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(These are excerpts from, or extensions to, the material published in my book "The Nature of Consciousness") Dualism And The Mind-Body Debate Rene Descartes; David Hume Historically, two main schools
of thought have antagonized each other: “dualism“ and “monism“. According to dualism, mind
and body are made of two different substances. The first and most famous of
dualists was the French philosopher Rene` Descartes (17th century),
who is credited as starting the whole “mind-body debate”. He observed that
reality is divided into matter and spirit. These are two different worlds, made
of two different substances. He defined what matter is and what mind is: matter
is whatever exhibits the property of "extension" (geometric
properties such as "size", "shape", etc.) and mind is…
"cogito", i.e. thought (a more scientific definition of mind will
come later from Franz Brentano). "Res extensa" (things that have an
extension) and "res cogitans" (things that think) belong to two separate realms, and cannot be
studied with the same tools. This dualism had an enormous influence on future
generations. Newton's Physics, for example, is a direct consequence of that
approach: Physics studies the realm of matter, and only deals with matter. And
such it will remain until the end of the 20th century. Descartes' dualism was a
departure from Aristotle's dualism that had ruled for centuries. Aristotle
divided things into living and nonliving. Living beings behaved differently and
therefore required a different treatment.
Descartes realized that living and nonliving matter are, ultimately, the
same matter, that obeys the same physical laws. There is "one"
physical world for everything. Living matter appears to "behave" because
it is more complex. In reality, animals are mechanical automata. The real distinction is at the level of
thought. Some beings (and, for Descartes, it was only humans) can think. The
difference is not between living and nonliving matter, which are ultimately the
same substance, but between matter and mind, which are two different
substances. In a sense, Aristotle's
philosophy was centered on life, whereas Descartes' philosophy was centered on
man. (It would take three centuries to
resurrect the idea that animals, too, may have a mind, and therefore return to
Aristotle). Descartes also understood
that the brain was the seat of the body-mind interaction, although he couldn't
quite explain it. The 18th century British
philosopher David Hume was a dualist too, but he pointed out that
"mind" is really a set of "perceptions". The self is an
illusion. The mind is simply a theater where perceptions play their part in
rapid succession, often intersect and combine.
The self is like a republic, whose members have an independent life but
are united by a common constitution: the republic is one, even if the members
(and maybe even their individual constitutions) are continuously changing. The identity of the republic is provided not
by its contents, that are continuously fluctuating, but by the causal
relationship that holds its members together. (Edited in 2013 by Sean Champagne from Piero Scaruffi's book and subsequent revisions) |
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