In this article, Thomas O. Scarborough, author of Everything, Briefly: A Postmodern Philosophy (2022), ex UK top ten philosophy website editor, and a Congregational minister, presents us with a new take on Descartes’ legacy and the mind/body problem.
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Ever since René Descartes wrote, in 1641, ‘The mind is really distinct from the body,’ we have struggled with the mind-body problem. Not that the problem didn’t exist before – however, Descartes brought it to the fore.
While Descartes’ ideas on mind have long since been jettisoned, I argue that we have not moved very far beyond him. The simple problem of Descartes has morphed into another, which keeps us all spell-bound today – and frankly, in a rut.
The purpose of this article is to jump us out of the rut, so that we may think new thoughts and explore new directions.
Descartes ver. 1.0
Descartes famously wrote, ‘I think, therefore I am.’
His first word, unfortunately, was a mistake – a classic example of a suppressed inference. He assumed that the ‘I’ was an immaterial soul, which interacted with a material body. And the rest is history.
Descartes’ view was certainly common-sensical.
I tap my finger on a tabletop. I drink a glass of milk. I feel the warmth of the sun on my face. Such experiences seem perfectly real to me. Which means that, on the surface of it, my life seems real to me, through and through.
It seems, therefore, that I am living in a real world. It is not imagined or illusory. Further, it seems to me that I am an observer of this world, not merely a robotic presence there. On this basis, it would seem to me that I have a mind that observes reality: mind here, reality there, which separates my mind from the things that it observes – and separates my mind from my body.
Yet common sense does not always make good philosophy.
If we separate the mind from the things it observes, it is difficult to explain how a mind exists separately in a world where, apparently, only matter exists. And if we propose that something else exists, of which the mind is made, we face the daunting prospect of proving it.
Let us try to formulate Descartes’ position simply. We shall strip it down to conceptual basics – its bare essentials. The original position of Descartes, I shall argue, is this. I shall call it …
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