Cartesian consciousness compounds cognitive confusion
The "hard problem of consciousness" will never go away because nobody asks the right questions
MP favorite
discusses the appearance of the mind-body problem in the correspondence of notorious villain Rene Descartes. This post expands on a comment I left there.
For the untutored, the mind-body problem can be put in rough form like so:
When you have a thought in your mind, or feel hot sand under your feet on a blazing-hot day at the beach, these experiences seem to us as private, personal, intangible, immaterial, and even ghost-like.
By contrast, material objects, which we can touch, lift, move—and which often bite back if we move them the wrong way—are not like this. We don't experience them as ours, the way we might experience a pain in our hip or the taste of sugar on our tongue. They don't obey our wishes, except through crude and indirect means.
How is it then that colors, sounds, feelings of heat, pressure, and pain, and all the rest can get from Out There and inside your private skull-kingdom?
And how is it that you can decide to get another beer, only to have your body obey the command issued from In Here?
The fissure that Descartes introduced between the mind and the world must be understood as more than a simple division of the mental from the material.
It is that, but there is more much to say. Because of his peculiar way of doing philosophy, Descartes begins with some (at the time) strange assumptions.
Find an object around you. It can be anything. For me it's my red coffee cup with the cartoon lion on it. When I look at the cup, I see a range of properties. It takes up a certain amount of space. It has a shape. Sometimes it moves, when I take it to the kitchen or bring it to my desk.
Descartes carved up our perceptions into two sorts.
In one bucket, there are the clear and definite parts of perception. When I weigh the cup, when I measure its height and the diameter of its opening, or trace its movement in space, that's all measurable. I can assign it a definite value and communicate it to you without any fuzziness.
In the other bucket, we have "everything else". This contains the red color, the warmth when I touch it, the texture, and the feeling of heaviness when I pick it up. These properties are obscure and confused. I can't measure them, and they're impossible to express in definite words.
Clear and definite ideas, which can be assigned a numerical quantity, are good.
Vague and confused ideas, which convey qualities of sensation and cannot be measured, are second-class. John Locke would later call these the primary qualities and secondary qualities, respectively.
Now, Descartes didn't do any science to figure this out, so the division of clear ideas and confused ideas may itself seem definite or confused, depending on you way of thinking. Regardless, this has serious consequences down the line.
One, when we confront an object of experience that appears to us as red, heavy, hot, rough, sweet (and so on), the quality of the experience is only an appearance.
It looks or feels or seems to us as such-and-so, but that's only our perception of it. What's really going on is explained by a physical process which can be expressed in a mathematical formula. Remember, numbers are good.
Two, because the qualities of sensation are but appearances produced by physical causes, they belong properly to the body, not the mind.
Your mind experiences sensations through the body. When you feel the heat of the sun or taste bitter hops or rub your palm over sandpaper, that's "really" "just" particles slamming into particles.
Because of this curious division of experiences into objective quantities and experienced qualities, Descartes reasons his way to a vision of nature as a vast, sprawling mechanism made up of physical parts in motion. What you take to be the redness of a ripe apple is nothing more than a wavelength of light impacting your retinas, with some handwaving about how neurons in your brain do stuff with magic and make the experience of colors (but they totally aren't colors, because of science).1
Music is only vibrations in the air; warmth is the jiggling of molecules in the nerves of our skin; and so on. Philosophers today call this a reductionist explanation. Instead of taking our senses at face value, he's looking for the true explanation behind them. How do sensations happen in us? The answer is found by digging beneath the surface, where, Descartes reasoned, we learn that they are caused by material processes outside of the mind.
But wait, there's more! We aren't even at the good parts yet.
Three, what is left of the mind is the substance of pure thinking.
What is left? Yes.
If you're not interested in the history of ideas, you probably don't realize this, but before Descartes' time, people didn't talk about the mind the way we do now.
There wasn't a well-defined "inside" separated from the "outside". Philosophers and regular-folk weren't talking about a private consciousness experiencing the world from inside out.
Descartes' most famous saying, "cogito ergo sum" — which he never wrote, anywhere — came about at the end of a chain of reasoning wherein he tried to doubt everything except the undoubtable.
What can't be doubted? The fact that I think, of course.
By doubting everything, Descartes figures that the only thing he can't doubt is that there's some thinking happening and that thinking is none other than himself, Rene Descartes.(Later critics would wonder why he stopped there, instead of asking after this "I" character.)
That thinking mind cannot be part of the physical world. We've already ruled that out, remember. The world of matter is all numbers. As this world includes our own bodies and the sensations in them, we have to look elsewhere for the mind.
What's left once you banish the qualities of experience? Cogito ergo sum. The pure intellect, the activity of raw, uncut thinking, reasoning, and judging without the handicap of a body or a brain.
If mind is not part of the mechanical realm of material causes, then it must have its own, immaterial nature. That is your intellect.
What is left of the mind is nothing but thinking and the clear ideas that you think about.
Now the mind, unlike your lying bastard senses, is capable of knowing things in their true essence by way of pure thinking.
This was not a good precedent to set for future philosophers. Regardless, this explains how Descartes came to reason that the clear and distinct quantities that one can measure are more real than the hazy and indistinct qualities, which one cannot. The mind knows their true essence in a way that the senses cannot.
If you're like me, you may find Descartes setting out a self-serving standard. You tell me you're shocked that a guy who likes to lay about and think concludes that laying about while thinking is the gateway to truth?
I've long believed that if Descartes spent more time outdoors and away from dour European weather, we'd never have this argument.
This leaves Descartes in an uncomfortable position compared to today's cutting-edge ideas on the mind.
Much of today's work on mind and consciousness is all about the qualia, which are the phenomenal, experienced, "What It Is Like" in the first-person, the redness of red, coolness of cold, sweetness of sweet, and so forth. That's exactly opposite to Descartes' view.
Everybody wants to get sniffy about his idea of an immaterial thinking-substance. Oh that silly Descartes, believing in ghosts! Isn't he silly?
Immaterial thinking substances don't much bother me. Today's science can't be done without numbers and other abstract mathematical objects, not to mention the arcane hocus-pocus going on with computers, and nobody bats an eye at that despite having no real idea why these immaterial widgets are any more respectable.
Descartes wasn't some superstitious yokel. He had good reasons for making this argument, which was nowhere near as stupid as he's made out to be in some quarters today.
Descartes's real crime isn't making the mind immaterial.
Where he really turned the knife is by flattening the varied and rich range of mental experiences into a simple machine-like process of reasoning. The mind as intellect has no direct connection to sense perception, the imagination, or your living body. (As it did for the Aristotelian philosophers he took as his opponents.)
This is the key part: Not only is mind withdrawn from matter, but the idea of mind itself takes on a fixed, limited dimension. After Descartes the mind is nothing more than the reasoning intellect.
I've written elsewhere about this mechanization of the mind, where Descartes is a key figure.
Meanwhile, if you're reading the popular articles, and most the serious literature come to think of it, the problem of consciousness is all about those subjective qualities of experience. We're still collectively hung up on how to explain the blueness of blue, the hurtiness of pain, and the coolness of jazz fusion.
This is an after-effect of the Cartesian rupture between the stuff of mind and the stuff of matter. But the mind is much more than the mysterious first-person perspective.
Bonus - Why consciousness is the wrong question
I thought this would be under 2000 words and well, lol. If you want to keep reading, enjoy.
I understand why consciousness is so fascinating a puzzle, but I don't personally find it that interesting a problem.
I'm not interested in how our minds, or brains, construct inner pictures of reality. You could cook up analogies with optical lenses, or cameras, or electronic switchboards, or computers. Philosophers and scientists have tried all of them and more.
These metaphors may or may not work to explain why we feel or experience as we do. But they don't scratch the surface of the interesting problems about the mind.
What interests me is how the mind came unglued from the world in the first place.
Descartes' writings made up a major historical step in that process. But we don't have to accept his conclusions as our premises. His arguments came from somewhere, and they made contributions that future thinkers had to accept. There's no Philosophy Police that require us to hang on to any of that baggage.
Even so, much of today's philosophy and sciences of mind carry on oblivious, looking for a naturalistic explanation of consciousness.
Roughly speaking, this would lead us to a scientific theory of the mind, built on knowledge of nature, physiology, and cognitive functioning, explaining mental activity "from the bottom up", much as physics explains motion from the behavior of sub-atomic particles, or Descartes wanted to explain colors as oscillations of light-waves.
Why is this a bad idea?
The major and to me most convincing reason is that there are other capacities of the mind, which aren't part of consciousness, but are at least as important.
For example, let's take this sentence:
"All triangles have three sides."
That's true, as you know if you've any familiarity with geometry. But how is it that the sentence is true?
The sentence, I remind you, is only a squiggle of lines on a page (a virtual electronic page in the likely event you're reading this on a screen). If I erase the sentence with my delete key, it's still true that all triangles have three sides. If it were written in a script you can't read, such as Mandarin Chinese (in my case), the fact would not change.
Without getting too technical on you, the answer is that the sentence refers to a thought. The sentence is a material object located in space and time. The thought is a non-physical entity with no location.
So what's this "refers to" bit?
One time, over drinks after a talk, a clever psychologist tried to stump me with his favorite answer to the question. He brought together six empty beer glasses into a rough pyramid shape.
"See?" He gestures at the glasses. "You bring objects together and count them."
"OK," I said, "that could explain how we learn to count. But what makes this," pointing at the glasses, "into the number six?"
He didn't get it, so I continued with the example.
We were in the busy staff room, buzzing with half-drunk academics and grad students.
"There's six paintings on the wall," I said. "There's six people in a group. There's six chairs around that table." In truth, there were way more than that. As long as there are at least six, you can carve up almost anything into almost any arbitrary group of six.
"So how do you make this pile of dirty dishes into the same 'six' as all those other six things?
“Will the number six vanish when the table’s cleared?”
He had his explanation bass-ackwards. The dirty glasses didn't count up to the number "six" because he could see them and arrange them.
They counted as six because he (and I) already understood the concept of "six".
What made it true that there were six glasses, that we counted six glasses, that we were talking about six glasses?
The answer couldn't be in our brains or our eye-balls.
It had to be the thought, the idea, the abstract concept. The number six still exists even all these years since the server came to clear the table. The pyramid of glassware realized the abstract concept. We screw up when we mistake the concrete for the abstract, or the abstract for the concrete.
Which is all too common since the Cartesian idea grabbed hold of the popular mind.
Bare consciousness isn't the end of our discussion about the mind, as my plucky psychologist acquaintance believed. Conscious experience is only just the beginning of the mind's capabilities.
Thanks for reading.
-Matt
p.s. If you found this valuable, interesting, funny, or it made you upset that you had to use your mind for activities that don't involve infinite scrolling, I ask that you do me a favor and share it with just one person.
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This is sarcasm.
Neal Stephenson does a great job talking about "the six-ness of six" type philosophy in his novel Anathem. With referencing back to Platonic thought.
Oh yes. This. I think about this a lot.