According To Descartes, Nonhuman Animals Could Not Experience Pain Because Of What?
Descartes and the Discovery of the Mind-Body Problem
The French philosopher René Descartes is often credited with discovering the mind-body problem, a mystery that haunts philosophers to this mean solar day. The reality is more than complicated than that.
Consider the human body, with everything in it, including internal and external organs and parts — the tummy, nerves and encephalon, arms, legs, eyes, and all the remainder. Even with all this equipment, specially the sensory organs, information technology is surprising that we can consciously perceive things in the world that are far abroad from u.s.a.. For case, I can open my eyes in the morning and run across a loving cup of java waiting for me on the bedside tabular array. There it is, a foot away, and I am not touching information technology, yet somehow information technology is making itself manifest to me. How does it happen that I see it? How does the visual system convey to my awareness or mind the image of the cup of java?
The answer is not particularly simple. Very roughly, the physical story is that calorie-free enters my eyes from the cup of coffee, and this light impinges on the 2 retinas at the backs of the optics. And so, as we have learned from physiological scientific discipline, the two retinas send electrical signals past the optic chiasm down the optic nerve. These signals are conveyed to the then-called visual cortex at the back of the brain. And so there is a sort of a miracle. The visual cortex becomes active, and I run across the coffee loving cup. I am conscious of the cup, we might fifty-fifty say, though it is non clear what this ways and how it differs from saying that I see the loving cup.
One minute there are only neurons firing away, and no epitome of the loving cup of java. The next, there it is; I come across the cup of coffee, a human foot away. How did my neurons contact me or my mind or consciousness, and stamp there the image of the cup of coffee for me?
It's a mystery. That mystery is the listen-body problem.
Our mind-body trouble is not just a difficulty virtually how the heed and body are related and how they bear upon one another. It is also a difficulty about how they can be related and how they can affect one another. Their feature backdrop are very dissimilar, like oil and h2o, which simply won't mix, given what they are.
There is a very mutual view which states that the French philosopher René Descartes discovered, or invented, this problem in the 17th century. Co-ordinate to Descartes, thing is essentially spatial, and information technology has the characteristic properties of linear dimensionality. Things in infinite have a position, at least, and a elevation, a depth, and a length, or one or more of these. Mental entities, on the other mitt, practise not accept these characteristics. We cannot say that a mind is a ii-by-2-by-two-inch cube or a sphere with a two-inch radius, for example, located in a position in infinite inside the skull. This is not considering it has some other shape in space, but because it is not characterized past space at all.
The difficulty is not merely that heed and body are different. It is that they are dissimilar in such a way that their interaction is impossible.
What is characteristic of a heed, Descartes claims, is that information technology is conscious, not that it has shape or consists of physical thing. Unlike the encephalon, which has physical characteristics and occupies infinite, it does non seem to make sense to adhere spatial descriptions to it. In short, our bodies are certainly in space, and our minds are not, in the very straightforward sense that the assignation of linear dimensions and locations to them or to their contents and activities is unintelligible. That this straightforward exam of physicality has survived all the philosophical changes of opinion since Descartes, near unscathed, is remarkable.
This issue aroused considerable interest post-obit the publication of Descartes's 1641 treatise "Meditations on First Philosophy," the first edition of which included both Objections to Descartes, written by a grouping of distinguished contemporaries, and the philosopher's ain Replies. Though nosotros do detect in the "Meditations" itself the distinction between mind and torso, drawn very sharply by Descartes, in fact he makes no mention of our heed-body problem. Descartes is untroubled by the fact that, as he has described them, mind and matter are very unlike: One is spatial and the other not, and therefore one cannot act upon the other. Descartes himself writes in his Reply to ane of the Objections:
The whole problem contained in such questions arises simply from a supposition that is false and cannot in any style be proved, namely that, if the soul and the body are ii substances whose nature is different, this prevents them from being able to human activity on each other.
Descartes is surely correct almost this. The "nature" of a baked Alaska pudding, for instance, is very different from that of a man, since one is a pudding and the other is a human beingness — but the two tin "act on each other" without difficulty, for case when the human being consumes the baked Alaska pudding and the baked Alaska in return gives the man beingness a stomachache.
The difficulty, however, is non merely that mind and body are unlike. Information technology is that they are different in such a manner that their interaction is incommunicable considering it involves a contradiction. It is the nature of bodies to be in space, and the nature of minds not to be in space, Descartes claims. For the two to collaborate, what is not in space must act on what is in space. Action on a body takes identify at a position in infinite, however, where the body is. Apparently Descartes did not come across this problem. It was, however, clearly stated past two of his critics, the philosophers Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and Pierre Gassendi. They pointed out that if the soul is to bear on the body, information technology must make contact with the body, and to do that information technology must be in space and have extension. In that case, the soul is physical, by Descartes's ain criterion.
In a letter dated May 1643, Princess Elisabeth wrote to Descartes,
I beg you to tell me how the human soul tin make up one's mind the motion of the animal spirits in the body so as to perform voluntary acts—being as it is merely a witting substance. For the conclusion of the movement seems ever to come up about from the moving body'southward being propelled—to depend on the kind of impulse it gets from what it sets in motion, or again, on the nature and shape of this latter thing's surface. Now the first two weather condition involve contact, and the third involves that the impelling [thing] has extension; just you utterly exclude extension from your notion of soul, and contact seems to me incompatible with a thing's being immaterial.
Propulsion and "the kind of impulse" that gear up the body in motion crave contact, and "the nature and shape" of the surface of the site at which contact is made with the body require extension. We need two further clarifications to grasp this passage.
The first is that when Princess Elisabeth and Descartes mention "animal spirits" (the phrase is from the ancient Greek md and philosopher Galen) they are writing almost something that plays roughly the role of signals in the nerve fibers of mod physiology. For Descartes, the beast spirits were not spirits in the sense of ghostly apparitions, but role of a theory that claimed that muscles were moved past aggrandizement with air, the so-called balloonist theory. The animal spirits were fine streams of air that inflated the muscles. ("Brute" does not mean the beasts here, but is an adjective derived from "anima," the soul.)
The second clarification is that when Princess Elisabeth writes that "you lot utterly exclude extension from your notion of soul," she is referring to the fact that Descartes defines mind and matter in such a style that the ii are mutually exclusive. Heed is consciousness, which has no extension or spatial dimension, and matter is not conscious, since it is completely divers past its spatial dimensions and location. Since listen lacks a location and spatial dimensions, Elisabeth is arguing, it cannot make contact with thing. Here we have the mind-trunk problem going at full throttle.
It was Descartes' critics who discovered the problem, right in his solution to it.
Descartes himself did not nonetheless accept the mind-trunk trouble; he had something that amounted to a solution to the problem. Information technology was his critics who discovered the trouble, right in Descartes'southward solution to the problem, although it is also true that information technology was well-nigh forced on them by Descartes'due south sharp distinction between mind and body. The stardom involved the defining characteristics or "principal attributes," equally he called them, of listen and body, which are consciousness and extension.
Though Descartes was no doubtfulness right that very different kinds of things can interact with 1 some other, he was not right in his account of how such different things equally mind and trunk do in fact interact. His proposal, in "The Passions of the Soul," his final philosophical treatise, was that they interact through the pineal gland, which is, he writes, "the master seat of the soul" and is moved this way and that by the soul and so equally to motion the animal spirits or streams of air from the sacs next to it. He had his reasons for choosing this organ, as the pineal gland is pocket-sized, lite, not bilaterally doubled, and centrally located. Still, the whole thought is a nonstarter, because the pineal gland is as physical every bit any other office of the body. If there is a problem about how the mind can act on the body, the aforementioned problem will exist about how the mind can act on the pineal gland, fifty-fifty if there is a adept story to tell almost the hydraulics of the "pneumatic" (or nervous) system.
We have inherited the sharp distinction between heed and torso, though not exactly in Descartes'southward form, but we have not inherited Descartes'south solution to the mind-torso problem. So we are left with the problem, minus a solution. Nosotros see that the experiences we accept, such as experiences of color, are indeed very dissimilar from the electromagnetic radiations that ultimately produces them, or from the activity of the neurons in the brain. We are spring to wonder how the uncolored radiation can produce the color, fifty-fifty if its effects tin can be followed every bit far as the neurons in the visual cortex. In other words, we make a sharp distinction between physics and physiology on the one mitt, and psychology on the other, without a principled mode to connect them. Physics consists of a set up of concepts that includes mass, velocity, electron, wave, and and then on, but does not include the concepts ruby, yellow, black, and the like. Physiology includes the concepts neuron, glial cell, visual cortex, and so on, but does not include the concept of color. In the framework of current scientific theory, "red" is a psychological term, non a physical one. So our problem can exist very generally described as the difficulty of describing the human relationship between the physical and the psychological, since, as Princess Elisabeth and Gassendi realized, they possess no common relating terms.
Was there actually no mind-trunk trouble before Descartes and his debate with his critics in 1641? Of grade, long before Descartes, philosophers and religious thinkers had spoken about the body and the mind or soul, and their relationship. Plato, for case, wrote a fascinating dialogue, the Phaedo, which contains arguments for the survival of the soul afterwards decease, and for its immortality. Yet the exact sense in which the soul or heed is able to be "in" the body, and too to get out it, is apparently non something that presented itself to Plato equally a trouble in its own right. His interest is in the fact that the soul survives death, non how, or in what sense it can exist in the body. The same is true of religious thinkers. Their business concern is for the homo, and perhaps for the welfare of the body, but mainly for the welfare and futurity of the human soul. They practice non formulate a problem with the technical precision that was forced on Princess Elisabeth and Gassendi past Descartes'south neatly formulated dualism.
Something of import clearly had changed in our intellectual orientation during the mid-17th century. Mechanical explanations had become the order of the mean solar day, such as Descartes's balloonist explanation of the nervous organization, and these explanations left unanswered the question of what should be said virtually the human being heed and human consciousness from the physical and mechanical point of view.
What happens, if annihilation, for instance, when we decide to do fifty-fifty such a simple thing as to lift up a cup and take a sip of coffee? The arm moves, just information technology is hard to see how the idea or desire could make that happen. It is every bit though a ghost were to effort to lift upwardly a java loving cup. Its ghostly arm would, 1 supposes, simply pass through the cup without affecting it and without being able to cause it or the physical arm to become up in the air.
It would be no less remarkable if but by thinking near it from a few feet away we could cause an ATM to dispense cash. It is no use insisting that our minds are after all not physically connected to the ATM, and that is why it is incommunicable to affect the ATM's output — for there is no sense in which they are physically connected to our bodies. Our minds are non physically connected to our bodies! How could they be, if they are nonphysical? That is the point whose importance Princess Elisabeth and Gassendi saw more clearly than anyone had before them, including Descartes himself.
Jonathan Westphal is a Permanent Member of the Senior Common Room at University College, Oxford, and the writer of "The Mind-Body Problem," from which this commodity is adapted.
Source: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/discovery-mind-body-problem/
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