The Cartesian Divide(I)

Descartes used to think that the body works like a machine, and is controlled by the soul, which is a non-material entity. This move towards comparing the human body to a mechanism couldn't have been possible without the emergence and flourishing of automaton-building. We can compare Descartes' leap of thought when making that comparison to the leap of thought that put the basis of cognitive science: comparing the human mind to a machine.

So, what is the difference between the two moves? Descartes only had automatons that could mimic movement and behaviour, so he could only assimilate the human body to the concept of a mechanism (which can be considered the basis for the robotics field). Modern cognitive science had the entire realm of information processing by machines to assimilate the human mind to. We could actually say that both analogies belong to the same kind of thinking, that they are two complementary steps in the same direction.

But as Descartes didn't had anything to stand in for "mind", or anything more scientifically minded to compare it with, he assimilated it to a non-material substance, different than the mechanistic body. And that mainly because human mind doesn't come in an external form, is hard to be measured, although it's results and actions can be clearly seen, and in fact a body without a mind wouldn't make that much sense to us, not in a human world anyway. So it's obvious why to Descartes and his contemporaries would find this "essence" as having no weight, no particular form, no colour - i.e. being spiritual in nature.

A little aside on the way we form concepts here, that would become more and more obviously important...

We tend to grasp things through our perception of them. We form concepts considering their qualities, the categories they belong or are related to, and the history of humanity is perhaps, in a way, a history of evolving concepts. If you would live in an era were most of the concepts you acquire would be based on the representation or comparison to the objects existing then, your knowledge-base would be somehow limited by that. So if you would live in the 17nth century, and you would have a substance, let's call it mind, that you couldn't see, measure form-wise, colour-wise, that you couldn't observe with your own senses, although you would see its manifestation through indirect means - i.e. people acting in different ways and being "possessed" by different "spirits" (passions, moods), some being more apt and resourceful and creative in various fields of endeavours than others, people coming out of the blue with unexpected actions (planning somewhere inside themselves in an invisible, perhaps threatening, if not only surprising way). If you would see all of this, and you wouldn't know how to call it, wouldn't you call it "non-material" substance just because you can't reduce it to something that you can perceive with your own senses?

I probably would. And it makes more sense to think of the development of concepts through a historical perspective. Also, I think analogy, metaphor, symbolism, hardly being useful only for poetry or various arts, are also the tools that helped us make progress in science.

We tend to get a different view on a concept through comparing it to another one - for Descartes the way he could embed information from the concept of automatons in his thinking about the human body clearly enriched his latter concept, and it enriched it for us as well. (perhaps I'll post soon on concept shaping and enrichment).

Now, in modern times, he have a beautiful comparison to make - the one to the personal computer. The existence of software would perhaps have helped Descartes' contemporaries, who found it hard to imagine an intelligent thing that would have no weight or shape, yet would not be supernatural. Software is clearly not supernatural or even spiritual (if you ever heard a stuck programmer swearing - otherwise an analytical and calm, therefore quite civil specie), although is all about organising information and using different commands or information tools to act upon it. Quite a resourceful analogy for CogSci to draw upon.

Today most of us assume a physicalist position – that means we think intelligence, personality, soul are physically grounded, and we don’t believe in substance dualism anymore – meaning we dont think in a physical substance making up our body and a spiritual type of other substance making up the essence of life (that belief is called vitalism).

However, there is still a big debate about the fact that we might still function in Cartesian terms,and think about the mind as a different thing from the body. I will try to explain why that is not only unavoidable in some ways, but perfectly natural if we think about how our culture has evolved, and how concepts are born. (to be continued....)