We are today going to cover not only Descartes' arguments for the points that he wants to establish, but we're also going to cover the big problem that they created, the big objection that remains to this day. The view I'm talking about is a view that has been called and still is called, dualism.

D-U-A-L means two. If you write D-U-E-L, that means two people are fighting. The dualism that Descartes is the champion of is called mind-body dualism. Human beings have a mind and a body. That's what constitutes a human being. In this respect, human beings are a microcosm—a little reflection of the big universe around us. The big universe consists of physical bodies, and these bodies are in space, are law-determined, and do not think, will, perceive, or know.

Human beings, however, have minds. The universe doesn’t have a mind, but in addition to the physical bodies, there is a rational component of the universe to which our minds correspond. These are the laws of math, logic, and other axioms that govern our thoughts.

Our minds think, will, perceive, decide, believe, and so on. They are not in space and are not determined by physical laws. You might say, “Well, that's just a review, we did this last time." Okay, okay, we’re getting there. Just a quick reminder: physical bodies and non-physical minds. The non-physical minds correspond to the rational order that governs the physical world.

Minds are not in space; they’re not determined. They’re free. Bodies are wholly determined by physical laws and causality, and they do not perceive, will, or feel as minds do. This sounds tidy, but it raises an enormous difficulty, and that enormous difficulty is called the problem of interaction.

The problem of interaction is really simple to understand. If my mind is nowhere in space, nothing about it is physical, and it's not subject to physical laws or causes—when I make a decision, say, to scratch my nose, how does that decision affect my brain, my nerves, and then my hand? How does that happen?

Think about this: everything that's true of a mind is false of a body, and everything that's true of a body is false of a mind, even to the point where the mind isn’t in space. So how can a mind that is nowhere and not connected to the physical brain by any chemical, electrical, or mechanical pathways affect the body? Because there's nothing in common; there’s no bridge.

Now, reverse that same thing. Something falls on my thumb and cuts it. I feel pain. You can analyze the cut: identify which nerve endings were affected and trace the nerve pathways up through my neck and into my brain, which produces some kind of brain process. But the perception of pain isn’t the physical motion of brain neurons. How do those brain neurons get a perception of pain into a mind that is nowhere, that is not physical, and that is not susceptible to being affected by any chemical, electrical, or mechanical causes?

How does it get there? This problem has plagued all dualisms, not just Descartes'. It plagued dualism before him and has plagued them all since him.

Dividing humans into two tidy pieces and saying one is subject to law, and the other is free, might sound like a nice way to defend free will—and I agree that free will is the truth there—but is that the way to defend it? Everybody's completely determined, but the mind is not; it's completely free. Then how does either one affect the other? How can either one be a cause of what happens to the other? We can't just say "causality," right? We're confronted with some kind of causality. Alright, is the causality that affects the mind when the body is impacted a physical causality? Well, if it's physical causality, it won't affect the mind at all because the mind is not affected by physical causes and effects. Is it, I don't know, biological? No, that doesn’t sound right—that’s in space and time, subject to change and so on. It's not nowhere and attuned only to the rational axioms. So, how does any causality cross this gap between mind and body?

Descartes never answered that. He tried, and he admitted he couldn’t explain it, but he thought he knew where it took place. His own proposal was that it happens in the pineal gland. In the brain. And the only reason he picked that was that the pineal gland is the only organ in the brain that is not divided symmetrically—it doesn’t have two halves. It's unified and sits just about in the center of things, so he thought that’s where the exchange must take place. It was a guess, and it’s easy to laugh at now, but at least it was an intelligent guess for his time.

However, knowing where it happens, or the part of the brain that receives the instructions from the mind and passes impulses like pain to the mind, still doesn’t explain how this gap is bridged. Descartes' final verdict, after trying to think of an explanation for a long time, was this: interaction is a miracle caused by God. Not a very good answer. I mean, if we have to invoke Deus Ex Machina, we have a real stinker of a problem here. If we can't find any solution, we’ll just drag God in and have Him do a miracle.

But think about that. That means everybody’s perception of the world around them, all day, every day, is constantly being made possible by God performing miracles. You know, if that were really true—if it were God making us see what we see when we look at something—then it wouldn’t be a miracle. If that’s how the world works all the time for everybody, all day long, every day, then it’s not a miracle anymore. And then it makes God’s action part of the natural world, which doesn’t sound right either.

So, the problem of interaction was very provocative, and the fact that Descartes essentially gave up on it—"Okay, it's a miracle caused by God"—doesn’t seem like a satisfactory explanation at all. And there were other thinkers after him who looked at this and came up with other proposed solutions. Let’s take a look at a couple. One thinker who liked the dualistic view but wasn’t satisfied with Descartes' account of interaction was Malebranche.

He held the same kind of dualism, but his view, called occasionalism, was that God doesn't impart miraculous power to everyone all the time so that impressions in their minds are passed on to their bodies, and impacts on bodies are passed on to their minds. Instead, God only steps in on the occasions when it's needed. So, rather than God constantly intervening, He does so only when there's no other way it could happen.

Leibniz, who followed him, thought this was a bad explanation. He held that each mind experiences only what takes place in it, and God has pre-programmed minds so that what takes place in them corresponds to the external world. In other words, why give us such an inefficient theory where God steps in every time it's needed to make the connection between mind and body? Since God is the creator of all minds, minds know only what's inside them, and what's inside them corresponds to what’s in other minds and the rest of reality because God pre-programmed them all to always be in harmony. This was called pre-established harmony in his day.

So, in other words, no mind ever perceives an external object. Reality is made of units, and these units are physical and mental. They're both, down to the smallest, tiniest ones, so that there's some amount of mind in everything. And when you get enough of them together, organized into a bigger thing, there's more mind and more consciousness. And finally, you come to human beings, and you have a sharp awareness of consciousness, but only of what's inside the mind. He's not trying to explain the interaction between a purely physical and a purely mental thing. He's got mental-physical things from the beginning, and God has pre-programmed them so that what occurs in the mind reflects what's actually going on in the bodies. Strange view—it never quite caught on, but it's another explanation of mind-body interaction that, in effect, says there is no mind-body interaction. There doesn't need to be because God makes it all occur in the mind as it’s occurring outside the mind, and He’s pre-programmed them so that there’s never a glitch. So, perception is reliable, but there's no interaction.

I don’t know how all this grabs you, but it seems to me that whatever plausibility Descartes’ view had initially gets really stretched beyond believability when these other guys step up and try to answer the difficulty of interaction. Now, how is this viewed today? In philosophy, everyone still admits that, as it was stated, that kind of dualism can’t account for the interaction. And I have known distinguished philosophers in our own time who say something like this: nobody's solved the problem of interaction, and they’re probably not going to at this point. They've been trying for 400 years, and nobody’s come up with anything. So, they say, we can’t explain that, alright, but take any other theory of reality. Take idealism that says there are only minds, or materialism that says there are only bodies. They have way worse problems than this. So, they say, “I'm going to be a dualist. I have less that I can't explain than any alternative has that it can’t explain.” And that’s the end of that.

There’s also a group of people that call themselves Mysterians, and they say the reason we can’t come up with this explanation of mind-body interaction is due to the way our brains happen to have evolved. Given the way they evolved, either we can’t think of the answer—though there is one—or we can think of it, but it’s somewhere in our unconscious and we just can’t access it.

But anyway, dualists—and from there on, they agree—say dualism has fewer problems than the other extremes that are usually considered alternatives, okay? Once again, you could say that about any problem in any theory, right? If it’s legitimate to say, “Well, there’s no explanation, or it’s subconscious and we can’t access it,” then why can’t we say that about any problem that arises in any theory? Oh, well, we can’t answer that, but subconsciously, we know it; we just can’t bring it up to our conscious level of thought. Then how do you know it’s in the subconscious? Well, that’s my theory. That’s the answer I’m giving to these problems. Yeah, well, that’s pretty shaky.

By the way, this is the time and place to say that this dualistic theory of a human being—mind and body, where whatever is true of mind is not true of body, and vice versa, so that this great gap forms and interaction becomes incomprehensible—got a lot of boost from people who heard it from their Christian background because our scriptures talk about minds and bodies, and our scriptures talk about humans as though they have real freedom. So, a lot of people thought, well, you know, Descartes, all he’s doing here is putting into philosophy the Christian view of a human being. And I beg to differ—that is not so. Descartes got it wrong, and I’d like to briefly make a comparison and show you where and why I think it’s not the Christian view of a human being. For that, we return to my whiteboard. (I called it a blackboard earlier).

Here are the terms that Bible writers use to speak about human beings and their nature. They speak of soul, spirit, and heart. Heart is obviously a metaphor—they knew about hearts that beat in chests, and they're not talking about that. They use the term heart, and now this, I’m just reporting to you. I did a paper where I examined every instance of the words heart, soul, and spirit, both in the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament. This is what I found: the Bible writers almost always use heart for the central unity of a human being, that person’s identity. There are even places that say it’s from the heart that all the other issues come. This is the unity. They use spirit to speak of the diversity of what has its root in the person’s heart or self. So, they speak of someone having a spirit of wisdom or a spirit of kindness, a spirit of generosity, or having an angry spirit—that kind of thing. So, it’s the diversity that comes from the unity. The Bible writers use the word soul in a completely different way than it’s come to be used in English. In English, going back to very early times, soul has been used for what the Bible writers use for heart. But for Bible writers, the soul is the life of the body. It’s heart and spirit embodied.

And given that understanding of the life of the body, which expresses spirit and heart, when a person dies, it’s exactly the soul that dies—the life of the body dies. So, Bible writers don’t use the term the way it’s come to be used in English. I say again, the common meaning of soul in modern usage refers to what Bible writers mean by heart—the central unity, the identity of a human, from which come all the issues of life and all of a person’s capacities, inclinations, talents, defects. Everything is rooted in the heart, just the heart. And the Bible writers do not view that as something that is purely non-physical while the body is purely physical. They view all those aspects as integrated with one another. From a biblical point of view, it is not true that everything true of the heart or self or mind is false of the body, and everything true of the body is false of the heart. No, the heart is more than just physical, but it has its physical functions. It has physical properties and exists in space and time, along with the person’s body.

It is not what Gilbert Ryle ridiculed as the theory of the “ghost in the machine.” It’s not that the machine collapses and the ghost floats off somewhere else. From a biblical point of view, when a person dies, it’s more like having a limb cut offthan shedding a shell. The body is not just a shell, and it’s not just physical or biological until a person dies. While they’re alive, it’s expressive of everything that’s in the heart and spirit. So, it doesn’t see these things as walled off from one another at all. Does it spell out how interaction works? No, but it doesn’t create the gaps that need explaining. It doesn’t endorse the gaps that need explaining. It has a different sort of view. Am I going to say that maybe we know what that is, or because of how our brains evolved, we can’t figure out how that is? No, I’m just going to say there are a lot of questions we can raise that we don’t know the answer to now. Maybe we’ll get answers to some of them when we enter God’s final kingdom, and maybe we won’t.

I’ve heard preachers in sermons very dogmatically affirm that all things that puzzle us now will be made clear when we get to heaven. And it occurred to me on the spot that that’s a promise that is not anywhere in Scripture. Sorry, Charlie. It’s a nice idea, and maybe it will turn out that way, but we don’t have any reason to think God promised that. So, I think the Christian view is significantly different, different enough that it doesn’t raise the problems in exactly the way Descartes raises them. It may leave us puzzled about how interaction takes place, but it does not say that the properties and laws that are true of the body are not true of the spirit or heart, and it doesn’t do the reverse either.

So, the body is involved in learning. There’s a physical side to it and a non-physical side—the heart or spirit, which includes the mind, knows things and understands principles, and the body responds. The same sort of principles organize the body too. I’m not saying that the body alone knows anything, but there is no body alone until death. Only then does a body become something only physical, chemical, and biological. So, I would like to disavow any position that claims that what Descartes has presented us with is the Christian or biblical position. That doesn’t fly. The biblical position may still be bigger than we’d like in the sense that there are a number of points where we don’t know the answers, but it doesn’t give us the same problems that trouble Descartes’ theory.

The thinker who came after Descartes—and I listed these back in one of our first talks—who writes the most about this stuff and achieves some attention is a man named Baruch Spinoza. And Spinoza gives an account of human nature that overcomes the mind-body split, but is still very objectionable to most of the thinkers that encounter it.

Spinoza is a pantheist. That is to say, Spinoza holds that there is one great reality. And for him, you can call that God, or you can call it the world. He doesn't care.

And that one great reality is what all the parts that are inside it are made of—so rocks and humans are made of the divine being, and bodies and minds are made of the divine being, so we don't have this rigid gap. He then claims that all things are made of the Divine. That's what pantheism means. When we perceive reality, our perception is of the two modes in which we can be aware of reality, and they are—guess what—mind and body. In other words, in our experience, it looks to us as though there are minds and bodies, but really they are both ultimately made of the same stuff, the divine being. So rocks, puddles, and all that—they're all made of the divine being. When we perceive the world, our perception is such that we grasp it as minds and bodies, and they look like they’re opposed to one another, but really, behind the scenes, they're all made of the same stuff. So there's no interaction problem. They can interact because it's all the Divine Being interacting with itself. He doesn’t mind, I said, whether we call the one reality the divine reality, God, or nature—they're the same thing anyway, right? If everything’s made of the divine being, then what’s nature? The divine being. And you and I, forced by the limitations of our faculties, see it as mind and body and puzzle over how they interact. But that’s all solved if you start with his pantheism.

So, he's a pantheist, but he wants his cake and eats it too. He wants everything to all be made of the same stuff, so there’s no interaction problem, and then from there on, he explains everything as though you’re a dualist. We see the world as mind and body, sure. And if you bring up interaction, he resorts to pantheism. And if you bring up objections to the pantheism, he resorts to mind-body dualism.

He mainly wrote on ethics, but he wrote enough about the theory of reality and knowledge obliquely to give this much of an account. He then tried to write an ethics and spell out ethical laws as though they were rational laws. The title of his work was Ethics Done Like Geometry. So he has fundamental definitions and axioms, and then he tries to derive correlates and rules. He holds that this gives us a system of ethics that’s absolutely rigid. It shows us everything that’s wrong and everything that’s right, everything that’s obligatory for us to do, and everything that’s obligatory for us to shun and not do. And as countless commentators have said about it, if you concede to him his definitions, then the rest of the stuff would follow, yeah. But there are lots of people who don’t agree with those definitions, and he never goes into why they’re right or why other candidates are wrong. He treats them as though they’re the only possible ones.

So, his philosophy didn’t have, all by itself, a powerful impact on the history of philosophy, and I attribute this largely to Christian influence—Jewish too, Jewish and Christian, and then Muslim influence in civilization. All three are opposed to pantheism. Creation is not made out of the being of God. God has called creation into existence, where previously there was only Himself. There was no “nothing,” and “nothing” is not the name of a something out of which God made the world. I mean, there wasn’t anything out of which He made the world—God called it all into existence. So, it’s not favorable to pantheism, and most pantheisms have either ended up with short-lived popularity or none.

Nevertheless, it’s interesting to see a guy who takes that kind of tack. He thinks interaction is so severe a problem that he’s willing to become a pantheist to get over it. Unfortunately, of course, that didn’t go over well with the synagogue he was a member of—he was a member of a synagogue in Amsterdam—and they drummed him out. They tossed him out. You can’t tell us God is nature and nature is God and still be a Jew—that’s what they said to him. So, he got the boot.

Now, I’ve already mentioned a little bit about how Leibniz handled this problem, and maybe we’ll go into more detail about that. I wanted to make sure, though, that this dualistic view of the human being is distinguished from the Christian—that is, the scriptural view of a human being, which is not two things pieced together. It’s not that whatever is true of one is false of the other. Is that clear? I’m just trying to get that across.

Look, take something like memory. Memory is something in the mind. For Descartes, it’s going to be only mind stuff—memory in the body is another zone. But bodies do have memory, don’t they? There’s bodily memory that occurs over time. A body is trained to do something, and when someone is injured and their mind is not working rightly, they can still do a certain task because they’ve habituated themselves, and there’s a residual memory in the nervous system of the body. We’re not talking about stuff that’s purely mental or purely physical, with each ruling the other out. We’re talking about all the components of a human having all kinds of properties and being subject to all kinds of laws.

Even though it’s true that the central unity of the heart not only exercises activities that are covered by the laws, but has a center that transcends the laws and is free, it does both. I think that’s the biblical view, and not Descartes’ mutually exclusive entities that have nothing to do with one another but are somehow unified—or not unified—in a human being while they’re alive.

And by the way, I think the one significant piece of support for that is the way Christian theology and biblical teaching speak of humans in the resurrection. Everlasting life is guaranteed to humans, but it’s bodily everlasting life. They are raised from the dead and given a new body that’s not mortal. So, it’s not that there’s a mortal body and an immortal spirit—that’s called Gnosticism. That’s not New Testament teaching about this stuff, and I’m endorsing what I take to be the New Testament view.

So, we’ll cover other theories now from this same era that followed Descartes, which dealt with interaction. Then we’ll take a look at the British thinkers who went off on another tack and made their contribution. It’s those two groups that Immanuel Kant will take from in the end—taking the best out of each and trying to make a coherent system out of it. He’ll drop the worst, keep the best, and give you his idea of the whole picture. I’m not endorsing it—I’m going to be highly critical of it—but those are all treats and goodies yet to come.


آخر تعديل: الثلاثاء، 29 أكتوبر 2024، 5:40 م