Here we read:
But as evolutionary biologists and cognitive neuroscientists peer ever deeper into the brain, they are discovering more and more genes, brain structures and other physical correlates to feelings like empathy, disgust and joy. That is, they are discovering physical bases for the feelings from which moral sense emerges — not just in people but in other animals as well.
The result is perhaps the strongest challenge yet to the worldview summed up by Descartes, the 17th-century philosopher who divided the creatures of the world between humanity and everything else. As biologists turn up evidence that animals can exhibit emotions and patterns of cognition once thought of as strictly human, Descartes’s dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” loses its force.
People often question the utility of philosophy. One use of philosophy is to protect us from bad philosophy, pseudo-philosophy, the 'philosophy' of those who denigrate philosophy yet cannot resist philosophizing themselves and as a result philosophize poorly. Man is a philosophical animal whether he likes it or not. Philosophize we will — the only question being whether we will do it poorly or well.
The two paragraphs quoted illustrate the sort of pseudo-philosophy that the genuine article must combat. Since to spend much time criticizing writing as shoddy as the above is a poor use of time, I'll just make two brief remarks.
First, it was not Descartes who set human beings apart from the animal kingdom. This idea is a staple of the Judeo-Christian tradition and is already set forth in the Book of Genesis:
Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram . . . (Gen 1, 26) Let us make man in our image and likeness. . .
Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam. . . (Gen 1, 27) And God created man in his image. . .
The idea is that God, a purely spirtual being, conferred upon man a spiritual nature that distinguishes him from the rest of the animals. In Imago Dei, I go into this at some length and ward off a common misunderstanding.
Second, the 'force' of Cogito ergo sum is in no way lessened by evidence that animals exhibit emotions and patterns of cognition found also in humans. The author betrays a complete lack of understanding as to what the Cartesian dictum means.
What it means is that there is something accessible to my experience that is indubitable. The existence of my thinking (in the broad Cartesian sense that includes perceiving, imagining, wishing, willing, hoping, desiring, and indeed every mental act that displays the property that Brentano called intentionality) cannot be doubted. Given that I am conscious of a (putatively external) object (in whatever modality: perception, imagination, recollection, etc.), it is possible to doubt whether the object of consciousness exists apart from my being conscious of it. Presently gazing at Superstition Mountain, I can doubt the existence of the mountain, but I cannot doubt that a mental act of visual perception is now occurring, or that this act is of a mountain of such-and-such a description. Both act and object qua object are indubitable as to their existence; dubitable alone is the existence of the object in reality. If I try to doubt the existence of my present thinking, I find that my doubting guarantees its own existence: Dubito ergo sum.
If you understand this, then you understand that the author of the NYT piece is an ignoramus.
Jeffery Hodges
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I would modify this in a couple of ways. For one, I'm not sure the focus on the act is a good move. When visually experiencing a mountain, it is the content of the experience that is buffered (somewhat) from doubt. I am not sure there is an act of experiencing (which itself carries a theoretical load that is debatable), unless you want to stipulate that by 'act of experiencing' you mean 'experiencing' which would make it redundant at best, and questionable at worst (it could end up something like 'the experience of experiencing' which is a bit wiggly).
Second, I am not sure judgments about experiences are indubitable, though I suppose in normal people in normal conditions they are buffered from falsification in ways that claims about the world are not so buffered. It is a difference of degree, not kind. I say this partly because I have been wrong about my experiences (what I thought was a tickle a while ago I realized was a slight pain). Also, there is a neurological syndrome in which blind patients insist that they see ('blindness denial') It is not well understood, but it suggests that some people should doubt their judgments about what they are experiencing!
Eric Thomson
But her mistakes were not the only ones in there. The physical scientists she quoted in the first half of the article have somehow got it in their head that correlations between brain states and mental states disprove theories that mind is more than brain. It's as if they think they've discovered something no substance dualist or other believer in soul took into account before--that the brain is involved in the process.
Hi again, Bill -
Here's what I sent to Cornelia Dean in response to her article:
=============
Dear Ms. Dean,
I read with interest your article "Science of the Soul?" (6/26/07), but found it both (1) misrepresentative of contemporary dualism, and (2) wrongheaded in its approach. For purposes of brevity, I will restrict the
majority of my comments to the latter.
Discussions about what the mind *is* (ontology/metaphysics) are inherently
philosophical. This is not to deny that scientific findings can play a peripheral role in informing the debate, it is just to say that science cannot exert the kind of influence or authority over the subject that your
article (or the Nature piece) so strongly suggests. Correlates between mental and physical states, for example, cannot in principle indicate identity (i.e. the mind just is reducible to physical states); at best they
show causal relationships. And there are plenty of excellent reasons to think that mental states are recalcitrant to the reductive project. This is why atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, well versed in philosophy of mind but no friend to religion, wrote the following in response to Dawkins' book The
God Delusion:
"The reductionist project usually tries to reclaim some of the originally excluded aspects of the world, by analyzing them in physical—that is, behavioral or neurophysiological—terms; but it denies reality to what
cannot be so reduced. I believe the project is doomed—that conscious experience, thought, value, and so forth are not illusions, even though they cannot be identified with physical facts."
[Thomas Nagel, "The Fear of Religion," The New Republic (10/23/06), p. 25;
Internet: https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i=20061023&s=nagel102306,
spotted 6/30/07.]
I think both difficulties with your article could find their remedy in interviewing a sophisticated dualist such as J.P. Moreland (BIOLA University). In fact, he penned an article back in 2003 that seems written with your concerns (science vs. dualism, and Nancy Murphy's related claims)in mind. The abstract reads:
"Today it is widely held that, while broadly logically possible, dualism is no longer plausible in light of the advances of modern science. My thesis is that once we get clear on the central first and second-order issues in
philosophy of mind, it becomes evident that stating and resolving those issues is basically a (theological and) philosophical matter for which discoveries in the hard sciences are largely irrelevant. Put differently,
these philosophical issues are, with rare exceptions, autonomous from (and authoritative with respect to) the so-called deliverances of the hard sciences."
The article is available online at
http://www.asa3.org/aSA/PSCF/2003/PSCF3-03Moreland.pdf
Some familiarity with current philosophy of mind is helpful, but not essential, I think, to understanding Moreland's argument: scientists are operating out of their field of expertise when it comes to determining the
nature of things, including the mind. I commend this article to you, and welcome your comments.
Sincerely,
Steven D. Thomas
Very nice letter. Let me know if you get a rise out of Ms. Dean.
Jeff,
I am reminded of a saying, "Brilliant minds think alike." Could it be that you and I illustrate this weighty truth? [grin]
I agree with your comment. There is this incredible naivete on the part of science writers and most neuroscientists. They don't think about what a correlation is or proves. A correlation is not an identity. To establish a correlation presupposes the distinctness of what is being correlated. And the correlations are consistent with substance dualism.
Bob,
I agree with your agreement with Tom!
By 'act' I just mean the intentional experience as occurrent (as opposed to dispositional). That's standard terminology at least where I come from. You are right, however, that 'act' imports theory that will be denied by Moore, Sartre, Butchvarov, and everybody who thinks of consciousness-of as 'diaphanous' and thus not mediated by acts. But don't forget, I was expositing Descartes for the limited purpose of showing that what he meant by his cogito has nothing to do with what the science writer thought he meant.
I can't agree with your second para. Whether a felt datum, a quale, is a tickle or a pain probably involves some transcendent assumptions about its etiology. Bracket all that a la Husserl. Attend just to the felt datum. I would argue that no one could be mistaken about that.
Steve
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
It was on my back, I was attending just to the quale. I was just wrong about it. It wasn't very strong, a slight pain that I thought was a tickle when I first casually attended to it (I discovered the etiology later).
Also, the existence of blind people who sincerely say they see poses problems (there are even surgeries that stops them from confabulating, afterwards they realize they are blind and then can start to get assistance with their malady).
But, in normal circumstances, and especially in the abnormal circumstance of intense focus on an experience from the philosophers' armchair, there is certainly a buffer claims about experiences enjoy. For one, you can't tell me it wasn't a pain at first that I misidentified :)
2. Disallowing comments from a particular person, or deleting an offensive, off-topic, or otherwise substandard comment, has nothing to do with censorship. People who think otherwise confuse censorship with lack of sponsorship. I am under an obligation not to interfere with anyone's exercise of legitimate free speech rights. But I am not under any obligation to aid and abet anyone's exercise of free speech rights, legitimate or illegitimate.
3. The Comments area is not an open forum for anyone to say anything about any topic. As the name implies, it is primarily for commenting on the author(s)' posts. But to comment on them, one must have read them. And if I have spent three hours on a post, a reader will not understand it in thirty seconds. Secondarily, the Comments area is to facilitate civil discussion between and among commenters as long as the discussion remains on-topic.
4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.