How Things Work – A Brief History of Reality
Book 1 – Dualism (The Mind-Body Paradox)
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Tuesday, January 4, 2022
“We don't live in the world of reality, we live in the world of how we perceive reality.” –Bryan Singer
Preface
Rene Descartes essentially saw human beings as a duality of reason and perception. He believed that perception represented a flawed method of understanding reality, and only reason could be trusted in the pursuit of discovering and understanding ultimate objective truth. Therefore, he questioned the very validity of perception itself, as well as any evidence or understanding of reality previously gained through it. This included even the perception of “self.” Descartes decided to disregard all previous philosophy and knowledge based on past physical perceptions, including the perceptions of the ancient Greeks, starting with the very perception of a separate and unique self. Therefore, Descartes’ new form of pure empirical scientific inquiry begins with doubting the very existence of a “real” self.
“Mind existed beyond the limitations of measurable space; mind and matter were completely separate realities.”
Descartes establishes that there is a physical organ, called the brain, that interprets physical information from the senses and a different form of consciousness, or a priori knowledge, that makes abstract reasoning, such as mathematics, possible. Physicality, or what Descartes called “body” occupies space and is measurable, like the brain. However, what Descartes called “mind” was not a physical object, therefore not located in space as an independent measurable physical object like the brain. Mind existed beyond the limitations of measurable space; mind and matter were completely separate realities. The mind represented an understanding beyond perception and the limitations of the brain by recognizing the divine nature of reason, particularly through pure mathematics.
Descartes’ distrust of physical perception is reminiscent of Ebenezer Scrooge’s reaction to meeting the ghost of his dead partner Jacob Marely in A Christmas Carol:
“You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost.
“I don’t,” said Scrooge.
“What evidence would you have of my reality, beyond that of your senses?”
“I don’t know,” said Scrooge.
“Why do you doubt your senses?”
“Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”
Descartes sees physical perception as a completely untrustworthy form of gaining information in terms of describing “true” reality. Perception can change from human being to human being depending on a variety of situations and circumstances; perception can even change over time. The divine, eternal truths of reality could not be perceived by the brain, only experienced through the pure reason of the mind. For Descartes, the quintessential and immortal language of the mind was mathematics.
“The result was a new duality resulting in a new paradox: the mind-body paradox.”
Descartes’ belief that knowledge gained through reason, logic, and mathematics, as opposed to perception through the five senses, represented the only authentic possibility for reaching true objectivity in the pursuit of absolute truth; establishing pure objectivity as the bedrock foundation of the new modern sciences. Descartes’ recognition of a real “self” resulted in an attempt to define and discover more about that “self,” generating an entirely new set of metaphysics in both religion and the social sciences, such as psychology. The consequence was a new duality resulting in a new paradox: the mind-body paradox. This set the stage for the emergence of Rationalism and Empiricism leading to the Age of Reason and the “modern” world that is the immediate precursor to our own current reality.
Consideration# 12 – The Mind-Body Paradox
Descartes argued that the traditional Scholastic beliefs based on the physics and metaphysics of the ancient Greeks, including Plato and Aristotle, were essentially flawed because they were founded on knowledge and information gained through the five senses; leading him to doubt the validity of the “truths” gained from them. Descartes sought to prove that authentic truths, particularly divine truths, were experienced through “reason” as opposed to “perception.” Therefore, Descartes was prepared to doubt even his own direct experience of reality. One example he used to support such a doubt was dreaming. Here is how it works.
“This eventually led Descartes to conclude that what we consider “physical sensations” such as sight, taste, hearing, feeling, and smelling were in fact not real at all.”
Essentially, Descartes argued that, when dreaming, people experience perceptions similar to when awake. In other words, dreams can feel very real while you are dreaming, but they are still not real in the physical world. You can experience pain, fear, pleasure, happiness, and other physical sensations, but when you wake up you realize it was only a dream. This eventually led Descartes to conclude that what we consider “physical sensations” such as sight, taste, hearing, feeling, and smelling were in fact not real at all. These assumed physical sensations were actually some type of “mental sensation” beyond physical reality which he called “mind.” This would eventually lead to a new form of dualism: Mind-Body, or Substance Dualism.
“Our mind-body problem is not just a difficulty about how the mind and body are related and how they affect one another. It is also a difficulty about how they can be related and how they can affect one another. Their characteristic properties are very different, like oil and water, which simply won’t mix, given what they are.
According to Descartes, matter is essentially spatial, and it has the characteristic properties of linear dimensionality. Things in space have a position, at least, and a height, a depth, and a length, or one or more of these. Mental entities, on the other hand, do not have these characteristics. We cannot say that a mind is a two-by-two-by-two-inch cube or a sphere with a two-inch radius, for example, located in a position in space inside the skull. This is not because it has some other shape in space, but because it is not characterized by space at all.
What is characteristic of a mind, Descartes claims, is that it is conscious, not that it has shape or consists of physical matter. Unlike the brain, which has physical characteristics and occupies space, it does not seem to make sense to attach spatial descriptions to it. In short, our bodies are certainly in space, and our minds are not, in the very straightforward sense that the assignation of linear dimensions and locations to them or to their contents and activities is unintelligible. That this straightforward test of physicality has survived all the philosophical changes of opinion since Descartes, almost unscathed, is remarkable.”
Descartes and the Discovery of the Mind-Body Problem – Jonathan Westphal
(The MIT Press Reader – August 8, 2019)
Descartes introduced a dichotomy between “mind” which is non-physical and “body” which is the manifestation of physicality. He determined that the brain was a physical organ capable of perceiving physical sensation and stimulation, however what gave sense, logic, reason and meaning to those perceptions was a non-physical attribute he called “mind.” The mind and the brain were not the same thing. However, Descartes’ concept of mind was not the same as Plato’s Realm of Forms or Aristotle’s concept of soul; Descartes’ concept of mind was essentially mathematical. This would ultimately lead to novel and unconventional innovations in science, medicine, physics, geometry, philosophy, religion, and eventually influence the American and French Revolutions.
Postscript
Descartes represents what Fritjof Capra would later describe as a “turning point” in the development of human understanding. To a great extent, Western thought, particularly scientific thought, is experienced through a “Cartesian” lens in which reality is a kind of complex self-generating system much like a machine. Like any machine, the key to understanding how it works rests in understanding the nature of its unique “parts” and sub-systems and how they function within the overall system. Therefore, modern science sees the universe as a kind of complex machine and it is the scientists’ job to discover and understand its parts, starting from the simple and moving to the more complex, in order to discover and understand what the machine called “the universe” is and how it works. With this information human beings would eventually learn how to become the “mechanics” of reality.
Next week we will consider how Descartes’ influence transformed Aristotle’s original “Physics” into the modern sciences of the 20th century, eventually leading to Digital Technology, Einstein’s theories of Relativity and the birth of Quantum Mechanics.
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