The second set of objections to Descartes' Meditations

Mersenne gets right to it, and his first objection is to demand how D knows, at that point in his exposition (meditation 2) where he rejects the existence of bodies, that he has not rejected his own existence?

How does he know, at that point or at all, that a thinking thing is not a body, that each of its actions - thoughts or perhaps "thinkings" - is not nothing but a movement of bodies or parts of his body?

Car comment prouvez-vous qu'un corps ne peut penser, ou que des mouvements corporels ne sont point la pensee meme?

Indeed, how does he know, asks M, that it is not the brain that, by its movements, does the thinking?

D replies correctly that he doesn't actually address that question until the 6th meditation, though he concedes the possibility in the 2nd that he, a thing that thinks, is a body.

And he continues, beginning by quoting himself from the 6th meditation,

"C'est assez que je puisse clairement et distinctement concevoir une chose sans une autre pour être certain que l'une est distincte ou différente de l'autre", etc.

Et un peu apres: 

"Encore que j'aie un corps qui me soit fort etroitement conjoint, neanmoins, parce que, d'un cote, j'ai une claire et distincte idée de moi-meme en tant que je suis seulement une chose qui pense et non étendue, et que d'une autre j'ai une claire et distincte idée du corps en tant qu'il est seulement une chose étendue et qui ne pense point, il est certain que moi, c'est-a-dire mon esprit ou mon âme, par laquelle je suis ce que je suis, est entièrement et véritablement distincte de mon corps, et qu'elle peut être ou exister sans lui".

A quoi il est aisé d'ajouter:

"Tout ce qui peut penser est esprit ou s'appelle esprit."

Mais, puisque le corps et l'esprit sont réellement distinctes, nul corps n'est esprit: donc nul corps ne peut penser.

And then the challenge:

Et, certes, je ne vois rien en cela que vous puissiez nier; car nierez-vous qu'il suffit que nous concevions clairement une chose sans une autre pour savoir qu'elles sont réellement distinctes?

Donnez-nous donc quelque signe plus certain de la distinction reelle, si toutefois on en peut donner aucune.

D considers one might insist on experience as the test whether things can really exist apart and replies it can fail both when the same thing, appearing differently, seems to be two things existing apart in fact and when two things, always experienced together in fact, are on that account mistaken for inseparable.

But this is lame.

The challenge stands.

How can we say what is or what is not, though not actual in our experience -  or anyone's so far as is known -, metaphysically possible?

He seems to believe there is no real alternative and moves on to the next of Mersenne's issues.

Perhaps we should revisit D's discussion of substance and attribute in the 6th meditation, raised in just this connection?

Clear and distinct, obscure or confused

Crucial to the Cartesian epistemology.

So what are they?

Bluff?

Anyway.

The 3rd meditation, among other things, advances 2 proofs of the existence of God of which the first is the more novel, though both rely on the principle that the whole cause of something must contain "objectively or eminently" as much reality as its effect.

The 4th meditation echoes ancient skeptical themes about schooling oneself to withhold judgement regarding what is uncertain lest we believe what is false.

The 5th contains a defense of the ontological proof and claims knowledge of God's existence and veracity are foundational to the sciences, licensing continued confidence in things whose clear and distinct proofs are recalled but no longer before our minds.

Still a circle.

There are many nods to Plato in the Meditations, including reference to the doctrine of reminiscence which D does not literally accept and reference to the immutable and eternal essence of the triangle which he does literally espouse.

Elsewhere I have read that Schoolmen reconciled Platonic realism with Aristotelian conceptualism by locating the Ideas as concepts in God's mind.

D is absolutely drenched in scholastic learning.

Med 6. The argument that we cannot imagine a chiliagon - or its thousand sides - is bogus.

I can't perceive the difference between a chiliagon and a myriagon.

Does that mean I can't perceive either?

That we cannot perceive their sides?

No.

The famous possibility argument:

[B]ecause I know that all things which I apprehend clearly and distinctly can be created by God as I apprehend them, it suffices that I am able to apprehend one thing apart from another clearly and distinctly in order to be certain that the one is different from the other . . . .

[J]ust because I know certainly that I exist, and that meanwhile I do not remark that any other thing necessarily pertains to my nature or essence, excepting that I am a thinking thing, I rightly conclude that my essence consists solely in the fact that I am a thinking thing. . . .

[B]ecause, on the one side, I have a clear and distinct idea of myself inasmuch as I am only a thinking and unextended thing, and as, on the other, I possess a distinct idea of body, inasmuch as it is only an extended and unthinking thing, it is certain that this I [that is to say, my soul, by which I am what I am], is entirely and absolutely distinct from my body, and can exist without it.

Interpersonal comparisons of utility

Forever denigrated as impossible, such comparisons of intensity of desire, preference, or pleasure must surely be possible if the most abject materialism is true, or reliable correlations between whatever on the side of matter passes for these things and these things as felt or as impinging on the human mind are available, at least in principle.

And materialism is all the less plausible as such correlations are all the more doubtful.

Or, anyway, doubtful in principle.

The possibility argument

Suppose it is true that if the soul is possibly immaterial it is necessarily so.

Still, there seems to be an equivocation between the soul being conceivably immaterial and it being possibly so.

There is a difference between epistemic and objective possibility.

The former may reflect crucial ignorance that, if remedied, would both preclude it and exclude the latter.

If the case may be such then to invoke the former to prove the latter is begging the question.

But it may be replied that the alleged difference pertains to a posteriori possibility - physical, psychological, or technical possibility, say, - of the bounds of which one may well be ignorant.

But metaphysical possibility, a priori possibility, which is what is at issue here?

Really?

Agent causation

Suppose the brain is the Ego, the mind, the soul, the intellect, the self, that mental events are distinct from physical events, and non-redundant interactionism is true (think philosophical swerve).

Then in a case of interaction we can think of physical events as input and other physical events as output that the input physical events do not themselves cause; they are caused by intervening mental events, singly or in chains or in complexes, that themselves originate with the input physical events.

If a particular physical brain event as input causes a particular thinking event, do thinking events ever cause such physical brain events as output?

Are thinking events correlated with physical brain events in such wise that the occurrence of either causes the other?

Are any of those that seem to be voluntary choices not caused by preceding events, physical or mental, but instead simply by the self?

Update, 12292015.

The above supposed that the physical and mental events in question are distinct from one another.

But what if all mental events are also physical events?

Like this?

Then the picture is slightly different from the more or less basic interactionism of the above.

Factors in the mind/body mix

Dualisms, Cartesian and not

Substance (aka "Cartesian") dualism: being a mind and being a body are logically distinct properties of individuals which cannot be exemplified together.

Locke dissented, wondering why the same thing could not be both a mind and a body.

Event dualism 1: There are mental events and physical events but no event is both.

Event dualism 2: All events are physical events but some are also mental events

The unity of apperception (UA)

Multiple mental events may happen to the same mind, subject, or Ego.

In that case they are all thoughts, desires, sensations, or whatever of the same mind, subject, or Ego; it is the same "I" that "thinks" them all.

This rejects the "bundle theory" of mind that originated with Hume and is popular with some contemporary philosophers of mind.

Event identity (EI)

If event A = event B they happen to, involve, or relate all the same subjects, objects, or entities.

This seems an uncontroversial extension of the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals,

C From EI: No physical event in anyone's brain can be the same event as any mental event occurring in his - or anyone's - mind.

Event dualism 2 is not true.

[Update 12292015. C now seems to me not at all plausible.

Event dualism 2 seems a real and even attractive possibility.]

Event dualism 1 does not exclude substance dualism.

But neither does it entail it.

The brain could be the Ego.

Dualism (Stanford) lucidly covers a lot of ground.

PS.

Identity criteria for events vary.

For example, Events.

Nature does nothing in vain

That is a maxim of the Schoolmen the moderns have carried over into the theory of evolution.

If over millions of years animals become more intelligent, more foresightful, more canny, these things must help.

But if the emergent view is right this should close the deal, should it not, for interactionism over epiphenomenalism?

Else natural selection would have no grip on these things but only on their physical causes, leaving the existence of these mental phenomena themselves wholly useless decor like fins on a 1960 Ford Galaxy.

Not impossible, no, any more than the Tooth Fairy.

But no better a fit, either, in the world as we otherwise know it.

Or think we do. 

So, interactionism, then?

That excludes physicalistic determinism but not psychological, the determination of one's choices by one's unchosen nature, character, and dispositions.

And certainly not logical.

And it entails, I think, philosophical swerve, in the sense of departures from or violations of purely physical, or chemical, or physio-chemical laws, as I think C. D. Broad pointed out so long ago.

Captain Kirk and the transporter malfunction

Kirk enters the Enterprise transporter room to be sent to the Excalibur.

The machine does its thing and he appears in the Excalibur and walks off to join Scotty for lunch.

But after the machine in the Enterprise does its thing the Captain is still there, standing in the machine in the transporter room.

So there are two guys walking around in different starships, each purporting to be Kirk.

But which is Captain Kirk?

Why, the first guy, if either.

How many times have Kirk-successors let themselves be murdered and replaced in this process?

The real Kirk only did it once.

For the hardware view of personal identity, and against the software view.

The lesson of subjectivity

If you are a brain in a vat, does that matter?

Neo had a chance to destroy the Matrix and did not.

He just made human life within it more fun for lovers of comic book heroes with superhuman powers.

Of course, experience could be more deceptive even than that.

Berkeley.

Solipsism.

Hume.

The Skeptics, said Voltaire, are not a sect of philosophers but a sect of liars.

Voltaire, like Moore, was unable to accept that the world of our experience is certainly a lie, certainly a merely virtual world.

Or that our belief that it connects to, perhaps represents, an objective, somehow material, real world including other minds - minds of others, at least humans, with whom we are of a kind and communicate - is mere animal faith.

An animal faith for which, at its most uncorrupted, the ray of vision reaches out from our eyes and sees the objects that comprise the world where they are and, generally, as they are.

And among them are other people whose perception of the physical, objective world we all inhabit is as direct and veridical as our own.

But Hume himself provided the answer before the comics.

We can know our faith for what it is.

It is possible to disbelieve its every article and yet jump into life with all the practical, "as if" faith of the faithless Neo, who knows it's all illusion.

Though the suggestion would certainly freak out those most dogmatic of  physicalists and pig-headed of philistines, the enlightened, atheist liberals of America, for undermining morals and weakening resistance to Christianity.

"Captain Kirk, is that you?"

Apparently, Kirk materializes and steps out of the transporter.

Spock, unable to see, asks the question.

If you think the answer might be yes you are ready for practical immortality.

Just saw an old Schwarzenegger movie, The 6th Day.

Close enough?

Platonist materialism?

Sentient meat?

Meat and electricity?

Very well.

So much for the res cogitans.

But abstracta, appearances, and the phenomenal realm remain.

Indeed, the world of matter and energy, of space and science, remains a mere posited noumenon, dependent on the categories of human thought, the scope of human imagination, and the material of human, sensuous intuition.

And yet, we suppose there is trans-phenomenal reality.

Unity of apperception

"The 'I think' must accompany all my representations."

Years later, it was discovered that transporter beams had been a Starfleet hoax.

The transporter machine in the Enterprise into which he stepped destroyed Captain Kirk instantly, disintegrating his body to atomic dust to be swept up by that evening's housekeepers and flushed out into space.

The machine in the next starship, ostensibly his destination, simply assembled an entirely new Kirk who would step away believing he had just moments ago finished lunch in an Enterprise snack bar.

What if the unity of apperception is just a mistake and there is no single, continuing 'I' - no me - that is the thinker of all "my" thoughts?

Meat and electricity.

Meat and electricity.

“The brain is just meat and electricity. How does that account for consciousness?”

So says Gloria Verrano, the Medical Examiner on Haven, over-playing her hand and using a common argument for property dualism as a basis for substance dualism and “universalist” – as opposed to Haven-specific – notions of life after death.

One argument intended to take us past emergence and property dualism is that neither “meat and electricity” nor any material basis can explain the unity of apperception.

For that, only the radical unity of the res cogitans could suffice.

But supposing meat and electricity in fact account for my representations being all mine and none of them yours, perhaps some failure in the meat – or the electricity – accounts for multiple personalities.

That kind of multiplicity seems a lot more plausible in that case. 

The dead are their bodies

They are no more when their bodies are no more.

Before that they are dead but they are not gone; they still exist.

They are not even irreparably dead, save relative to our inability to revive them.

And that can change.

Over the course of time, as medical technology progresses, the boundary is pushed back between what we can fix and what is beyond repair.

Grid willing, that will continue.

Who knows how long or how far?

Everything goes as though .  .  .  .  .

When death is we are not

So says Epicurus, explaining why death is nothing to us.

But no modern materialist accepts that.

The broken toaster - or computer - still exists, as does the dead man.

But his central point seems right, anyway, that life on the whole and consciousness in particular cease when we die.

The dead have no pain, do not suffer, have no regrets, feel no loss, etc.

In traditional societies in which souls are believed in it is said of the dead that they "are gone."

Those skeptical that there was anywhere to go tend to say they are no more, that they no longer exist.

But if we think of life and consciousness as properties - or perhaps better as activities or functions, or congeries of activities and/or functions - of our bodies and our nervous systems we will think that he who has died has stopped, and not that he has gone somewhere or ceased to exist.

Like a computer that has crashed or some other sort of machine that, for whatever reason and whether permanently or not, has stopped working.

Eventually, as medical science progresses, we may find ourselves able to resuscitate - the temptation to say "reanimate" will pass - the dead in more and more circumstances, after greater delays and worse damage.

We may see this start to happen long before medical science, or genetics, or what-you-will has progressed to the point of, say, as much as doubling the human life-span - assuming we are ever able to very much stretch out our duration.

At first, many in our culture will want to simply change the medical definition of death so as not to face the truth: it will have become possible for someone to die, be clearly and indisputably dead for some length of time, and then be raised from the dead.

The very same person in the very same body, so to speak, not still alive but undeniably alive again.

Admitting any such thing would fly in the face of specific beliefs that have been integral to Christianity since its beginning.

Religions that teach reincarnation will find such a development less of a shock to their traditions and dogmas.

They will just decide it's a case of reincarnation of the same soul in the same body.

But Christianity?

Another hammer blow to its popular credibility from advancing science.

What are you, anyway?

Three notions are regularly played with in popular, mid-level, and higher, academic culture.

1.     In the tradition of Plato and Descartes, you are your soul and your soul = your mind = your spirit = your intellect, a single non-material whatnot existing continuously over a span of time.

2.     In the tradition of Locke, anything that has your memories and your mental traits is you, though these change in varying degrees over time, anyway.

3.     In the materialist tradition, your body or at any rate your central nervous system is you.

As to the first, think Being Human.

As to the second, think Oblivion, Warehouse 13, or Eureka.

[And note that, for the attentive, Oblivion at least contains the refutation of this conception of personal identity.]

As to the third . . . . well, maybe you don’t see that a lot, in pop culture.

Can’t think of anything just now, anyway.

But that’s certainly the idea behind efforts to cryogenically preserve dead bodies until the day medical science is able to restore them to life.

Cryonics

Restore whom to life?

Why, himself, of course. Whosever body that is.

For any variant of materialism, a dead person is a dead body, and the latter is like a broken toaster.

Depending on how bad things are and on the available skills and resources, sometimes a toaster can be fixed and become fully functional, again.

A witty science fiction writer could make a very amusing Whozzat? story with such ingredients, playing these ideas off against each other.

As to materialism, the eliminative kind has the virtue of doing frankly what the reductive variety does surreptitiously.

That is, they both deny the data (pun intended) of experience.

Experience adverbial?

Some people claim the truth is more like this, that you see the water bluely.

And more generally you don’t see something that is blue.

That never happens.

Instead, you just see something bluely.

What if there is nothing to see?

The brain in the vat?

Well, they would say, something is going on within it that's like what goes on when one sees something blue(ly).

And that's all that's really happening,

See?

Not very different from the eliminative and reductionist styles of materialism.

In the end, the point is to deny experience.