Descarte Lec for Posting PDF

From Cartesian minds to bat minds Here we go!  Lecture Game Plan Extra credit: survey info And an attendance question! Why are we reading (very old) philosophy texts in week one of a course on the brain and mental health? Getting down to it: Descartes’ Meditations – context and a...

From Cartesian minds to bat minds Here we go!  Lecture Game Plan Extra credit: survey info And an attendance question! Why are we reading (very old) philosophy texts in week one of a course on the brain and mental health? Getting down to it: Descartes’ Meditations – context and aims of this text Closer look at Meditations I and II (and a quick account of Med. VI) Bats: what is it like to be one?  Research Survey Participation (entirely optional – 3 pts extra credit) If you volunteer to participate in this study, the researcher will ask you to do the following: Complete 2 surveys, one at the start of the quarter and one at the end. You will receive a small amount of course credit or extra credit upon survey completion, but credit is not linked to how you respond. You may also opt-out of your responses being used in the research study when you take the survey and still receive credit. How long will the research last and what will I need to do? Participation will take a total of about 30-40 minutes (approximately 15-20 minutes spread across 2 course surveys), once at the start of the quarter and once at the end. Attendance question! (See ungraded survey on our website in the “quiz” section) What is Dr Gibbons’ dog’s name??  Philosophy? You’re already doing it… Questions we have all likely pondered: Why not cheat on a test if you could get away with it? Should I eat (specified, non-human) animals? What happens to me after my (bodily) death? Do we have free will? Maybe I’m just dreaming all this?  Karl Jaspers: living our philosophies “The image of the human being that we hold to be true becomes itself a factor in our lives. It determines the ways in which we deal with ourselves and with other people, it determines our attitude in life and our choice of tasks." (Cited in Thomas Fuchs, In Defense of the Human Being (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)  Descartes and the modern “image of the human being” René Descartes: 1596- 1650 Regarded as one of most important philosophers of all time and the “father” of modern philosophy Inventor of analytic (coordinate) geometry Central figure in the scientific revolution overturning qualitative Aristotelean physics in favor of a mathematically-based physics Looking for more powerful form of explanation of natural phenomena– a mechanistic view of “matter in motion”  The “old science”? …Goes all the way back to Aristotle… Aristotle explains physical change in terms of what makes things what they are - their form or their “nature.” Heavy bodies fall because they possess the form of heaviness, and it is in their nature to fall (while light bodies move up bc it is in their nature). A pan gets hot on a fire because the fire has the form of heat that it transfers to the pan.  “New science” Descartes (and “new” science) wants to avoid explaining heat in terms of heat. Seeks an account of the mechanism of the transfer of heat independent of the notion of heat. Heat is the kinetic energy of vibrating and colliding atoms transferred between systems. Allows for precise, determinate laws of nature appealing to quantifiable features of matter in motion (extension, shape, size, position, and motion) No longer requires the senses to be taken at face value So, heat is understandable apart from how it feels  Descartes’ goals in The Meditations (1641) Implicit goal: establish the foundations of the new physics on the basis of math and geometry Explicit goal #1: prove the existence of God Explicit goal #2: prove that the soul is distinct from the body (perhaps to secure the immortality of the soul)  Meditation I, first sentence: “Some years ago, I was struck by how many false things I had believed, and by how doubtful was the structure of beliefs that I had based on them."  Does this connect to your experience? Can you think of any falsehoods you believed in your childhood (or more recently)? Do you recall the source of these falsehoods? Did those false beliefs cause you to doubt the whole “structure of beliefs that (you) had based on them”?  How should we deal with unreliable beliefs? Descartes’ analogy (in his Reply to Bordin): treat questionable beliefs like rotten apples (along with some good ones) in a barrel In Med I, he proposes the building metaphor - cut the (shoddy) building’s foundations out from under it, and the edifice collapses. Good news: Can rebuild on a secure foundation!  Task: investigate the reliability of whole categories of belief Impossible to check out ALL your beliefs! Find the principles on which you based them, and reject whole groups that depend on unreliable principles.  Steps into skepticism My senses occasionally deceive me, especially when things are small or far away (so, let’s bracket our belief in the perception of small, distant things for now). But can I doubt that I am sitting here, now? That I feel this fire? That I see my hands? Yes! I could be dreaming. But maybe I can tell sleep from waking. Maybe I can’t! (Have you ever had dreams you had to tell yourself after weren’t real?)  Steps into radical doubt, cont. Maybe I can be certain that objects exist extended in space (even if I know little else about them)? But what if NONE OF IT exists because God is deceiving me? You say God’s goodness prevents this gross deception. But if that’s so, why does God allow me ever to be deceived? We end the meditation imagining the worst: there is an evil demon doing their utmost to deceive me. … And that’s not so different from The Matrix, is it? How is this going for you?  Meditation II – first two sentences “Yesterday’s meditation has hurled me into doubts so great that I can neither ignore them nor think my way out of them. I am in turmoil, as if I have accidentally fallen into a whirlpool and can neither touch bottom nor swim to the safety of the surface.” What should we do with this radical doubt? Embrace it!  One thing remains certain, even when I’m being deceived at every turn! Even if I doubt the truth of everything I think I know, is there NOTHING I can be certain of? It seems that even doubting everything, there is one thing I can still know…  “I am, I exist” (Elsewhere: Cogito, ergo sum) “But there is a supremely powerful and cunning deceiver who deliberately deceives me all the time! Even then, if he is deceiving me, I undoubtedly exist: let him deceive me all he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing while I think I am something. So, after thoroughly thinking the matter through I conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, must be true whenever I assert it or think it.” (Med II, para 4)  What is this “I” that thinks? “Thinking? At last I have discovered it – thought! This is the one thing that can’t be separated from me. I am, I exist – that is certain. … Strictly speaking, then, I am simply a thing that thinks – a mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or reason, these being words whose meaning I have only just come to know. Still, I am a real, existing thing. What kind of a thing? I have answered that: a thinking thing.” (Med II, para 8) Getting clearer about the nature of the mind (and primacy of the intellect over the sense and imagination)  Descartes’ “wax example” Transforming wax by heating: From a cold, solid, fragrant, yellow ball that makes a noise when you knock on it To a warm, liquid, odorless, clear state (that can’t produce a sound) Challenge: if this is STILL WAX in varying states that are utterly unlike each other in appearance, then my senses are not giving me clear and distinct knowledge of what wax really is. Conclusion from reflections on wax: privileging reason (intellect) over sense perception and imagination “This wax that is perceived by the mind alone is, of course, the same wax that I see, touch, and picture in my imagination – in short, the same wax I thought it to be from the start. But although my perception of it seemed to be a case of vision and touch and imagination, it isn’t so, and it never was. Rather, it is purely a perception by the mind alone – formerly an imperfect and confused one, but now clear and distinct because I am now concentrating carefully on what the wax consists in.”  Life in a Cartesian world (at end of Med II) What can we know with 100% certainty? What is our relationship to the external world and to our senses? What is our relationship to other people?  Meditation VI key conclusions: bringing the external world back (including people!) Descartes did not intend our meditator to live in radical skepticism forever. In Meds III and V, RD offers arguments to prove the existence of a (benevolent and omnipotent) God – a God who is no deceiver. By Med VI, Descartes reassures his reader that we can believe that the external world exists and that we can know it – - because if my “great propensity” to believe in such a world was false, God  Take-aways from Meditations Cartesian dualism is a SUBSTANCE DUALISM Immaterial mind is totally distinct from but nevertheless INTERACTS with material body How? Through the pineal gland…(?) How does that work?? Because mind and body are totally distinct things, the mind can continue to exist after the body perishes.  Descartes’ Legacy? Descartes’ splitting the immaterial mind from the material world and body reshapes our relationship to self and world: Grasping the material world (and one’s own body) as mere extension means that we treat both the world and our body mechanistically – as if you are an uninvolved observer. Demote the senses, imagination, and feeling in privileging the intellect or understanding Triumph of mechanistic account of the natural world opens door to vast technological achievements Withdrawing meaning and moral order from the world (its “disenchantment”) risks existential crisis of meaning and instrumentalizing our relationship to it  Shifting gears (and centuries) Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” 1974  First sentence: “Consciousness is what makes the mind- body problem really intractable.”  So, what is conscious experience? Nagel: “The fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism. …(A)n organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something it is like for the organism.” (WIILTBAB, 436)  Against reductive accounts of consciousness Reductionists assume the mind “just is” the brain (or mental states “just are” brain states) in the way that water “just is” H2O When I want to understand the properties of water, I can abstract from how it seems to me and show how its molecular structure explains its properties (liquidity, freezing, boiling, evaporating, etc).  What does Nagel think reductionist physicalism misses? When science abstracts from the subjective experience – the “seeming” - it eliminates the very thing we are trying to account for when we want to understand consciousness. What it’s like – from the inside – - to be Bill (or a bat) The first-person, subjective point of view.  Can we know what it’s like to be a bat (or a dog)? Bat experience is very different from our own: Echolocation via high-pitched screeching; Flying; Hanging upside down to sleep in caves, barns, attics, etc. Dogs: Pick up stuff with their mouths; Nose located close to the ground, so learn about lots of things via odor Bark at that “other” dog in the window  Getting inside bat subjectivity? Try: Pretending to be a bat? Or transforming into a bat by degrees?  Cartesian split? “For if the facts of experience – facts about what it is like for the experiencing organism – are accessible only from one point of view, then it is a mystery how the true character of experiences could be revealed in the physical operation of that organism. The latter is a domain of objective facts par excellence – the kind that can be observed and understood from many points of view and by individuals with differing perceptual systems.” (WIILTBAB 442) Mary, the super-duper color scientist Frank Jackson’s thought experiment