Lecture Scribe for
Mind Body Dualism(Descartes)
Sarthak Pattanayak(14606)
7th November, 2016
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CWU1V4yJHc
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Introduction
Mind-Body dualism is also known as Cartesian Dualism, named after one of the greatest mathematician and philosopher of France, Rene Descartes. This field was widely
explored by Descartes, not motivated by religious or ethical concerns but rather inspired by his curiosity.Mind-Body dualism, in philosophy, any theory that mind and
body are distinct kinds of substances or natures. This position implies that mind and
body not only differ in meaning but refer to different kinds of entities.
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Brief Summary of Mind-Body dualism
Descartes identifies a person with the self(mind) rather than ones body.Mind-Body
dualism is defined as: ”The body is a physical substance, a machine, while the mind
is a non-physical, thinking entity, which inhabits the body and is responsible for its
voluntary movements”. Decartes collapses the entity mind and soul as one. According
to him, mind is the thinking entity which inhabits the body and which makes us who
we are and is responsible for our voluntary actions. Descartes gives the metaphor of
captain and ship to describe the relationship between mind and its respective body. He
also adds that the relationship between mind and body is more intimate then that of
between a captain and his/her ship. Extract from the notes:”I am not merely present
in my body,as a sailor is present in a ship. But I am very closely joined and as in
were intermingled with it. So, that I and the body form a unit. If this were not so, I,
who am nothing but a thinking thing would not feel pain, when the body was hurt,
but will perceive the damage, just as a sailor percieves by sight if his ship is broken”.
So, Descartes is thinking of the mind as the pilot of the body but more intimately. If
something happens to the body, we actually feel it, we don’t perceive it from a distance
as a sailor would for his ship. This is the position that we call mind-body dualism.
Mind is the essence or core of who we are as a person.
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Some Facts about Rene Descartes
• Born in 1596 and died in 1650.
• French philosopher and part of the vanguard of the Scientific Revolution. Issac
Newton was also one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution.
• Pioneer in the field of Optics.
• Created Analytic(Coordinate) Geometry.
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Scientific Arguments for the theory
• Arguments from the nature of matter:
To understand this, we need to understand the modern concept of physicality
and to do so we need to understand the pre-modern views of physicality, which
goes back to the Ancient Greece and the philosophical science of Aristotle, the
Greek philosopher. The Ancient Greeks had a qualitative view of the world ,i.e.
they described and understood physicality in qualitative terms. According to the
modern view, physicality is described and understood in terms of quantity rather
than quality. So, one can say the modern view is a kind of quantitative view of
the physical world. The Ancient Greeks had, what we would call, an elemental
view of nature. They thought that physical substances were ultimately made
up of number of simple elements - Earth, Water, Fire & Air. According to
them these elements have a place on this universe like Earth is below us, Air is
above us, Water is in between Air and Earth & Fire lies in between all of them.
So, to explain the movement of a substance, what they did was to find out
the main element in the substance and explain its movement using the natural
movement of the elements to their pre-dominant places in the universe. For
example, How do you explain a rock falling down? Its simple. The dominant
element in the rock is Earth. Earth’s place is below and hence it goes down
when it is left unrestrained. Similarly, it can be explained, why hot air balloon
goes up when left unrestrained. Such explanations are commonly known as
teleological explanations. This word comes from the Greek word ”Telos” which
means purpose or function. And a teleological explanation is an explanation
in terms of purposes or functions. There has been a remarkably huge change
in the scientific views as time has progressed. The views of physicality which
were qualitative in the ancient era, now has become completely quantitative
one. Physical objects are defined in modern science in terms of mathematically
quantifiable magnitudes. We are going to discuss the three qualities which make
up a physical object as it is understood in Physics of modern era. The first is
Mass , a substance’s substantiality. The second is volume, which is the amount
of space occupied by the physical object. And then there is motion, the fact that
a physical object can move or change positions. The main question is how Mind
fits into this whole explanation? Actually mind and its thoughts don’t seem to
have these characteristics. In turn they have characteristics which seem to defy
the understanding of physicality that prevailed the Descartes’ time. According
to Descartes, the mind is actually not a physical object as it does not have the
properties that a physical object must have. So, it is fundamentally different
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from our body which displays all signs of being a physical object.
Weaknesses of these arguments:
– These arguments are outdated and are not the arguments that are compelling at this date.
– Materialist notion of physicality in all the given arguments. For Descartes,
physical means material. Today we would not identify physicality with
materiality. We know that matter is convertible to energy and vice-versa
according to the famous Einstein equation E = mc2 . So, there exists a
physicality, that is energy, that does not have mass and does not take up
space.
– If we proceed with our present understanding and scientific views, then we
would surely dismiss Descartes’ explanation for Mind-Body dualism.
• Arguments from the comparision of human beings with animals and
machines.(will be taught in the next lecture).
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Conclusion
Even if we would reject Descartes’ notion of Mind-Body dualism, I would like to suggest
that there is value in understanding historical ideas even if they are outdated, because
they are of course the road map to our contemporary ideas. Without this scientific
revolution, we would not have had the second scientific revolution that we had in the
20th Century with Relativity and Quantum mechanics.
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