Michael Ossipoff
This is what happens when the reality of dualism is denied, we end up with possibility worlds. Then instead of dualism we have infinitism.
I think 'physicalism' is the wrong word here. I'm sure that 'dualism' was in some ways a response to the scientific revolution. But as I understand it in the 17th Century the belief in the immateriality of the soul was no different from how it had been for many centuries (with views differing about whether the soul survived the human death). Robert Boyle, for instance, only a bit younger than Descartes, was confident of an immaterial realm.
My understanding of physicalism is that it denies the immaterial, and takes non-physical explanations (which tend to be called 'mental', though I'm never clear where the 'social' fits in either, let alone the 'aesthetic' or 'spiritual' or other ways of describing types of discourse) to supervene on the physical. Sorry if this is all obvious to you.
I've just been reading a book by Emmanuel Levinas, and his mid-20th century version of this cleavage is that the scientific/mathematical view is 'totalising', in that it aims for a completion that it believes to be reachable (very like the Adorno/Horkheimer postwar view), whereas the phenomenological view, the I-view, is 'infinite', unbounded and unbound-able by the totalising view, characterised instead by an excess over mathematizing explanation.
Actually I don't understand why some of the qualitative methods of social science can't be used to tackle scientifically supposedly intractable areas like 'consciousness'. A mix of objectivising data with diaries, focus groups and spontaneous remarks by individuals about how things happen from the 'I' - 'my' point of view seems to me perfectly valid, it's how we better understand lots of social phenomena. But the Chalmers' school have a natural-type science in their sights, which feels like a fruitless exercise, although the apo semiotics model is an interesting one. But this is wandering off into another thread :)
That was the point (sort of). :)
What choice do we have but the usual local 1[sup]st[/sup] person perspective? There's no self-escape, no becoming whatever else. We're already, always bound by identity, which sets the stage for "dualistic" (or "partitioned") thinking, like this one:
Hence Levine's explanatory gap. The troubles begin when taking this to mean substance dualism:
[quote=Searle]Watch. I decide consciously to raise my arm, and the damn thing goes up. (Laughter) Furthermore, notice this: We do not say, "Well, it's a bit like the weather in Geneva. Some days it goes up and some days it doesn't go up." No. It goes up whenever I damn well want it to.[/quote]
Of course consciousness has parts. When you close your eyes, you are still conscious but have removed part of the conscious experience. People who are deaf, or have lost feeling in certain parts of their bodies have also lost part of their consciousness. When you lose part of your consciousness, you lose part of your awareness of the world.
In the light of that, the Cartesian problem is a perennial problem. It turns out that it can't be merely in the context of Descartes' challenges that we understand his use of mind. But instead we recognize that he used that word for a reason. Grasping that reason isn't so straight forward because attempting to grasp it, one finds oneself enmeshed in holism.
Chomsky insists that all languages have essentially the same features. In a sense, there is only one underlying language. This fundamental language is not a tool that developed for practical reasons. It's an expression of something basic about humanity. And for this reason, we can have some confidence that if we time-traveled to ancient Sumeria and struck up a conversation about mind with the locals, they would fairly easily understand what we mean, though the problems they deal with are very different from our own.
Me too, although I'm not sure I'd come to the same conclusion as you :) One thing about the modern era is the idea of 'fact'. I remember when I was just an innocent lamb in the old forum, having a disagreement with Banno about whether one could time-travel to the 16th century and still more-or-less understand one another, or if changes in language and norms would make mutual understanding impossible. To me something hinged on 'fact', invented in the 16th century and not having an ancient equivalent. Chaucer's entire oeuvre didn't know of facts!
I wonder if 'mind' is in the same sort of category :)
Isn't that really the more prevalent viewpoint now?
It gets its data from numerous sensory organs, yes, but is "presented" as a single part like a movie.
Movies are themselves illusions which is what eliminativists like Dennett argue consciousness is.
To be more thorough what I meant in my last reply.
I am referring to the phenomenological first person unity (what is known as the binding or combination problem in neuroscience) countered against the (new) mechanistic take on on the phenomena. There is an epistemic description of emergence existing in system science (new mechanism).
Roger Sperry's wheel is a good example of that: "Sperry cites a wheel rolling downhill as an example of downward causal control. The atoms and molecules are caught up and overpowered by the higher properties of the whole. He compares the rolling wheel to an ongoing brain process or a progressing train of thought in which the overall properties of the brain process, as a coherent organizational entity, determine the timing and spacing of the firing patterns within its neural infrastructure."
But ontologically they are just parts acting on each other in extremely complex interdependent ways, yet we (individually) have an ontological experience of unity (combination problem).
It may be possible to diminish consciousness gradually but that won't change the times it did exist as a single thing. Descartes only discovered the separation (mind - body separation) through meditation, not out walking or something.
There's no reason to believe in the reality of Dualism.
You don't like possibility-worlds? My metaphysics based on possibility-worlds is completely parsimonious. No assumptions or brute-facts.
You can't say that about Dualism or Materialism.
Michael Ossipoff
Again, I don't see it as presented as a single part. There are many different parts, or distinctions, I can make out. I know these are different parts as I can experience each one by themselves without the other parts. I can close my eyes and focus on a sound only and make that the only part, or close my eyes in a quiet room and think of only one color. The different sensory experiences are themselves the fundamental parts of consciousness. Consciousness itself isn't fundamental. I can imagine different consciousnesses filled with different data and that data represented in different ways based on the kinds of sensory organs an organism has. We can even communicate the different parts of our experience - communicating only parts and leaving other parts out. If consciousness were fundamental and presented as a single part, we wouldn't be able to communicate those different parts to others and they know what we mean.
I'd said:
You replied:
Of course. We're the animal.
As I was saying before, you're using Dualism with a different meaning. You're using it to mean the absence of one-ness with our surroundings.
...whereas the academic Western Dualists use "Dualism" to mean a dissection of the person (the animal) into body and Mind, two distinct substances or entities. ...a belief in Mind as something separate from the body.
I don't say that we're one with our surroundings (though we're central and primary to, and the essential component of, our life-experience story, which can only be because of us.). I do say that the person, the animal, is unitary, and that it's meaningless, pointless, artificial and unnecessary to want to dissect the animal into body and Mind, Soul, Spirit, etc.
As for Searle, from what of his that I've read, he seems, to me, a Dualist, no matter what he calls himself.
But he's also a quasi- or semi- Materialist, because he said that the physical is still the ultimate origin and cause.
Michael Ossipoff
Also, mind does not exist; it is a convenient expression for a set of active and passive functions of intellect and will exercised by a being. Therefore, attributing psychological predicates to a mind is nonsense, and attributing them to a brain is mereological confusion.
Yes. The being, the animal, has feelings and does actions based on his/her predispositions and surroundings.
Michael Ossipoff
Sorry, my bad for being unclear, I didn't mean to describe old-school substance dualism à la Descartes — supposedly independent, real "substances" — res cogitans (thinking substance, mental) versus res extensa (extended substance, material).
Rather, I meant to account for the apparent dualism monistically, e.g. self versus other, as simply being due to (self)identity, while still taking Levine's explanatory gap serious.
All the self stuff together already is what our cognition is — our self-awareness, 1[sup]st[/sup] person experiences, thinking, etc (when occurring) — and is ontologically bound by (self)identity, which sets out mentioned partitioning. We're still integral parts of the world like whatever else, interacting, changing, albeit also individuated.
So, cutting more or less everything up into fluffy mental stuff and other material stuff is misleading from the get-go; monism of some sort is just fine, and perhaps a better categorization is that mind is something body can do, and body is moved by mind, alike, which (in synthesis) is what we are as individuals. Whatever it all is.
I've expanded my reply a bit to:
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
...to clarify that I don't say that there's free-will.
Michael Ossipoff
Ok, the Dualism that you're referring to is the absence of oneness with our surroundings.
I guess Advaita is the perfect and pure Monism, because it says that there's really only one Existent.
I'm not an Advaitist (though I'm a Vedantist), because I insist on avoiding assumptions, and I consider the avoidance of assumptions to be more important than ultra-perfect Monism.
Forgive the delay in this reply. I had to look up Levine's explanatory gap. According to Wikipedia, it's the gap that must be be bridged to solve the Hard-Problem-Of-Consciousness.
No, don't take that explanatory-gap, or that "Hard Problem Of Consciousness seriously.
It's a made-up makework "problem" invented by Western academic philosophers who evidently need a problem, so that they'll have something to publish about. You know, "Publish or Perish"..
I've answered it many times in these forums.
How could mere physical material, in a physical purposefully-responsive device like us, result in Consciousness?
Let me say it again:
Animals, such as humans, are purposefully-responsive devices, resulting from natural-selection, and designed by natural-selection so as to best achieve survival and reproduction (which includes care for and protection of offspring).
As such, they must respond to their surroundings in a manner that best achieves those purposes.
Our feelings, likes, disllkes, wants, fears, and efforts are exactly what would be expected for such a purposefully-responsive device. So where's the problem???
I repeat:
Where's the problem???
You continued:
The self-stuff consists of the animal (that's us).
1st-person experience is exactly what one would expect for a purposefully-responsive device such as an animal.
Of course the animal has self-identity.
Of course we're part of our life-experience possibility-world, though we're central and primary to it, because we're what it's for and about.
We're a distinct and special part of it. The essential part of it.
Ok, but even that needn't be said, because it's an unnecessary separation of us into Mind and body, as if they were two separate metaphysical substances.
No, that's Dualism.
Instead of separate body and Mind, there's just the animal.
The fact that the word "Animal" is derived from a Latin word for "Spirit" is a reminder that the animal embodies "spirit" and body as one integral unit. No need to even mention Spirit or Mind. There's just the animal, the purposefully-responsive device.
But there's no need to synthesize the supposed parts of what's already one thing, never separated in the first place.
Michael Ossipoff
Not substance dualism, though. Unless you think of space/objects and time/processes as substances? I just think of them as different aspects of the same world, perhaps like memories, inertia, gravity, what-have-you, are aspects of the world that we can differentiate, but not in an incommensurate fashion. The rock in the driveway isn't conscious. My neighbor is (for the most part, at least when I run into them).
Yes, but you were still speaking of Mind and body as separate and different, whereas i claim that that is an artificial dissection of the animal.
So I'd say that the more accurate way to say it is: The animal has feelings and does actions determined by its predispositions and surroundings.
The body runs itself. You are the body.
Michael Ossipoff
A person has a consciousness and a brain. That is a reasonable division of a person into 2 seperate parts. Your position I take it is that those two parts are both composed of the same matter, the same substance. A reasonable response to that is "who cares"? If there are 2 parts composed of the same substance, the question still remains of how do you account for such divergent behaviors from the same substance, so much so that we can't even accurately observe or measure the consciousness phenomena but we can the brain phenomena.
That is, these 2 things are significantly different, and simply making a reductionist claim (i.e. at some level they are reducible into quarks or whatever) answers nothing (especially since we really don't know what a quark is).
I’d said:
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You replied:
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“Division”, yes. “Reasonable”, no.
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The separate “consciousness” is Spiritualist fiction.
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We aren’t a consciousness and a brain. We’re an animal.
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You’re making it unnecessarily Dualist-complicated. Dualist-elaborate.
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No. There aren’t two parts.
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“Two parts” is Dualism. I disagree with Dualism.
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What you’re calling “two parts” is one thing: The animal.
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You insist on artificially, unnecessarily, dissecting the animal into two parts, one of which is Spiritualist fiction.
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Dualists.
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Evidently they care to make up that 2nd fictitious part.
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There aren’t.
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There aren’t 2 parts.
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One of those supposed parts is fiction.
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Your Scientists (capitalized because they’re an object of Science-Worship) can indeed observe a brain, because it’s a physical object. They can observe all sorts of things about it. Maybe in principle someday they could observe and measure everything about it.
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But now you want them to also be able to measure a fictitious “consciousness”?
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You want to know why they can’t observe or measure it?
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They can’t observe or measure it because it’s fictitious.
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You’re expressing the Hard-Problem-Of-Consciousness. You want the Scientist to be able to observe and measure another animal’s 1st-person experience.
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Why would you expect one animal to be able to experience, observe or measure another animal’s 1st-person experience???
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…no matter how much Scientific instrumentation the Scientist has.
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Scientificists want everything to be the province of Science. And so they’re bothered by the fact that Scientists can’t observe and measure another animal’s 1st-person experience.
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…or would be, if there were 2 things.
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I didn’t speak of quarks.
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We’re the animal. Period. Full-Stop.
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You’re the one who insists on trying to dissect the animal into body and fictitious consciousness.
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You’re the one who wants to make it complicated and elaborate.
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Michael Ossipoff
Sure. Consciousness occurring is a kind of "running", to use your terminology. If you're out, unconscious, have been put under by anesthetic or whatever, then that kind of "running" isn't occurring. You may come to, though, as long as the body has retained sufficient (structural) integrity.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I don't think my take presumed or implied anything supernatural or spiritual in particular. At least I don't think there's any requirement to invoke such things, even though we don't self-comprehend exhaustively.
"The separate “consciousness” is Spiritualist fiction." — Michael Ossipoff
...or made-up?
Then that's where we can agree to disagree.
Exactly my point.
Michael Ossipoff