The Mind-Body Duality Fallacy: A Critique of Descartes

[Music] philosophy builds upon itself theories developed they fold and contort into each other sometimes wilting into dead ends and at other times flowering becoming useful justifying certain politics social movements dispositions Theory always exists in a context never in a vacuum environment in zeitgeist shape ideas and ideas shape history furthermore chancing contingency haunt every maneuver what is good of always and easily been a multitude of other things some by geographical or material fortitude have a platform from which ideas can be promoted certain stages are more fertile than others so am is simply the best of a bunch of bad ideas and all of the product of the whims and contingencies of personality have routine of the structure of the Faculty of the sentiment unfinished because of the call for dinner duty circumstance countless better ideas have been lost to the darkness of disconnected continents and countless thinkers unheard because of their impoverished isolation Descartes was a product of his time he was concerned with preserving the concept of human freedom of a transcendental soul in a world that was looking increasingly like a machine Galileo Newton Bacon and others were discovering laws that moved the universe it was impossible to accept that the human mind was just another machine on top of their steak art was publishing in the most liberal country on earth at the time the Netherlands in a Europe increasingly concerned with trade and a larger world his two most important works discourse on method in 1637 and meditations in 1642 are both largely concerned with Cartesian diet the process of being a skeptical of as much as possible so that one can search for certain foundations from which to have a firm undeniable basis for philosophic thought he wanted to push doubt about the world to its limit so as to find a first philosophy building blocks on which more ideas can be built he began by dieting his senses can I be skeptical that I'm sat here in front of the fire yes because I dreamt that I've been in front of a fire before moreover I'm aware that people have hallucinations or can go mad and deceive themselves he also thought a demon could be deceiving him making him think that 2+2 is 5 but what can't be dieted he thought is that there has to be an eye to be dreaming or to be deceived he wrote whilst i thus wished to think that all was false it was absolutely necessary that i who thus thought should be somewhat and as i observed this truth I think therefore I am cogito ergo sum was so certain of such evidence that no ground of diet however extravagant could be alleged by the skeptics capable of shaking it I concluded that I might without scruple accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search that conclusion I think therefore I am is one of the most well known philosophical phrases in the West it's been referred to so often in philosophy that it's the basis of much liberal thought that puts emphasis on the free thinking eye at the center of theory 300 years later philosopher Gio Toulouse wrote that what makes Descartes a philosopher is that he makes use of that saying in order to erect an image of thoughts as it is in principle this I separate from and superior to the physical world around it meant that the body and mind was split it privileged the mind as the site of individual rationality many philosophers have been critical of Descartes but today that mind-body jollity has become harder to defend with the onset of modern science neuroscientist Antonio Damasio laid out the case in neuro scientifically in the influential Descartes Serra in 1994 body and mind are one and the same the split is an illusion demacia writes that nature appears to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation but so from it and with it the idea that the eye is singular coherent and unified also has subtle ramifications Descartes wrote that there is a great difference between the mind and the body and as much as the body is by its very nature always divisible while the mind is utterly indivisible for when I consider the mind or myself insofar as I am merely a thinking thing I'm unable to distinguish any parts within myself I understand myself to be something quite single and complete by contrast there is no corporeal or extended thing that I can think of which in my thoughts I cannot easily divide into parts and this very fact makes me understand that it is divisible this one arguments would be enough to show me that the mind is completely different from the body compare this to Proust I was not one man only but the steady advance hour after hour of an army in close formation in which there appeared according to the moments impassioned men in different men jealous men in a composite mass these elements may one by one without our noticing it be replaced by others which others again eliminates or reinforce until in the end a change has been brought about which it would be impossible to conceive if we were a single person much of the time philosophy is the search for universals or more simply as de leurs point sites of everybody knows I think therefore I am everybody knows what it is to think and everybody knows what it is to be but is that true does everybody know what it is to think and to be for everybody else or is the eye dependent on object to focus on for it to think at all even the eye doing thinking is an object of contemplation when the eye that does the thinking takes an object for consideration it recognizes it through the use of its faculties its perception memory imagination understanding all these things precede the eye I think Proust is widely considered to be the greatest novelist to have ever lived largely because he had an innate feeling of this priest's novel in search of lost time as Nabokov raped is the transmutation of sensation into sentiments the ebb tide of memory waves of emotions such as desire jealousy an artistic euphoria people then don't exist in a vacuum with a product of an unfathomable an extra bull stream of sensations from both our own body our own organs and the environments around us most of which were unconscious of what makes us the single free eye even if you keep freewill in the picture seems almost inconsequential compared to the mountain it's built upon this is why social theory must have priority Daniel Dennett's pointed out that the mind-body chirality reaches out of academia and into everyday speech these athletes are prepared both mentally and physically or there's nothing wrong with your body it's all in the mind and Yonder Voss argues that even with MRI scans scans that seemingly isolate the eye neuroscientists can't help but resort to the history of psychology sociology anthropology to explain what's being scanned in other words a scan of the brain doing something without considering the eyes the nose the environment something to desire to need is rudderless that scan needs a history to live in for us to understand it all of this isn't to say that the purely empiricist view of the eye is correct either only that the truth is going to come from a thorough engagement with the idea that both must be in some way connected and two sides of the same coin the day carting can bolster the individualism of the West as influenced thought that focuses on that individual and on what the individual is capable of his faculties is intellect and to great accomplishment so the consequences of emphasizing that I am philosophy since Descartes have been fruitful but what have we also lost we face a certain loss of progress conceptually when we lack the pushed what's understanding the social patterns ward's discourse in the years since Foucault has somewhat served to rectify this what if Descartes in Kant had come to different conclusions what if they theorized that we're as much a product of the forces outside of us as much determined as we are free problems might have been solved differently the way we think of blame and responsibility might work more effectively prison systems schools might be different in some way some fear that we'll lose moral culpability and self responsibility but I don't think this is the case when we value our actions and the power of our words more if we acknowledge their communal social effect how we're all moved by similar phenomena we might have better ways of talking about press culpability about freedom of speech but how corporations have a particularly acute influence over us and are not just a conglomeration of individuals that still have individual rights we might live in a world with a more sophisticated understanding of collective power communal good and shared responsibility if you like these videos I need your help and here's my request if you think you get the same value from four of these videos as you do from just one cup of coffee then please consider pledging 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Channel: Then & Now

Views: 25,169

Keywords: Then & Now, Then and Now, History, Philosophy, Politics, mind-body duality, mind-body fallacy, descartes introduction, descartes critique, deleuze, difference and repetition, antonio damasio, descartes error, affect theory, proust, involuntary memory, in search of lost time, proustian

Id: gsUbpQKHZBE

Length: 10min 29sec (629 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 22 2019