Descartes seems to me of only historic interest, his ideas are doubtful and not particularly useful. I enjoyed his discussion about the senses and trying to reach the bottom of thought, but the primary goals, to prove the existence of the soul and of God through philosophy, were a failure in my opinion. As I progressed through the works, I felt a rising sense of disappointment by many arguments. It’s a shame, because I had a real desire to see some fantastic proof of God and the soul that, like an undeniable mathematical proof, would make me unyieldingly convinced of one or the other.
Discourse on Method
From the beginning, I found disagreement, when he took on faith that all men are equal in their faculties. This may or may not be true, but without a truly thorough understanding of man, we cannot say one or the other. In lieu of the truth, this is at least the more pleasant assumption.
When in Part Three he says he observes the laws and customs of his country and seeks moderate opinions for that which he has not pursued, I found this strange. Especially after he had stated that it is more likely for one man to be right than for many people to be right. A time and place have different ‘moral profiles’ of what the polar ends and the middle look like, it is not all uniform, which means the ‘moderate’ view is still not safe. For instance, in some time or place, it may be a moderate view that women and children should only be beaten enough to get the message across, which is obviously still an extreme view today, which is for the better. How could one who lives in a society that practices foot binding, make a moderate judgment of the practice? I should note that Descartes specifically meant moral opinion, so these are quite apt and challenging examples.
I found it interesting he says that “if we did not know that all that is real and true in us comes from a perfect and infinite being, however clear and distinct our ideas were, we would have no reason that assured us that they had the perfection of being true.” This is what he means when he says that God and the soul is the bedrock of his metaphysics. His way of approaching the idea of the soul was interesting at first, but it was a leap; why does our inability to reasonably deny our existence imply the existence of immaterial soulstuff? [I came to see in the preface of Meditations that he never meant this, but as that is a whole other work published years later, I hold that this is a fault in Discourses.] He talks about the amorphous concept of ‘perfection’ so frequently as well; I cannot tell what he means by this, especially when he compares the perfection of things. Descartes suffers a problem I am seeing frequently as I read more philosophical books, that is, an attempt to build fundamental things using concepts that are ill-defined. Why is it assumed all objects are organized as hierarchy? I wonder if the hierarchical organisation and composition of nature is present here, as it builds so naturally to God; I suspect with good reason that the concept of God comes first for Descartes, all that he writes here is a hasty afterthought, hence is so incomplete and fails to genuinely prove anything. In similar manner perhaps, he has a presupposition of the soul owing to his beliefs, that coloured his attempt to philosophically find the soul.
A problem that we have been presented today is the concept that our brain is mechanistic; we suspect our thoughts could be mere biocomputation than real thoughts, which brings into question whether ‘we’ truly control ourselves. I cannot affirm nor deny this idea myself, because it is in equal measure plausible and inplausible. There is doubt in the material view, as we all see there is nothing in nature that is at all similar to us, and we do seem to have freedom of will, the ability to analyze our patterns and disrupt them; yet the immaterial view is folly, a wishful and aggrandizing view of the self. We may only believe in our ability to choose because we dislike the idea of having no choice, though one who believes the material view should not let this fact change the way they make decisions. It’s not hard to see why the ancients invariably believed in the immaterial soul, as it’s quite natural. One should be careful not to let this fact alone lend credence to the idea. If we view man as a mere machine, he must be driven from one moment to another by responding to his sensory input and internal passions. The philosophers see the senses as faulty because they divert us, make us act beyond our will, thus freedom comes from isolated thought. Thus we may really understand Descartes principle I think, therefore I am. We can doubt the validity of all our senses, and the phenomena of dreaming and hallucination show they don’t necessarily portray reality, but we cannot deny the existence of ourselves and our ability to think, as our existence is necessary in the first place for us to try. He repeatedly tries to consider the the human when separated from it’s senses, to get to the bottom of the real thinking that is going on. It makes me think of John Lilly and his floatation tank, which are said to cause intense hallucinations comparable to an acid trip. What is the significance of this then? How would Descartes interpret this phenomena?
His discussion of a machine made in the image of man was interesting, and I wish it were longer so I could understand what people thought of this idea in his time. Such ideas have gone back to the myth of the golem. He first states such a machine could not use words or signs as we do, which we may think has recently come into question. It may still hold though. At the very least, though machine learning is inspired by the action of the neuron, it does not truly imitate it, thus even mechanistically could not be the same as human thought. A machine still only simulates the use of words and signs, but it will remain to be seen if this is truly how human’s think. His second statement, that such machines will be only purpose-fit, still rings true. Artificial general intelligence is still science fiction, and for all we know may always be, no matter if we may throw all the compute power in the world to make a comprehensive model that appears general. All this really points to a single problem we have yet to solve, which is understanding the real mechanism and origin of thought, or more specifically, our thought as it relates to our will.
A statement he makes is since we do not see any other causes at all for [the soul’s] destruction, we are naturally led to judge from this that it is immortal. In a way, this succeeds in explaining the thought process behind the belief in the immateriality of the soul. But this is the perspective of a living being, who is aware only of a subset of the whole life-death system, thus the whole is actually obscured, and we can only speculate on the truth of what happens beyond life.
Meditations on First Philosophy
Maybe I will revisit this work at another time, while reading the Replies and Objections, to make a more comprehensive analysis of the work to truly understand the points. I could write significantly more on Meditations than on Discourses, but I have no inclination to read Replies and Objections yet, nor to think anymore about Descartes. As I stand, I don’t think Suffice to say, that following Discourses quite closely, Descartes still does not achieve what he sets out to do. He is carried through by a particular preconception of what the mind is and how it may work. He also makes lazy statements on his belief in God. This one was very offensive, I think in Meditation Five, where he says that one proof of God is simply that he cannot imagine God without existence, which is a terrible argument. I will refrain from saying more on any particular point until I have re-read the work, as well as read the Replies and Objections, but I do not promise that I will do this.