The Cartesian Soul

The first thing you learn in any good philosophy of mind course is that Descartes was wrong.  As recently as the 1950s something like his view of the mind and its relation to the body was considered common sense, and many people still believe it today.  Descartes's view, roughly, is that the mind is a non-physical object that connects with the body through the brain (specifically, in the pineal gland).  This object is our consciousness (so the idea of unconscious thoughts is self-contradictory) and it contains everything of which we are directly conscious, including thoughts, beliefs, emotions, sensations, and representations from the senses of physical things outside the mind.  It is this non-physical mind that is the real you and that, if all goes well, will one day go off to heaven.  Many religious people still believe something like this.

What reasons might they have apart from blind faith?

1. The difference (asymmetry) between our knowledge of our own minds and our knowledge of everything else.  My beliefs about my body, and other people's bodies and minds, is based on evidence.  To see whether I'm bleeding after a shave I have to look.  But my knowledge of my mind is not like that. 

2. A second aspect of this asymmetry concerns my infallibility with regard to my mental states (i.e. my thoughts, emotions, sensations, etc.).  I cannot be wrong about whether I'm in pain or whether I think I'm bleeding (as I can be wrong about whether I actually am bleeding).  So my connection to my mind seems to be much more direct than my connection to anything else, including my body.  Perhaps I just am my mind.

3. We think of human beings as having a special importance.  This is reflected in such things as belief in human rights.  But the body is just meat and bones, a lot like an ape or a corpse.  Surely, some people think, there must be something more to us than the body.  We must have some extra, non-physical component, just as Descartes says.

 4. We also think of human beings as being responsible for our actions.  But all physical things simply blindly follow the laws of physics.  So if ethics is to make any sense we must be partly non-physical, and this non-physical part must cause our actions.

5. Various people report having had out of body experiences.  Some of these reports might not be true.  But if any of them even could be true, then we cannot be our bodies.  A self cannot be outside itself.

So, must Descartes be right after all?  Not necessarily.

Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests that the asymmetry referred to in points 1 and 2 above could be grammatical, not metaphysical.  In other words, the asymmetry arises not from a real difference in the nature of things (blood vs. pain, for instance) but from what counts as making sense and what does not in our language.  "I think I'm in agony, but I could be wrong" is not a cautious claim about one's situation, but nonsense, or a joke.  The same goes for "I think I want a doughnut.  I'll have a look."

Descartes thinks of the mind as a kind of object, specifically a container.  Thoughts and pains and the rest are then thought of as objects of a special kind.  Wittgenstein suggests that this is the wrong way to think about things.  Imagine everyone has a box and whatever is in it, even if this is nothing, is called its "contents."  That word has no other meaning in these people's language.  Now imagine that nobody ever knows what anyone else has in their box.  We could still talk about other people's "contents," but we would mean nothing by this except "whatever-the-heck-they-have-in-their-boxes-(including-possibly-nothing-at-all)."  Contents would not really be a kind of object.  The word "contents" would mean, in this imaginary language, something like x in algebra.  Wittgenstein thinks that words like 'pain' and 'thought' function like this in our language.  Instead of thinking of thoughts, etc. as special kinds of thing, we should not think of them as things at all in the usual sense.  [This example comes from Wittgenstein himself, except he uses the word "beetle" for "contents."]

If he is even possibly right about this, then points 1 and 2 do not prove that Descartes is right.  If Wittgenstein is right, Descartes seems not to know what he is talking about (although he could be reinterpreted as recommending that we use words like 'mind' in a new way).

What about point 3?  Some people deny that human beings have any such importance.  Others insist that we do, but point out that it seems odd to think this importance must come from our being made of weird, non-physical stuff.  Why can't it come from what we do instead?  How would being made of strange stuff give us moral rights?

The same kind of response can be made to point 4.  How does our actions being caused by a non-physical thing (a "mind") make us any more responsible for them than if our actions are caused by a physical thing (e.g. a brain) instead?  If the answer is that non-physical things are outside cause and effect, then how can the mind cause physical actions?  Perhaps the causation is one-way, from the mental to the physical but not vice versa.  Yet physical acts, drinking whisky for instance, certainly seem to affect the mind.  Responsibility seems to depend more on who or what causes an action than on whether the action was caused at all.  And if the cause is a physical thing such as a human being, we generally do hold that human being responsible for the action.

Finally, what about 5?  Such experiences do seem possible, but they do not really prove Descartes's point.  Seeing your body from outside does not prove that you have experienced being outside your body.  I can see into a room without going into it.  We might think we can imagine existing without brains or bodies at all, but it does not follow that any such thing is actually possible.  Perhaps God could make consciousnesses without brains.  It does not follow that He has done so.  If Mike Tyson punched me in the brain I would probably lose consciousness for a while.  If he destroyed my brain I think I would lose consciousness permanently.  Perhaps I would then find myself still conscious, looking down on my dead body, and so on.  BUT in the normal sense of conscious (judged by other people testing for reactions to stimuli) the dead are not conscious, so 'life' (and 'consciousness' etc.) after death would not be life in the normal, primary, literal sense.  Still, we might find, after death, that we find it natural to use words like 'life', 'thinking', 'I', etc. in our thinking, even if we now use these words in radically new circumstances (Look Ma, no body!).  Similarly, words such as 'thought' and 'intention' might not name objects, but we might find things in the brain that we find it convenient or natural to start calling 'thoughts' and 'intentions'.  This would be a new use of these words, but not a complete break from our current use.  If Wittgenstein is right, though, it would be a mistake to think that our words 'consciousness' and 'intention' have meant all along either what we might experience after death or what we might one day discover in the brain.  Right now that is just not how we use them.    

The main objections to Descartes are: a) that there is no reason to believe his theory unless you are religious (and faith proves nothing), and b) it creates horrible problems such as the mind-body problem.  This is the problem of understanding how the mind can affect the body and vice versa if mind and body are such radically different kinds of thing as Descartes thinks they are.  But how does anything affect anything else?  Causation remains a mystery to philosophers.  Some deny that it really exists.  Others say that for x to cause y is just for x always to be followed by y.  There is no reason why non-physical things should not causally affect physical things in this sense. 

So is Descartes right or wrong?  He could be right, but if any other account of the mind works then he might not be.  And perhaps he never even would have developed his theory in the first place if he had read Wittgenstein.  If words like 'mind' and 'thought' do not name things, why theorize at all about what these things are?  The whole enterprise seems to be a mistake.  This is not to say that religious belief in disembodied life after death is a mistake, but such belief gets little support from either philosophical reflection or scientific research.  The word 'mind' does not seem to function in our language as the name of an object (which is one reason why scientists do not investigate minds).

In recent decades, the first theory to emerge as a rival to Descartes's was logical behaviorism.