Noam Chomsky on René Descartes

modern scientific revolution starting with Galileo essentially was aimed to construct a picture of the world that was mechanical an idea that the world was a machine big complicated machine made out of things like levers and gears and so on which essentially could be construct could be constructed in principle by a master artisan of course nobody's smart enough to do it but it had that character kind of thing you could construct like a huge clock or something like that and in fact it was assumed it was constructed by a super partisan you know better than any human artisan but it was a mechanical device that was called the mechanical philosophy but remember philosophy doesn't in science so it was essentially the science of mechanics Descartes was a major figure in advancing and developing the mechanical philosophy the conception of the world is machine the idea was from roughly Galileo lawn to overcome the mystical character of neo scholastic science the reigning physics of the day which held that the world was operated in terms of mystical forces so if say a flower grows from a seed that's because it has a vegetative force and if something falls to the ground that's because that's its natural place and where it wants to be and if two things attract one of each other it's because they have a sympathy and if they repel one another they have an antipathy and if I see a tube let's say rotating in space it's because the physical cue the form of the cube rotating in space Flitz through the air in some fashion and gets into my brain and in my brain there's a cube rotating in space so that's what I see that these are the ID this kinds of conceptions of the physics of the day physics and physiology of the day and the goal of the mechanical philosophy was try to get rid of all that stuff an account forever in terms of strictly mechanical principles that could be understood principles of the principles that we see when we see a machine parts of machine working and try to show that the whole world works like that well Descartes made they made a lot of progress in this he extended the mechanical philosophy to he thought he extended it to the biological world to a good part of human nature so for example probably his most lasting scientific contribution of saloons can really be restated in somewhat different forms today had to do with this theory of vision so he and other scientists the day mocked the idea that the form of a object Flitz through the air and gets into your mind that's pure mysticism it's got to be a mechanical interchange of some kind and he had a theory of light which was mechanical and recognized that the retinal image was on your retina is not the cube rotating in space or let's say if I look at the audience I see people sitting around and so on but that's not the retinal image the retinal image is some complicated two-dimensional display which could be interpreted in all sorts of ways Descartes recognized that what you see must be a construction of the mind has to come from the inside in the terms that were used by later philosophers working on this the sense the sensory organs just provide the occasion for experience which hits the sensory organs provides the occasion for the mind to construct experience using its own internal resources some cognitive powers and times of the day which were understood to be innate they had to be innate cut not agnostic ative hard to say powers properties of the mind which somehow use the occasion of sense to create what you see a tube rotating in space people walking down the street people sitting in front of me whatever it may be this it was also understood as I say that this was innate so for example Descartes was struck by the fact he didn't do the experiments but if he did the experiments that would come out the way he imagined even Galileo didn't do most of the famous experiments he mostly imagined they're flawed experiments some some of them are physically impossible in fact but the the Descartes did a thought experiment which is undoubtedly correct he asked how is it that if you have an infant with who's never seen a triangle let's say and you draw tres if I were to draw a triangle on the blackboard and the infant were to look at it what the infant would perceive is a triangle but in fact what I drew is certainly not a triangle I mean there's some physical thing which could possibly be a triangle I mean maybe two of the lines we didn't quite come together would be curved or whatever so why is it that the infant perceives a triangle maybe a distorted triangle and not a perfect image of exactly what it is why is that the case and it into experiments now you find that is the case well his conclusion was that it must be that the innate structure of the mind is based on principles like those of Euclidian geometry and on the occasion of sense the mind simply constructs a triangle and whatever the sensory object is as seen as some distortion of what the mind construct all of this is and then he had theories of how the sensory image gets into the mind which constructs those things and so on mechanical theories which we wouldn't put in quite those terms today but can be restated in in modern terms with that very dramatic change apart from the mechanisms a lot of it all of this is quite plausible and in fact apparently true in a modern reformulation and modern neurophysiology in perceptual psychology is giving sharper accounts which are roughly at that time they cart pursued this as far as he could he wanted to see how far you could go and giving a hypothetical account of the way the world could be machine up to things like human sensation and perception and he concluded that you could go quite a long way but that some things were left out what was left out primarily was acts of human will which he said are our most noblesse possession the only thing was truly human so he there was a lot of interest in those days in automata just as there is today the automata and that at that time were complicated devices you know that were made by a master artisans and did all sorts of amazing things and the question naturally arose what's the difference between a human an automaton if there is any and they card argued that this is precisely where the difference would lie factor him it was the difference between humans and automata and also between humans and animals which were automata the difference lay in acts of will so in the case of a machine an automaton if you said it sparks in a certain arrangement and you have some external input the machine is compelled to act in a certain fashion as a choice about the matter it could be random it's because these are going to be random or determinant on the other hand if you take a human being and use quarks or internal parts are arranged in a certain way and it has a certain sensory experience it may be as they put it incited and inclined to act in a certain manner but it might but it's not compelled that there's a could act in a different manner so if somebody were to walk up here with you know assault rifle or something and order everyone to stand up and say you know Hitler or something and if you took them seriously not very probable that everybody would do it you'd be incited and inclined to do it but we all know that there is a choice you might decide to get killed let's say because you want to do it and those things are not determined there's no mechanistic determination of that if we know and we know that as well as we know anything at all and that is kind of irreducible phenomenal knowledge experience and Descartes argue that that's the crucial difference between humans and animals insanely we have no reason to doubt that at the moment but anyhow that's the correct Asian argument the most striking example that he offered was in fact language use he pointed out that ordinary use of language and I mean writing poetry or anything just you know telling your friends at a bus stop or whatever ordinary use of language has a kind of creative aspect its unbounded people are always saying the things that we're never heard before and their experience or maybe in human history they don't know that they're knows there's no way of knowing whether a sentence that you just heard is one you've heard before impossible so human ordinary human interchange with language is constantly innovative and productive and unbounded in facts infinite and technical sense on the other hand it's also undetermined so you can't determine what a person's want to say on the basis of the situation that they're in or the arrangement of their internal organs on the other hand it's not random so it's not caused by situations or internal states but it's somehow appropriate to situations it's coherent other people understand that it evokes thoughts and other people which they could have expressed that way themselves say it has a thought and maybe they do have the thought after they hear the expression so these this collection of properties of being unbounded undetermined uncaused but appropriate The Situation's coherent evoking thoughts and others and so on that's a kind of creative aspect of language use and the Descartes argued that that's the striking difference between humans on a conical there was a lot of interest in those days and trying to train in asking whether you could construct an automaton or train an animal or whatever to act the way a human does and they most most with the the experiments turned on they were their work again weren't actually carried out that most experiments in that period even in physics marked carried out it was thought about the experiments turned on this you know so if people will list the kinds of experimental techniques you might try to see if another organ another object that looks like you has a mind like yours and they're mostly language tests based on the creative aspect of language well in order to deal with these apparent facts and we have no reason to doubt that they're facts in fact they seem to be facts in order to deal with that Descartes had a problem you couldn't incorporate this within the mechanical philosophy so it wasn't a matter of gears and levers and so on so he was forced to invent a new principle which is standard science incidentally something isn't explained by the principles you have you construct the new principle the new principle is what he called the mind so alongside of the body which works by mechanical principles there's another principle a kind of creative principle as other properties - which is mine that's the famous Cartesian dualism so there's the world consists of body and special human characteristic mind which distinguishes humans from animals and automata and turns on factors like these and others but primarily these the what was the fate of this doctrine here's where misunderstanding and the fate of this doctrine was should be clearly understood it was overthrown within a generation by Isaac Newton but what Newton showed was that the theory of body was wrong didn't have anything to say about the theory of mind that stayed unchanged Newton showed that the world just isn't a machine it works by mystical forces that was an appalling discovery out they had Newton considered it a total absurdity and to the end of his life tried to overcome it but it was apparently true then the force of attraction is has nothing does not involve contact so I can you know unbelievable as it is move the moon by lifting my arm and that's just the way the world works it has mystical forces as I say Newton was regarded this is a total absurdity who has sharply condemned by the scientists of the day the leading scientists of the day for returning to neo scholastic mysticism with occult forces as they were called that made the world work so uncho that the world couldn't possibly be a machine and these were unintelligible forces we couldn't understand they were mysterious I mean common sense tells us that I can only make something move by touching it being in contact with it in some fashion but Newtonian physics said no that's not true there's a not called force that allows you to make things move and that accounts for the terrestrial motion and planetary motion and the tides and so on and so forth well as I say this is considered a total absurdity but it was apparently true and what it does is demolish the conception of body it demolishes the idea that the world is a machine it isn't it has mystical forces it's common these days to say to ridicule the Cartesian idea would ghosts in the machine the minds ghost inside the machine but that's misunderstanding what was exercised was the machine not the ghost ghost state or what turned out the world was not a machine there are no machines in the sense of our common sense understanding and the mechanical philosophy the physics of the day so that goal was undermine it turns out the world is in Dean unintelligible to us we have to accept the existence of mystical forces we can try to construct develop an understanding of the principles doctrines about them and so on but they're not intelligible to human understanding and the mind stays where it was this these ideas were moral and this was like I said to say a hint of an outrageous discovery Newton tried to overcome it to the end of his days into the well into the 20th century physicists were still trying to construct some kind of mechanical conception of the universe by now that's finally been abandoned totally and people are accustomed to even more mystical emotions like fuels which are mathematical objects but still interact with one another electromagnetic forces a conception of space and time which eliminates any notion of solidity or in fact every fall of common sense is just go on it's not even a not even it's not even considered relevance at this point yes the world is unintelligible to our common sense but that's just the way it is we do the best we can and trying to construct doctrines about

Channel: Chomsky's Philosophy

Views: 205,054

Rating: 4.9094477 out of 5

Keywords: René Descartes, Descartes, Philosophy, Chomsky, Noam Chomsky, Language, Free will, Philosophy of mind, Mind body problem, Mind-body dualism, Dualism, Choice, Thought, Mechanical philosophy, Creativity, Determinacy, Randomness

Id: EVFBABFdLXE

Length: 16min 17sec (977 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2017