# Descartes and Dualism (cont.)

## January 27th, 2020

- Pre-class scribblings:

        Follow flash of fishies
        through cove and cave, salt and sea
        silvery scattery swimmers
        bear the light away

        Take it, oh! Spread it like
        butter on the world-toast
        like silver fish on platters
        scatter light to darkened places

- Blog posts are done! "I thought most of them were quite good - nice!"
- Your 1st argument analysis is due 2 weeks from now, in other news
    - Hopefully, today's conversation will prepare us for it (on the "mind-body" problem)
    - These'll be more intensely graded than the blog posts
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- So we read Elisabeth of Bohemia, who raises a *very* classic objection to Descartes
    - Traditionally, modern philosophy has been taught as "Rationalists vs Empiricists," with Kant swooping in and synthesizing the two at the end - but that approach is somewhat artificial and presents the sides as more unified than they actually were
    - It also leaves out a *lot* of good philosophers, including women philosophers of the time and authors who just corresponded (rather than putting their thoughts into books)

- Last class, we went through the argument for God's existence by Descartes quite quickly, and there were a *lot* of questions - so let's go through it more slowly
    - "Obviously this is a charged topic based on people's religious beliefs, so please be sensitive and keep it academic"
    - First off, a few concepts Descartes uses that we need to understand:
        - A SUBSTANCE is something that exists independently and on its own (e.g. mind, matter)
        - A MODE is a "modulation" of a substance, e.g. "ideas" are a mode of the mind
            - The substance is the essence of something, while the mode are the accidental properties that substance might take on (e.g. shapes)
            - "Descartes does believe the mind depends on God, but that's a proviso; so, God is the only infinite substance in Descartes book"
    - Now, Descartes says that in his mind, he has the "idea" of God, an "infinitely real being" - even if he can't picture him in his imagination, he can think about it intellectually
        - However, this is an idea Descartes argues he *couldn't* have come up with on his own as a finite person - so he decides this idea must be innate inside him
        - But, then, how did that innate idea get there?
    - Descartes then makes a distinction between "objective reality" and "formal reality," and says that he knows his *idea* about God is real - but that doesn't mean the thing his idea is about actually exists in "formal reality" (i.e. the "real world")
        - However, since Descartes is finite, he thinks this finite idea of an infinite God must have come from outside him somehow - he couldn't have come up with it himself!
            - "An analogy: think of a watch. The idea of a watch in your head must have come from something at LEAST as complex as a watch; it may not be the watch itself, but it had to come from something, since we can't imagine anything more complex than anything we've seen!"
        - So, if we have the idea of an infinitely complex thing in our head, it must have come from something that complex - i.e. God!

- "Clearly, some of you aren't satisfied with this, but hopefully it's a starting point to learn more about Descartes"

- So, let's now look at the mind-body distinction, starting with the argument from divisibility
    - Here, Descartes says that physical things can always be divided, but you can't divide 1 mind into 2 different minds - it's indivisible! Therefore, the mind must not be a physical thing!
        - But we don't say other things that differ in a single property, like cups and chalkboards, are made of different substances, so why do this for the mind?
        - The reason is because it's not *just* "another property," but because divisibility seems to be an *essential* property of *all* physical matter - and therefore the mind can't be the same thing as a physical body
            - In this case, note that emotions would be a mode of operation of the mind
    - How do we know, though, that the mind isn't divisible?
        - Sub-conscious and conscious doesn't do the trick, since that only shows the mind can exist in different "modes"

- So, the mind and body are distinct - at the same time, Descartes defends the close connection between the two, so why does he bring up division in the first place?
    - Well, because if he loses this distinction, then the mind is subject to his senses, making mechanistic physics and mathematics impossible - if the the mind and body are the same, then we have to worry about physical objects possibly having mental states, which is *weird* (imagine if your microscope starting playing with you *a la* Toy Story)

- For Descartes, every mental state has a corresponding physical state; pain in our mind goes along with our nervous system lighting up
    - If the mind is in the world, then we apparently have to accept our subjective feelings like "ticklish" really are in the world, like with Galileo's counter-argument about ticklish
    - Do we still have this problem today? We'll see!