December 8, 2025 • 44 mins
He is considered the “Father of Modern Philosophy.” He is one of the most intelligent thinkers who ever lived and in the top five most influential philosophers of all time. Who is Rene Descartes? Why is he important? What does “I think, therefore I am” really mean? In this episode we examine the contributions of this great man.
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(00:08):
Hello, and welcome to another edition of Ideological.
I am a random smart guy, Zach Lee.
Today we're going to be talking about a guy named Helena
Descartes. That's the Frenchy way to say
it. I'm going to just say Descartes.
It's certainly not Descartes. You know, it's Augustine, not
Augustine. It's Descartes, not Descartes.
(00:29):
It's Barkley, not Berkeley. So there's some, you know, it's
it's Persephone, not Persephone.But today we're going to be
talking about Rene Descartes, who is one of the most
influential philosophers in world history.
This guy is a big deal. You've probably heard this name.
You might not know a lot about him, but he is a big deal.
(00:51):
You're not a big deal. Whoever you are, whoever's
listening to this, even if it's like the President Descartes, a
bigger deal and a brilliant, brilliant philosopher, you're
talking about one of the most intelligent men, probably who's
ever lived, and definitely one of the most influential
philosophers. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I'm getting Descartes before thehorse.
So let's talk about Descartes and his influence on philosophy.
(01:14):
Let's talk about his life, and then we will jump into some
fascinating things about him. First of all, he was born on
March 31st, 1596 in Lahaye, France.
It's since been named after him.So it's now Descartes France.
All right. Descartes.
No, remember, not the, not Descartes, Descartes France in
(01:37):
his honor. So, you know, you're a big deal
if you know people are naming cities after you.
His mother died a year after he was born, which is sad.
He was raised primarily by his grandmother, and he had a
brother, a sister and four half siblings from his dad and his
new step mom. So it almost sounds like the
start of like some sort of Disney movie.
Eventually, he's going to becomea beautiful Princess and he's
(02:00):
going to use his geometry skillsto make perfect glass slippers
that you perceive with your mind, which is different than
your body. But again, getting to cart
before the horse, We'll get there.
He is known as the father of modern philosophy.
How about that? That's a pretty, that's a pretty
solid title, the father of modern philosophy.
And he's probably in the top five most influential
philosophers in world history. So he's a big deal.
(02:24):
If I were to say that I'm not saying I like or don't like
these guys, whether you love them or hate them, the most
influential philosophers in world history.
If I, if I had to limit it to five, it's probably Plato,
Aristotle, Descartes, Kant and Hegel.
They're probably the most influential.
He got to attend the very prestigious Jesuit college.
The Jesuits are serious, dude. As far as Catholic orders, they
(02:45):
are the like, educational wing. They're very liberal now, but
they're the educational wing in the Catholic Church.
We got to attend the very prestigious Jesuit College at La
Flesche, where students were trained in Latin, Greek authors
like Cicero or Kikiro, Avid, Aristotle, Aquinas and the
Rhetoric of Quintillion. They would have studied natural
(03:05):
philosophy and metaphysics as well.
So that's going to be important for our boy Descartes.
As a boy, he was excused for morning exercise due to his weak
lungs and general frailty. So, you know, he's a genius, but
how many push ups can he do? We need to ask ourselves these
things. If there's a bunch of bumps on
your mind, or your brain rather,but there's not a bunch of bumps
(03:27):
where your ABS should be, you got to work on mind and body,
you know, if you're going to do the dualism thing.
After that, he studied law at the University of Poitier.
He did serve in the military briefly, but we don't know if he
was ever in combat. So again, more of a not exactly,
you know, a Maximus kind of character.
Not exactly some sort of gladiator guy, but very, very
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smart. He was a geometer by training
and gave rise to analytic geometry and what we now call
the Cartesian plane. Hmm, interesting.
So if you're a math nerd, this guy loves math because it's
certain. It's certain knowledge which he
will use to build up other areasof our knowledge.
He's a bit of a sleepy head. He did much of his study in bed
(04:10):
and preferred to sleep in. One of the things that's
interesting you'll see in history is that geniuses
typically prefer to sleep in. They don't typically get up
early, you know, when the day laborers are getting up and all
the yeah, the people working with their, their brown, they
prefer to work with their brain.And so they prefer to be a
sleepy. He would sometimes sleep for 10
hours a night and was excused from the 5:00 AM wake up call in
college. Now that just seems a little bit
(04:32):
lazy. But old Descartes loves, loves
being in bed. You know, he did have a daughter
out of wedlock named Francine Sweet Francine who died of
scarlet fever when she was just five.
She was baptized as a Protestanteven though Descartes considered
himself a Catholic his entire life.
This is going to sound old and racisty, but you know, the
(04:53):
French just I don't know if theyjust have that hot blood so that
like some old person would say they're they're Rousseau is into
BDSM and sleeping around and Voltaire has all these
mistresses and Descartes has a child out of wedlock.
Later on, Jean Paulsop and Simone de Beauvoir are going to
have a a throuple and an open relationship like the French
(05:16):
dude. I there there's some interesting
people. All right, So I mean Portage in
Le Francais. Yet I love the French people.
There's something something about them.
He held off on publishing how the earth rotated around the sun
because he didn't want to get into trouble.
So he he already saw that with his genius, mathematical and
philosophical skills toward the end of his life.
So it's so interesting. So he's he's this famous
(05:37):
philosopher. He has to go, you know, move and
people are riding against him and he's a genius and he's
shaking up the system because he's not just doing Aristotle's
philosophy. He's given the new science a run
of the Enlightenment. Here is how he comes to his end.
OK. It's very interesting.
Toward the end of his life, he became a court tutor to Queen
Christina of Sweden. I don't know if you know this or
(06:00):
not. Sweden is north of France.
It is cold. OK, Who forced him to give her
her lessons at 5:00 AM? So he's a sleepy guy.
He likes to sleep in. He is kind of weak and frail.
And she forces him not to, to get up at 5:00 AM, but to start
his lessons on some of these most lofty topics at 5:00 AM
each morning. That's when she wanted to have
(06:20):
her lessons and he died. Unfortunately, he's not eternal.
He's not still around on February 11th, 1560 at the age
of 53. The rigorous schedule, lack of
sleep, and freezing weather probably contributed to his
death. So sorry.
I've got like 1 little hair thisepisode.
Brought to you by Hair Hair. Grow it yourself.
(06:43):
Get a 5% discount on all ideological products if you're
bald. OK so something weird happened
after he died because he became way more famous after he died.
He was already famous when he was alive but more famous after
he died. He died in Sweden but his body
was moved to France in 1666. Now listen to this.
The skull was separated, likely stolen.
Somebody stole Descartes skull which is crazy from his body and
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it traveled around to different owners until the 20th century.
Just passing around Descartes dead skull.
OK. His body is now buried in the
San Germond Dupre and his head is on display at the National
Museum of Natural History in Paris.
Talk about mind body dualism. So his head is going to be
(07:27):
separate from his body even to this day, which is ironic
considering his view of it. Wouldn't we wouldn't say brain,
we'd say mind in a second. I'll I'll explain the difference
forever. Something that Descartes
bequeathed to us. I always have to be careful
saying that word, this mind bodydualism, that the spiritual is
different than the physical. His head now rests eternally
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away from his body, even though it's his physical head.
So it still kind of works. OK.
That's Descartes. That's his life now.
Why is he a big deal, Zach? You say he's an important
philosopher and he's getting it on with his maid and has a sweet
little daughter and she dies andthe cold weather and the
tiredness kills him. Thanks a lot.
You know, Sweden for for that I'm sure you're great in the
(08:10):
CrossFit Games or whatever, but you you killed Descartes.
So why is he important? OK, let's talk about his goal.
First of all, here is his goal practical human flourishing.
He thought that so much and Francis Bacon thought the same
thing. So much of the education going
on at this time in the universities that medieval like
scholasticism, where it's just building these cathedrals of the
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mind, but it doesn't seem to have much relevance to human
life. It doesn't seem to progress our
knowledge of sciences. It doesn't seem to make our
lives better and make our medicine better and make our
politics better. He thinks that metaphysics is
like he he he gives this exampleof a tree.
Metaphysics is the root of the tree, and then the trunk is
physics, but then the branches and the fruit that this
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beautiful philosophy tree shouldproduce are things like medicine
and mechanics and ethics or morals, so should have this
practical outcome. He says this in passions of the
soul. The function of all the passions
consists solely in this, that they dispose our soul to want
the things which nature deems useful for us and to persist in
this volition. OK, so part of his goal is
(09:17):
practical human flourishing. We learn all these things so
that we might better human lives.
This is a big emphasis during the Enlightenment.
The other thing though, is he wanted to create a system of
certain knowledge. He wanted to fight the skeptics
that incorporates the new science and can withstand
skeptical increase. So he's kind of starting from a
fresh foundation and saying we're in the Enlightenment.
We have a new view of science, new view of physics.
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We're not just building these cathedrals in the mind like the
monks in the Middle Ages. I want to create a system that
is rigorous, that is scientific,that is certain, that is
logical, and that can withstand skeptical inquiry.
The ghost of skepticism will appear over and over and over
again in philosophical history, and Descartes wants to deal with
(10:01):
it. So I'm going to give you his big
project 1st and then we'll, we'll drill down on some of
these more specific issues. First, Descartes to to start.
So, so here's what he wants to do.
He wants to start over, scrap everything he knows temporarily
for a time and see if he can build an irrefutable system so
(10:22):
that we can have human knowledge.
And if we can have that, we can progress to other things like
ethics and mechanics and you know, medicine and these kind of
things to better human life. He has and what he's famous for
is called the method of doubt. Other people have doubted.
This is Descartes method of doubt, though.
He traps himself in a room with a stove.
I've heard a lot of people thinkthat he trapped himself in the
(10:42):
stove. No, I, I don't know if you've
ever seen a stove. No, they're, they're small.
You can't just live in a stove. The, the word that he uses that
sometimes people mistranslate. It's a room that has a stove in
it because it's cold. OK, so he's in this room
basically what we think of as like a fire fireplace.
And he decides that he is going to doubt anything that can
possibly be doubted. He's not saying that it's wrong.
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He's just going to say that. He's going to pretend like it's
wrong, that that everything he thinks he knows is lying to him.
Everything is everything he thinks he knows could be false.
His senses are lying to him. Our senses have done that.
We've seen things that look likeoptical illusions.
If one of your hands is hot and the other's cold, and you put it
in the same temperature, water 1feels hot and 1 feels cold.
You can't trust your senses. That's ridiculous.
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Our senses deceive us all the time.
Stick a stick in water and it looks broken.
So we're going to doubt our senses, we're going to doubt our
reason. OK, we're going to, we're going
to say that we're in doubt everything we know.
We're going to doubt all of our history.
We're going to doubt whether or not we have a body.
We're going to doubt freaking everything.
Not only that, Descartes going to make it more intense.
He's now going to assume that God is actively trying to
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deceive him. So with the deck stacked against
him. So I don't believe my body.
I don't even believe I have a body.
I might be in a dream. I can't trust any of my
reasoning. I can't trust anything I've been
told. I can't trust any of my customs.
I can't trust any of my experience.
I can't trust any of that. And to make it even worse, God
who's all powerful is actively trying to deceive me.
He talks about an evil genius oran evil demon that his all
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powerful that is even working all its power against him to try
to trick him and try to deceive him.
Even with all of that stacked against him, is there anything
he can know with certainty? Because if God's actively trying
to deceive you, he could even deceive you on what you thought
was right in mathematics. He could even deceive you when
(12:30):
you were in dreams and the mathematics you had in like he.
If God is trying to deceive you,they would be very hard to find
something that you can know withcertainty.
Because what Descartes trying todo is with all that doubt and
all that skepticism, he's takingit as far as it can go.
If he can then find some things on which to hang his hat, an
anchor that will hold, he can use that as his foundation,
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hence foundationalism to build an epistemological system of
knowledge. And this is where he comes up
with his very famous cogito ergosum, right?
I think therefore I am. Let me explain what he does and
doesn't mean. First of all, he's not the first
one to come up with this kind ofidea.
There were a lot of people that knew that if they were thinking
they existed. Augustine has an argument where
(13:12):
he says I exist and if you say that I'm wrong then I still have
to exist cause a non existing thing can't be wrong.
And if I'm right then I'm right.So Augustine has already dealt
with this and there have been others.
What, what Descartes realizes iseven if God's trying to trick
me, and even if everything can be doubted, and even if all my
senses are deceiving me, the onething that I can't doubt is that
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I'm thinking. The one thing that I can't doubt
is that I mean, even if God's deceiving me, there's something
to deceive. Even if I'm being tricked,
there's someone to be tricked orthere's something to be tricked.
So he knows this, that he's thinking, that thinking is
happening, that he's a thinking thing.
OK, that's where he comes up with his cogito.
Ergo assume I think, therefore Iam.
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All he's saying by that is he's saying the thinking is evidence
that he exists because a non existing thing can't think.
So even if he's being deceived, even if you know, even with
everything that he's doing against himself, there has to at
least be thinking going on. OK, that is Descartes point.
There's a funny joke. And by funny, I mean it's not
actually funny unless you're just a super nerd Dungeons and
(14:18):
Dragons person. And it's this where Descartes
walks into, you know, a fast food restaurant, let's say
McDonald's, and he orders a burger and they say, would you
like fries with that? And he says, I think not.
And therefore he disappears again, Ridiculous.
That's not his point. He's saying that he even with
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all the decks stacked against him, he's still thinking.
If he's doubting, he's thinking.If he's deceived, he exists.
And so that's what he realizes in his famous cogito.
Now that's step one. Step 2.
He now has, with all the the forces of the world stacked
against him, he now has this solid rock on which to build.
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And from that he builds the ideaor not the idea he thinks
already has it. The existence or the proof of
the existence of God. OK, so now that I know that I'm
a thinking thing and that's all I know, what else can I know?
And he realizes that one of the things that he can know is that
God exists. He gives a, a form of the
ontological argument, sometimes with Descartes.
It's called the trademark argument for the existence of
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God. He here is essentially his
thing. I'm not going to get into the
ontological argument too much here just because I've already
done a lesson on proofs and refutations for God's existence
where I deal with the ontological argument at length.
So I would encourage you to listen to that lecture.
But essentially he's saying thiswhen he examines his mind.
He has the idea of perfection. Well, he hasn't ever experienced
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anything perfect. When he looks at the contents of
his mind, he has this idea of Infinity.
He certainly hasn't experienced anything infinite.
This cannot be an idea that he got from his senses.
It can't be an idea that he got a posteriori.
It can't be an idea that he got from experience, because he
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didn't ever experience anything infinite, and so he concludes
that this is evidence that thereis a perfect being.
There is an infinite being, which is why my mind sees it.
OK, let me read a a long quote that comes from meditations on
this topic and I'll explain whathe's meaning.
But again, I'm not trying to spend too much time on the
ontological argument. But granted, I can no more think
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of God as not existing than I can think of a mountain without
a valley. Nevertheless, it surely does not
follow from the fact that I think of a mountain with a
valley that a mountain actually exists.
Likewise, from the fact that I think of God as existing, it
does not seem to follow that Godexists.
From the fact that I'm unable tothink of a mountain without a
valley, it does not follow that a mountain or valley exists
anywhere. OK, but listen to this next
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part. But only that whether they exist
or not, a mountain in a valley are inseparable from one
another. But from the fact that I cannot
think of God except existing, itfollows that existence is
inseparable from God, and that for this reason he really
exists. Not that my thought brings this
about. This is what you know, A lot of
people have misunderstood about the ontological argument.
They're not saying if you can think of God, he must exist.
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That's that they're misunderstanding the argument.
What he says is not that my thought brings this about or
imposes any necessity on anything, but rather the
necessity of the thing itself, namely of the existence of God,
forces me to think this. For I am not free to think of
God without existence, that is, a supremely perfect being
without supreme perfection, as Iam to imagine a horse with or
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without wings. Here's what he's trying to say.
Whether or not there are any triangles.
You can't think of a triangle without it having three sides.
It goes together. OK, whether or not mountains
exist, you can't think of mountains, plural, without
valleys. OK, whether or not God exists,
you can't think of him. It was non existent.
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That doesn't make any sense. So he's not trying to say his
thought makes God exist. That's like Guanillo's criticism
of Anselm and it's it's a misunderstanding of the argument
to say it more clearly. He is not saying that if we can
think of the concept of God, then God must exist.
That's backwards. Rather, what Descartes is saying
is he's saying that since God exists and in fact has necessary
existence, This is why Descarteshas the corresponding thought
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which he couldn't have received through experience.
So it's not that his thought causes God, it's that God causes
thought. How does he get this thought of
Infinity and necessary being andperfection, all these things
that he doesn't experience? If God doesn't exist, God exists
and therefore he has this thought, not the other way
around. Exciting, boring, fascinating.
OK, so for Descartes, God is theground of being.
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OK? So it makes no sense to say that
God might not exist. In fact, if contingent things
exist, he knows that he exists as a thinking thing.
So he knows he exists. Other things exist, right?
Like I think so like this littlefan, portable fan in my my water
bottle and, you know, this microphone or whatever.
If that's the case, if there's such a thing as being that
obviously being capital bie God must also exist.
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That's what Descartes thinks. So all the doubts are against
me, and evil demon genius is trying to trick me.
I can't trust my body, Can't trust my body.
Is there anything I can know? Yeah, I can know that I'm
thinking, that I think thereforeI must exist.
And then on top of that, I have this idea of God, which could
only be made from God because I didn't experience it.
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So it must be planted there by God.
Cool. And then Step 3.
Because God is not a deceiver, because God is not a liar.
If this perfect infinite God exists, which we've already
established that he does exist, then then he's not a liar.
Or else he wouldn't be perfect and he wouldn't be infinite and
he wouldn't be good. And therefore he has not
designed us as a deceiver would OK Now a lot of people
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misunderstand this point. OK, Descartes is not saying that
if God exists, we can never missreason or misperceive things.
We do that all the time, OK? What he's saying is when we are
using our mind correctly and when something is absolutely
certain. Like in the same way if if God
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made us with a mind. That could take something super
clear, certain knowledge 2 + 2 is 4 and that wasn't true then
God would be a deceiver. Now we deceive ourselves all the
time, we make mistakes all the time, sin causes misreasoning
for someone like Descartes etcetera.
But he's saying when we use our faculties correctly the way that
God designed them to be used. To say it another way, when
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Jesus who doesn't have sin, and Adam before the fall, who
doesn't have sin, when they decide to use their mind and
their senses and stuff, if thoseare not working correctly, then
God has made a bad product. God is a deceiver.
But for the things we know with certainty, we know that God, we
can come to certain knowledge because God is not there to
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trick us like that. So why do we miss reason then?
Zach OK, so God, so he's the thinking thing, God exists.
Other things exist because God didn't deceive us.
And our mind can know some things.
When we're doing things correctly.
It seems like we get things wrong all the time.
Here's why for for Descartes, part of the reason that we miss
reason or reason incorrectly is due to our senses and our body.
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OK, He thinks that our body and our physicality and our
experience gets in the way of pure thought, right?
Things like mathematics, things like being these deeper thoughts
our body gets in the way of. In fact, from the time we're
little kids walking around sticking stuff in our mouth and
eating things and learning how to move and all that, we're very
body focused. We're very down here since
perception focused. He thinks that causes errors in
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our reasoning. The other thing he thinks that
causes errors in our reasoning is that we we make cognitive
mistakes because our finite willoutruns our embodied intellect.
OK, Our finite will outruns or outstrips our embodied
intellect. What does that mean?
It means that our will goes beyond our intellect.
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We go too far with our will and what we decide versus what we
know. And that leads us to make
mistakes and miss reason. Little break, little break, Get
some water. Maybe we'll throw some music in
the background. Descartes, he loved to sleep.
This episode's brought you by pillows.
Pillows makes a great silent weapon and a place to lay your
(22:17):
head and your guilt afterwards. OK, so rationalism, let's talk
about rationalism. He is considered a rationalist
in the early modern period alongwith guys like Spinoza or
Spinoza and Leibniz. Let me let me describe it this
way. This is a crass
oversimplification and a lot of people have written about how
this is an oversimplification. So I know that don't, don't DM
(22:39):
me. I know that I'm just trying to
make it easy for a podcast. When it comes to thinkers and
epistemology in this in this time period, they're typically
divided up into rationalist and empiricist, OK.
A rationalist does not say that all your knowledge is only in
the mind, OK? That's not what they say that a
lot of people have heard them say that That's that's confused.
A rationalist says the most certain and the most important
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things you know through reason, but you also have some knowledge
from the body. It's not sure it's probable.
It's less perfect, but obviouslyyou experience things OK, But
the rationalist is going to put,the rationalist is going to say
some of and most of your important knowledge is come to
by reason. An empiricist is going to say
that none of it is innate, that none of it's like that.
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It's all comes to experience. A true empiricist is going to
say that all your knowledge is going to come through
experience. You might have innate
dispositions like what we think of as instincts, but as far as
actual content knowledge, that'sgoing to come through
experience. Again, they're different guys
that are more or less on that spectrum.
It is more of a spectrum. Some people think some things
can be known this way and boringanyway.
(23:41):
Descartes though, is a strong rationalist and he believes that
there are ideas that are innate that you cannot learn from
experience. OK, so he, he to to give you
just a few that rationalist would use, for example, the idea
of Infinity. You don't ever experience
anything infinite. OK, now what some people think
(24:01):
is they think it's empirical. They think, OK, I see one stick
and I pick up another stick. And then I pick up a third stick
and in my mind I say dot, dot, dot.
What if I picked up sticks forever?
That's how we get to the idea ofInfinity.
The rationalist will then say, gotcha, what the hell does dot
dot dot mean? What does it mean to say we'll
(24:23):
pick up sticks? Wait for it forever?
The idea of foreverness was already in you, which is why you
could read it on to the idea of individual sticks.
OK, so the idea of Infinity, theidea of substance, right?
We don't actually see the thing that stands under things,
attributes or accidents, the things we actually perceive.
The we don't actually see hoarseness.
We just see like fur and brownness and we hear the weird
(24:46):
sound that horses make, but we don't actually see the substance
of hoarseness, the law of non contradiction.
To know that something can't both be and not be in the same
way at the same time, or that something can't be true and
false in the same way at the exact same time without changing
our terms. That just seems to be something
innate that we know. Were we taught that?
I don't think so. The concept of equality.
I don't mean like social justiceor something.
(25:09):
I mean like if I have 3 pennies and I have 3 pennies and I'm
like huh, those are the same. Did I experience the concept of
them being the same or did I just experienced 3 pennies and
three pennies? How can I put together this idea
that those are the same if it wasn't already in my mind, the
idea of causation, which David Hume will eviscerate, the idea
(25:29):
of perfection, et cetera. So the minds job for Descartes
is to find truth and he believesthat we do have innate ideas all
right in the mind of the baby isalready some some type of ideas
that will be shown to come to fruition later but not gained
through experience. OK.
The mind's job is to find truth and the body's job is to
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survive. That's one of the reasons that
we make mistakes in our reasoning.
Our body is here to survive and our mind is trying to find
truth. So that's his rationalism.
All right now let's talk about mind body dualism, which is
fascinating. It is a problem that was there
way before Descartes, but it hasnever actually been solved.
People think that they've solvedit.
(26:10):
I'm not sure that it's been solved.
It is a problem that bedevils philosophers to this day, and it
is mind body dualism. OK.
So for Descartes and his metaphysics, of all the things
that exist, of all the things that have been, there are
actually three things. There is body, OK, Not just our
physical bodies, but like thingsthat are corporeal, things that
(26:31):
are material. There's body.
There's these, these the stuff, there's mind, right, which
thinks, and the mind is different in the brain.
We'll talk about that in a second.
And then there's infinite mind, which is God.
So only God fits into that last category and that is a type of
mind. So really when we're talking
about things that are created things down here, we're really
just talking about mind and body.
(26:52):
So hence the mind body dualism. So Descartes basically thought
there's really only two kinds ofstuff other than God, who's in a
whole different category than everything else.
There's body, there's what's physical, there's what's
corporeal. And it's it's, it's main
component, its chief attribute, its nature is extension.
(27:15):
OK, which is a pretty good definition.
This little fan has extension and this water bottle has
extension in the water in it hasextension in the air in it has
extension in the microphone and my face has extension.
So like extension is kind of thething OK for him for for what's
corporeal and the nature of mindthough, is thought.
(27:37):
It's thinking. OK.
He says this in principles of philosophy, by the way.
That's that's probably his best work in my opinion.
You only need to read the philosophy part of it though.
The the rest of it's a lot of his science which is outdated,
but it does give you an insight into thinking and science.
During the the Enlightenment. He says this thought and
extension can be regarded as constituting the natures of
(27:58):
intelligent substance and corporeal substance.
They must then be considered as nothing else but thinking
substance itself and corporeal substance itself.
That is as mind and body essentially what I had just
said. There's physical things that are
extended and then there's mentalor mind things that are not
extended. Who's, you know, chief thing is
(28:20):
thought that's really what they are.
And he talks about this elsewhere.
He'll mention how that that chief attribute is really the
same thing as the substance. But OK, let's do a little fun
experiment. Are you you ready for a
funtivity? OK, this is going to be great.
Let's do this. I need you for a second to
suspend what you think you know about the brain and the mind in
(28:41):
philosophy. The brain and the mind are not
the same thing, and they're not the same thing for Descartes.
Your brain is this. What is it?
8 poundish clump of grey matter that looks like a gross Raisin
inside your head. And that is merely physical.
OK, It's it's a physical clump. The things that go on in your
brain, physical. The electricity, the chemicals,
(29:02):
the synapses, whatever that is, beta, block, block or something.
Anyway, that's all physical, OK?Your mind, or as it would have
been called in the Middle Ages, your soul is the immaterial part
of you. It is the part that actually
does the thinking. It can't be the physical part.
So a brain is physical. It takes up extension.
(29:23):
It has matter. The mind though, or the soul is
not physical. Here's what I mean by that.
Let's use your thoughts for for for as an example, think of a
pink elephant. OK, go, go for it.
I'll give you just a second. Pink elephant.
Now, my brain is physical. The chemicals that just changed
(29:45):
in my brain so that I could havethe thought of a pink elephant
are also physical. The thought though itself of
pink elephant is not physical. Well, Zach, it has to be.
Then we'd see it on an MRI, you idiot.
An MRI sees everything in your brain, especially when you do it
with iodine. Contrast you.
(30:07):
They can see tumors, they can see blood vessels, they can see
lesions. They can see anything physical
in your brain, entire brain. They can zoom in and they can
see it. If your thought of a pink
elephant was physical, was material, was corporeal, on the
screen would be a small pink elephant.
But you can't see the thought. You can only see the brain and
(30:29):
the chemistry and the electricity that causes it.
The thought itself takes up no extension.
How big is that elephant thought?
Think of it as bigger. Oh my gosh.
Did it take up more space? No.
What do you do with that? My experience of pain is not
physical. You know why?
(30:50):
Let's say I stick my hand on a burner.
What's happening are nerves, which by the way are in my hand,
are going up here into my brain,and my brain is causing a pain
sensation, but yet I feel it in my hand, but it's actually going
on up here. My hand can't feel anything
apart from the brain, which is why if you're paralyzed or
(31:11):
whatever, you can't feel certainthings.
So I'm actually, my brain is giving me a conscious experience
of pain, which is different thanjust a hot stove.
A hot stove does not have pain in it.
We push it stronger with everyone thinking that AI can
really think. Will a robot ever really feel
pain? I mean, we can program it to act
like it feels pain and yell and hop around, but it can't have
(31:34):
the conscious experience of painor the conscious experience of
what we experience, right? Like we experience emotion, we
experience self consciousness, we experience pain.
Pain is an idea. OK, if you take a dead person
and you burn their hand, even though their skin will burn and
(31:54):
the nerves are still connected to their brain because there's
no notice all the physical stuffstill there.
Notice all the I almost lost my soul right then coughing, all
the physical stuff still there. Yet they don't feel pain.
Why their brain's still there. In fact, right after they die.
It's because there's not the conscious experience.
The conscious experience, the mind, the soul seems to be
different than the body or the brain.
(32:17):
To say it simpler, what is immaterial, the mind has to be
completely different than what is material, the body.
So how on earth do they interact?
How on earth do they interact ifthe primary essence of mind is
thought and the primary essence of physical things is extension,
(32:37):
which includes things also like size, shape, motion, these are
all things that extended things do.
How on earth do they go together?
Say it this way, say I have thiswater bottle and I were to just
look at it and like stick out myhand like this and it were to
just start floating. We would freak out.
(33:00):
Do you know why? Because my will, something that
supposedly is not material, not made of matter.
The thought, not the things thatcause the thought, those are
material, but the thought itselfsomehow moved something that's
physical. I willed this bottle to float
and it just started floating. That would be miraculous and it
would seem like a magic trick. Now let me just show you
(33:21):
something that's equally as amazing.
Ready. Boom, I just moved my hand, my
will, my immaterial thoughts andimmaterial mind slash soul
somehow just jumped the gap to my material physical hand and
raising my hand just 'cause I want to check this out, I want
to move it down. What is happening?
I am moving physical things withwill.
(33:41):
Your will is not physical. Again, in an MRI, can a doctor
see your will, your your voluntariness?
No, what do you do with that? That is the mind body problem
and it's hard to solve. You can say that everything is
idea. You can say that everything is
physical and that our thoughts and experiences are just
physical. We just don't know how it works
(34:03):
yet. There is something to be said
that it seems like our minds arealways pretty close to us, so it
seems like they're somehow they're not omnipresent, so it
seems like they're somehow in space and time.
What do you do with that? Well, Descartes doesn't have a
good answer for this. The you can't say you have one
substance that has no extension and is only thought and another
that is extension and not thought.
(34:24):
And the two interact. How?
How could they interact? And yet it seems like they do.
So what do we do? Or do we just say there's not
two things? Do we just say the mind is the
brain, that the thought? We don't know enough about
science yet, but eventually we'll see how thoughts and our
conscious experiences is extended and we can put it under
a microscope. That still sounds ridiculous.
(34:44):
Well, Descartes doesn't have a good solution for this, and I
don't think anybody does since Descartes.
But what he says is that the place where this mind body
interaction happens is this tinylittle gland in the middle of
your brain called the pineal or pineal because it's funny gland,
the pineal gland or the pineal gland in the middle of your
(35:06):
head. Why does he think that?
Well, most if not all of your brain is duplicated on the other
side, right? Like it's a mirror image.
Your, your, your right part of your brain controls left side of
your body and left part of your brain controls right side of
your body. But there's this gland in the
middle that is not replicated onboth sides.
And so logically he thinks, well, obviously this is like the
primary, the souls everywhere inyour body, but this is like the
(35:27):
primary place. It is this is where this
happens, which makes no sense atall if the issue is how mind and
matter can interact. Taking a little gland that's
material doesn't answer the question.
OK, cool. Well figure it out, you know,
post in the comments. Let's figure out the mind body
problem and the the dualism. OK, more fun things about our
(35:50):
boy Descartes. Here's the next one.
Ready. Atoms do not exist.
By that there's nobody in the world named Adam.
Kidding, dad joke. How could atoms exist?
Let me tell you what atom. Atomos is the Greek word that we
get that we used to get the wordatom.
(36:11):
It means uncuttable. An atom is a concept.
Everyone thinks we've seen atomsunder microscopes.
You can't see an atom, somethingthat is the smallest thing, that
it cannot be divided. Conceptually, that makes no
sense. What we've seen is a tiny clump
of matter and we call it an atom.
But that's not what they meant by atoms.
What he's saying is if anything material is extended, which all
(36:33):
things that are material are extended, then there can be no
smallest uncuttable thing. You could always cut it in half,
further and further for Infinityto say it's stronger.
If you had a ruler, could God keep cutting that ruler in half
and then cutting that in half and cutting that in half and
cutting that in half forever? Yeah.
So therefore there's no smallestpart of that ruler.
There's no atom. There's not this tiny uncuttable
(36:54):
ball. In fact, an atom.
Wait for it. If you're like, no, Zach, we we
see atoms all the time and they surely exist.
Cool. They might.
They might exist conceptually. They might really exist.
We just don't know. We just haven't seen the
smallest piece of matter becauseit can always get smaller.
You know, smaller than atom, a quark, you know, smaller than a
quark, 1/2 quark. You know, smaller than 1/2
(37:15):
quark, 1/4 quark. You know, smaller than 1/4
quark, an eighth quark, cork quark, quark, quark.
OK, so the point is, is conceptually, if anything has
extension, you can divide it forever.
So there can't be a smallest thing that you can't divide.
Again, an atom is made-up of twohalf atoms.
That means it's still, even if we don't have the tools to do
it, conceptually divisible. OK, so there can't be atoms.
That's wrong. There's also no such thing as a
(37:36):
void or a vacuum. OK, How could there just be
nothingness? How could there just be
emptiness? Wouldn't that at least have?
Like, if you think of an empty BLOB of black space, you're
still thinking of blackness and space.
Even in a vacuum where there's supposed to be nothing in there,
in there, radiation from the universe in there, aren't there?
(37:59):
Doesn't that vacuum still have extension if there was to be in
a vacuum? So he doesn't think there can be
a true vacuum. I don't mean like what you get
chips off the carpet with, I mean like an absolute void in
nature of nothing in it. Like there there would have to
be something especially for things to be able to move and
interact with each other. If there's just a true gap with
(38:19):
nothing in there, you couldn't move anything at a distance.
So things are in a plenum for him.
So think of like, you drop a Pebble into a pond and it
ripples out because the water all touches he thinks that of
the universe. So even what you're thinking of
as empty space in space is not empty.
It's got radiation, It's got temperature, It's got color.
It's got all kinds of things. All right.
So more interestingly, you ready?
(38:42):
Pete is going to hate this. This episode is brought to you
by PETA. PETA, kill some dogs.
OK, So he thought animals don't have souls and therefore don't
feel pain. Remember, for Descartes, if you
have a mind, that's the same thing as your soul.
And only humans have souls. So animals, and he would
actually operate on animals livebecause he was convinced that
(39:03):
they didn't have souls, because they couldn't actually feel
pain. He he thinks that animals are
just fleshy machines. OK, they're just fleshy robots.
They don't actually have souls and therefore they don't feel
pain. Pain is a conscious intelligent
experience. OK, this desk doesn't feel pain
because it's it's it doesn't have a soul.
It doesn't have a mind. Zach, that's insane.
(39:24):
Like the dog has to be yelping and screaming and whatever.
Stop reading your experience of pain onto the dog.
Let me say it another way. Let's say I created a mechanical
dog, like a robot dog and I programmed it to when you step
on its little doggy paw, it yelps and pulls its paw back.
And when you it poops on the carpet with its fake dog poop
pellets, it acts like it's sad. At any point does the mechanical
(39:48):
robot dog actually feel sad? No.
Does the mechanical robot dog actually feel pain?
No. It's just programmed to Yelp to
preserve itself. He thinks that's the case with
animals. OK, to push it farther, what can
a real dog do that you could not, with enough technology,
train and program a robot dog todo?
(40:09):
And if you say, well, actually feel pain or actually love me or
actually understand, you've begged the question.
That's what we're trying to prove.
You can't appeal to that. And so his view is because they
don't have souls and minds, which you would have to have to
have things like pain and conscious experience and, you
know, act of thought and all these kind of things.
They're just fleshy machines. So we thought that they didn't
have souls and therefore did notfeel pain.
(40:29):
Regardless of your view on this,I would encourage you not to
harm your pet. Let's leave those fleshy
machines alone, OK? What is his view on ethics?
He's been critiqued for not being a huge ethical
philosopher. That doesn't mean he was
unethical. It just means that he, you know,
that he, this wasn't his main focus.
He does deal actually more with ethics than people think,
especially in his work passions.But he here's basically his view
(40:53):
of ethics. It's not super novel.
He says that the passions exist to incite us to action that
helps with our survival. So our our passions are helpful.
They give us utility, they help us survive and stay alive.
But he promotes a type of modified stoicism as far as his
ethic goes. So this is mainly explained in
his work, You know, the passionsof the soul.
(41:14):
But he has a great line in discourse on the method where he
says my third maxim was always to try to conquer myself rather
than fortune. Hear the stoicism in that.
If you haven't listened to the Stoicism lecture, do it.
It'll change your life. You'll learn how to not let
outside things affect your happiness, but it rather it's
within. The third maxim was always to
try to conquer myself rather than fortune, and to change my
(41:35):
desires rather than the order ofthe world, and generally to
accustom myself to believing that there is nothing that is
completely within our power except our thoughts.
OK, that's going to be his general ethic.
There's a critique. I'll end with this.
There's a critique against our boy Descartes, and the critique
(41:57):
is that his whole system is flawed because the cogito ergo
sum is flawed. So this critique goes back to
Bertrand Russell, and then otherpeople have hinted at this
actually, both before and after him.
What Russell would say is the only thing Descartes has shown
is that thinking is going on. He's presupposing the eye.
(42:18):
So after he does all this methodof doubt, the only thing he
knows is that thinking is happening.
He doesn't know that there's an IA self that does the thinking.
And so guys like Russell think Descartes starting point is
incorrect. Now I I disagree with them.
I think they misunderstand. Descartes is not saying I know
two things. There's an I of existence and
(42:39):
also there's thinking. Descartes defines himself as a
thinking thing. That's the only thing he so the
I and thinking are the same thing for Descartes.
So where if Descartes just said,OK, cool, Russell, I'll agree
with you, Thinking is happening,happening.
That's what I know for certain or thinking exists.
That's what I know for certain. It does not change his program
at all. He then defines the eye as the
(43:01):
thinking thing. So I think the critique of
Descartes here is misfounded. I think Descartes is smarter
than a lot of these other guys, and so I, I, I, I don't think
their critique against his foundationalism works.
Another thing he's been critiqued for, and this
especially comes out of the reformed epistemology camp, is
that you don't have to only believe things.
(43:23):
You can know that there are justsome brute facts that you know
without being able to prove it with Cartesian certainty,
assuming that a demon's trickingyou and all this other crazy
stuff, that you can just start there.
You can just say I had breakfastthis morning, my cognitive
faculties are working correctly.That's reasonable for me to
assert that I'm acting rationally and I don't have to
prove it with the type of certainty that Descartes wants
(43:45):
where he cannot be wrong even ifGod's trying to trick him.
So that's been another critique against him.
What do you think about our boy Descartes?
Love him or hate him, he is a big deal.
I hope that it stretches your mind.
If you want to do more reading on Descartes.
He is. I mean, he's a profoundly deep
thinker. He's a pretty clear writer.
And so you need to read Discourse on Method.
(44:07):
You need to read Meditations on 1st Philosophy, especially
Meditations. If you're only going to read one
thing by him, read that. You can read The Passions of the
soul. It's kind of boring and
technical in the the science andit's not actually correct.
He's written on things like optics and diatropics and all
these other things. There are little selections that
are taken from principles of philosophy.
There are several editions you can get online.
(44:29):
That's actually pretty good too.So those are the main things.
I hope that you found this to behelpful.
You know, Cogito ergo sum. Go get some this week.
You know, keep keep thinking andbeing, you know, keep sayla.
Let's just end there. Thanks for joining in on
ideological. We will see you next time.
Hello, and welcome to another edition of Ideological.
I am a random smart guy, Zach Lee.
Today we're going to be talking about a guy named Helena
Descartes. That's the Frenchy way to say
it. I'm going to just say Descartes.
It's certainly not Descartes. You know, it's Augustine, not
Augustine. It's Descartes, not Descartes.
(00:29):
It's Barkley, not Berkeley. So there's some, you know, it's
it's Persephone, not Persephone.But today we're going to be
talking about Rene Descartes, who is one of the most
influential philosophers in world history.
This guy is a big deal. You've probably heard this name.
You might not know a lot about him, but he is a big deal.
(00:51):
You're not a big deal. Whoever you are, whoever's
listening to this, even if it's like the President Descartes, a
bigger deal and a brilliant, brilliant philosopher, you're
talking about one of the most intelligent men, probably who's
ever lived, and definitely one of the most influential
philosophers. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I'm getting Descartes before thehorse.
So let's talk about Descartes and his influence on philosophy.
(01:14):
Let's talk about his life, and then we will jump into some
fascinating things about him. First of all, he was born on
March 31st, 1596 in Lahaye, France.
It's since been named after him.So it's now Descartes France.
All right. Descartes.
No, remember, not the, not Descartes, Descartes France in
(01:37):
his honor. So, you know, you're a big deal
if you know people are naming cities after you.
His mother died a year after he was born, which is sad.
He was raised primarily by his grandmother, and he had a
brother, a sister and four half siblings from his dad and his
new step mom. So it almost sounds like the
start of like some sort of Disney movie.
Eventually, he's going to becomea beautiful Princess and he's
(02:00):
going to use his geometry skillsto make perfect glass slippers
that you perceive with your mind, which is different than
your body. But again, getting to cart
before the horse, We'll get there.
He is known as the father of modern philosophy.
How about that? That's a pretty, that's a pretty
solid title, the father of modern philosophy.
And he's probably in the top five most influential
philosophers in world history. So he's a big deal.
(02:24):
If I were to say that I'm not saying I like or don't like
these guys, whether you love them or hate them, the most
influential philosophers in world history.
If I, if I had to limit it to five, it's probably Plato,
Aristotle, Descartes, Kant and Hegel.
They're probably the most influential.
He got to attend the very prestigious Jesuit college.
The Jesuits are serious, dude. As far as Catholic orders, they
(02:45):
are the like, educational wing. They're very liberal now, but
they're the educational wing in the Catholic Church.
We got to attend the very prestigious Jesuit College at La
Flesche, where students were trained in Latin, Greek authors
like Cicero or Kikiro, Avid, Aristotle, Aquinas and the
Rhetoric of Quintillion. They would have studied natural
(03:05):
philosophy and metaphysics as well.
So that's going to be important for our boy Descartes.
As a boy, he was excused for morning exercise due to his weak
lungs and general frailty. So, you know, he's a genius, but
how many push ups can he do? We need to ask ourselves these
things. If there's a bunch of bumps on
your mind, or your brain rather,but there's not a bunch of bumps
(03:27):
where your ABS should be, you got to work on mind and body,
you know, if you're going to do the dualism thing.
After that, he studied law at the University of Poitier.
He did serve in the military briefly, but we don't know if he
was ever in combat. So again, more of a not exactly,
you know, a Maximus kind of character.
Not exactly some sort of gladiator guy, but very, very
(03:50):
smart. He was a geometer by training
and gave rise to analytic geometry and what we now call
the Cartesian plane. Hmm, interesting.
So if you're a math nerd, this guy loves math because it's
certain. It's certain knowledge which he
will use to build up other areasof our knowledge.
He's a bit of a sleepy head. He did much of his study in bed
(04:10):
and preferred to sleep in. One of the things that's
interesting you'll see in history is that geniuses
typically prefer to sleep in. They don't typically get up
early, you know, when the day laborers are getting up and all
the yeah, the people working with their, their brown, they
prefer to work with their brain.And so they prefer to be a
sleepy. He would sometimes sleep for 10
hours a night and was excused from the 5:00 AM wake up call in
college. Now that just seems a little bit
(04:32):
lazy. But old Descartes loves, loves
being in bed. You know, he did have a daughter
out of wedlock named Francine Sweet Francine who died of
scarlet fever when she was just five.
She was baptized as a Protestanteven though Descartes considered
himself a Catholic his entire life.
This is going to sound old and racisty, but you know, the
(04:53):
French just I don't know if theyjust have that hot blood so that
like some old person would say they're they're Rousseau is into
BDSM and sleeping around and Voltaire has all these
mistresses and Descartes has a child out of wedlock.
Later on, Jean Paulsop and Simone de Beauvoir are going to
have a a throuple and an open relationship like the French
(05:16):
dude. I there there's some interesting
people. All right, So I mean Portage in
Le Francais. Yet I love the French people.
There's something something about them.
He held off on publishing how the earth rotated around the sun
because he didn't want to get into trouble.
So he he already saw that with his genius, mathematical and
philosophical skills toward the end of his life.
So it's so interesting. So he's he's this famous
(05:37):
philosopher. He has to go, you know, move and
people are riding against him and he's a genius and he's
shaking up the system because he's not just doing Aristotle's
philosophy. He's given the new science a run
of the Enlightenment. Here is how he comes to his end.
OK. It's very interesting.
Toward the end of his life, he became a court tutor to Queen
Christina of Sweden. I don't know if you know this or
(06:00):
not. Sweden is north of France.
It is cold. OK, Who forced him to give her
her lessons at 5:00 AM? So he's a sleepy guy.
He likes to sleep in. He is kind of weak and frail.
And she forces him not to, to get up at 5:00 AM, but to start
his lessons on some of these most lofty topics at 5:00 AM
each morning. That's when she wanted to have
(06:20):
her lessons and he died. Unfortunately, he's not eternal.
He's not still around on February 11th, 1560 at the age
of 53. The rigorous schedule, lack of
sleep, and freezing weather probably contributed to his
death. So sorry.
I've got like 1 little hair thisepisode.
Brought to you by Hair Hair. Grow it yourself.
(06:43):
Get a 5% discount on all ideological products if you're
bald. OK so something weird happened
after he died because he became way more famous after he died.
He was already famous when he was alive but more famous after
he died. He died in Sweden but his body
was moved to France in 1666. Now listen to this.
The skull was separated, likely stolen.
Somebody stole Descartes skull which is crazy from his body and
(07:07):
it traveled around to different owners until the 20th century.
Just passing around Descartes dead skull.
OK. His body is now buried in the
San Germond Dupre and his head is on display at the National
Museum of Natural History in Paris.
Talk about mind body dualism. So his head is going to be
(07:27):
separate from his body even to this day, which is ironic
considering his view of it. Wouldn't we wouldn't say brain,
we'd say mind in a second. I'll I'll explain the difference
forever. Something that Descartes
bequeathed to us. I always have to be careful
saying that word, this mind bodydualism, that the spiritual is
different than the physical. His head now rests eternally
(07:48):
away from his body, even though it's his physical head.
So it still kind of works. OK.
That's Descartes. That's his life now.
Why is he a big deal, Zach? You say he's an important
philosopher and he's getting it on with his maid and has a sweet
little daughter and she dies andthe cold weather and the
tiredness kills him. Thanks a lot.
You know, Sweden for for that I'm sure you're great in the
(08:10):
CrossFit Games or whatever, but you you killed Descartes.
So why is he important? OK, let's talk about his goal.
First of all, here is his goal practical human flourishing.
He thought that so much and Francis Bacon thought the same
thing. So much of the education going
on at this time in the universities that medieval like
scholasticism, where it's just building these cathedrals of the
(08:32):
mind, but it doesn't seem to have much relevance to human
life. It doesn't seem to progress our
knowledge of sciences. It doesn't seem to make our
lives better and make our medicine better and make our
politics better. He thinks that metaphysics is
like he he he gives this exampleof a tree.
Metaphysics is the root of the tree, and then the trunk is
physics, but then the branches and the fruit that this
(08:54):
beautiful philosophy tree shouldproduce are things like medicine
and mechanics and ethics or morals, so should have this
practical outcome. He says this in passions of the
soul. The function of all the passions
consists solely in this, that they dispose our soul to want
the things which nature deems useful for us and to persist in
this volition. OK, so part of his goal is
(09:17):
practical human flourishing. We learn all these things so
that we might better human lives.
This is a big emphasis during the Enlightenment.
The other thing though, is he wanted to create a system of
certain knowledge. He wanted to fight the skeptics
that incorporates the new science and can withstand
skeptical increase. So he's kind of starting from a
fresh foundation and saying we're in the Enlightenment.
We have a new view of science, new view of physics.
(09:40):
We're not just building these cathedrals in the mind like the
monks in the Middle Ages. I want to create a system that
is rigorous, that is scientific,that is certain, that is
logical, and that can withstand skeptical inquiry.
The ghost of skepticism will appear over and over and over
again in philosophical history, and Descartes wants to deal with
(10:01):
it. So I'm going to give you his big
project 1st and then we'll, we'll drill down on some of
these more specific issues. First, Descartes to to start.
So, so here's what he wants to do.
He wants to start over, scrap everything he knows temporarily
for a time and see if he can build an irrefutable system so
(10:22):
that we can have human knowledge.
And if we can have that, we can progress to other things like
ethics and mechanics and you know, medicine and these kind of
things to better human life. He has and what he's famous for
is called the method of doubt. Other people have doubted.
This is Descartes method of doubt, though.
He traps himself in a room with a stove.
I've heard a lot of people thinkthat he trapped himself in the
(10:42):
stove. No, I, I don't know if you've
ever seen a stove. No, they're, they're small.
You can't just live in a stove. The, the word that he uses that
sometimes people mistranslate. It's a room that has a stove in
it because it's cold. OK, so he's in this room
basically what we think of as like a fire fireplace.
And he decides that he is going to doubt anything that can
possibly be doubted. He's not saying that it's wrong.
(11:05):
He's just going to say that. He's going to pretend like it's
wrong, that that everything he thinks he knows is lying to him.
Everything is everything he thinks he knows could be false.
His senses are lying to him. Our senses have done that.
We've seen things that look likeoptical illusions.
If one of your hands is hot and the other's cold, and you put it
in the same temperature, water 1feels hot and 1 feels cold.
You can't trust your senses. That's ridiculous.
(11:27):
Our senses deceive us all the time.
Stick a stick in water and it looks broken.
So we're going to doubt our senses, we're going to doubt our
reason. OK, we're going to, we're going
to say that we're in doubt everything we know.
We're going to doubt all of our history.
We're going to doubt whether or not we have a body.
We're going to doubt freaking everything.
Not only that, Descartes going to make it more intense.
He's now going to assume that God is actively trying to
(11:49):
deceive him. So with the deck stacked against
him. So I don't believe my body.
I don't even believe I have a body.
I might be in a dream. I can't trust any of my
reasoning. I can't trust anything I've been
told. I can't trust any of my customs.
I can't trust any of my experience.
I can't trust any of that. And to make it even worse, God
who's all powerful is actively trying to deceive me.
He talks about an evil genius oran evil demon that his all
(12:10):
powerful that is even working all its power against him to try
to trick him and try to deceive him.
Even with all of that stacked against him, is there anything
he can know with certainty? Because if God's actively trying
to deceive you, he could even deceive you on what you thought
was right in mathematics. He could even deceive you when
(12:30):
you were in dreams and the mathematics you had in like he.
If God is trying to deceive you,they would be very hard to find
something that you can know withcertainty.
Because what Descartes trying todo is with all that doubt and
all that skepticism, he's takingit as far as it can go.
If he can then find some things on which to hang his hat, an
anchor that will hold, he can use that as his foundation,
(12:50):
hence foundationalism to build an epistemological system of
knowledge. And this is where he comes up
with his very famous cogito ergosum, right?
I think therefore I am. Let me explain what he does and
doesn't mean. First of all, he's not the first
one to come up with this kind ofidea.
There were a lot of people that knew that if they were thinking
they existed. Augustine has an argument where
(13:12):
he says I exist and if you say that I'm wrong then I still have
to exist cause a non existing thing can't be wrong.
And if I'm right then I'm right.So Augustine has already dealt
with this and there have been others.
What, what Descartes realizes iseven if God's trying to trick
me, and even if everything can be doubted, and even if all my
senses are deceiving me, the onething that I can't doubt is that
(13:36):
I'm thinking. The one thing that I can't doubt
is that I mean, even if God's deceiving me, there's something
to deceive. Even if I'm being tricked,
there's someone to be tricked orthere's something to be tricked.
So he knows this, that he's thinking, that thinking is
happening, that he's a thinking thing.
OK, that's where he comes up with his cogito.
Ergo assume I think, therefore Iam.
(13:57):
All he's saying by that is he's saying the thinking is evidence
that he exists because a non existing thing can't think.
So even if he's being deceived, even if you know, even with
everything that he's doing against himself, there has to at
least be thinking going on. OK, that is Descartes point.
There's a funny joke. And by funny, I mean it's not
actually funny unless you're just a super nerd Dungeons and
(14:18):
Dragons person. And it's this where Descartes
walks into, you know, a fast food restaurant, let's say
McDonald's, and he orders a burger and they say, would you
like fries with that? And he says, I think not.
And therefore he disappears again, Ridiculous.
That's not his point. He's saying that he even with
(14:38):
all the decks stacked against him, he's still thinking.
If he's doubting, he's thinking.If he's deceived, he exists.
And so that's what he realizes in his famous cogito.
Now that's step one. Step 2.
He now has, with all the the forces of the world stacked
against him, he now has this solid rock on which to build.
(14:59):
And from that he builds the ideaor not the idea he thinks
already has it. The existence or the proof of
the existence of God. OK, so now that I know that I'm
a thinking thing and that's all I know, what else can I know?
And he realizes that one of the things that he can know is that
God exists. He gives a, a form of the
ontological argument, sometimes with Descartes.
It's called the trademark argument for the existence of
(15:20):
God. He here is essentially his
thing. I'm not going to get into the
ontological argument too much here just because I've already
done a lesson on proofs and refutations for God's existence
where I deal with the ontological argument at length.
So I would encourage you to listen to that lecture.
But essentially he's saying thiswhen he examines his mind.
He has the idea of perfection. Well, he hasn't ever experienced
(15:43):
anything perfect. When he looks at the contents of
his mind, he has this idea of Infinity.
He certainly hasn't experienced anything infinite.
This cannot be an idea that he got from his senses.
It can't be an idea that he got a posteriori.
It can't be an idea that he got from experience, because he
(16:03):
didn't ever experience anything infinite, and so he concludes
that this is evidence that thereis a perfect being.
There is an infinite being, which is why my mind sees it.
OK, let me read a a long quote that comes from meditations on
this topic and I'll explain whathe's meaning.
But again, I'm not trying to spend too much time on the
ontological argument. But granted, I can no more think
(16:24):
of God as not existing than I can think of a mountain without
a valley. Nevertheless, it surely does not
follow from the fact that I think of a mountain with a
valley that a mountain actually exists.
Likewise, from the fact that I think of God as existing, it
does not seem to follow that Godexists.
From the fact that I'm unable tothink of a mountain without a
valley, it does not follow that a mountain or valley exists
anywhere. OK, but listen to this next
(16:47):
part. But only that whether they exist
or not, a mountain in a valley are inseparable from one
another. But from the fact that I cannot
think of God except existing, itfollows that existence is
inseparable from God, and that for this reason he really
exists. Not that my thought brings this
about. This is what you know, A lot of
people have misunderstood about the ontological argument.
They're not saying if you can think of God, he must exist.
(17:08):
That's that they're misunderstanding the argument.
What he says is not that my thought brings this about or
imposes any necessity on anything, but rather the
necessity of the thing itself, namely of the existence of God,
forces me to think this. For I am not free to think of
God without existence, that is, a supremely perfect being
without supreme perfection, as Iam to imagine a horse with or
(17:30):
without wings. Here's what he's trying to say.
Whether or not there are any triangles.
You can't think of a triangle without it having three sides.
It goes together. OK, whether or not mountains
exist, you can't think of mountains, plural, without
valleys. OK, whether or not God exists,
you can't think of him. It was non existent.
(17:50):
That doesn't make any sense. So he's not trying to say his
thought makes God exist. That's like Guanillo's criticism
of Anselm and it's it's a misunderstanding of the argument
to say it more clearly. He is not saying that if we can
think of the concept of God, then God must exist.
That's backwards. Rather, what Descartes is saying
is he's saying that since God exists and in fact has necessary
existence, This is why Descarteshas the corresponding thought
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which he couldn't have received through experience.
So it's not that his thought causes God, it's that God causes
thought. How does he get this thought of
Infinity and necessary being andperfection, all these things
that he doesn't experience? If God doesn't exist, God exists
and therefore he has this thought, not the other way
around. Exciting, boring, fascinating.
OK, so for Descartes, God is theground of being.
(18:39):
OK? So it makes no sense to say that
God might not exist. In fact, if contingent things
exist, he knows that he exists as a thinking thing.
So he knows he exists. Other things exist, right?
Like I think so like this littlefan, portable fan in my my water
bottle and, you know, this microphone or whatever.
If that's the case, if there's such a thing as being that
obviously being capital bie God must also exist.
(19:00):
That's what Descartes thinks. So all the doubts are against
me, and evil demon genius is trying to trick me.
I can't trust my body, Can't trust my body.
Is there anything I can know? Yeah, I can know that I'm
thinking, that I think thereforeI must exist.
And then on top of that, I have this idea of God, which could
only be made from God because I didn't experience it.
(19:21):
So it must be planted there by God.
Cool. And then Step 3.
Because God is not a deceiver, because God is not a liar.
If this perfect infinite God exists, which we've already
established that he does exist, then then he's not a liar.
Or else he wouldn't be perfect and he wouldn't be infinite and
he wouldn't be good. And therefore he has not
designed us as a deceiver would OK Now a lot of people
(19:43):
misunderstand this point. OK, Descartes is not saying that
if God exists, we can never missreason or misperceive things.
We do that all the time, OK? What he's saying is when we are
using our mind correctly and when something is absolutely
certain. Like in the same way if if God
(20:03):
made us with a mind. That could take something super
clear, certain knowledge 2 + 2 is 4 and that wasn't true then
God would be a deceiver. Now we deceive ourselves all the
time, we make mistakes all the time, sin causes misreasoning
for someone like Descartes etcetera.
But he's saying when we use our faculties correctly the way that
God designed them to be used. To say it another way, when
(20:25):
Jesus who doesn't have sin, and Adam before the fall, who
doesn't have sin, when they decide to use their mind and
their senses and stuff, if thoseare not working correctly, then
God has made a bad product. God is a deceiver.
But for the things we know with certainty, we know that God, we
can come to certain knowledge because God is not there to
(20:45):
trick us like that. So why do we miss reason then?
Zach OK, so God, so he's the thinking thing, God exists.
Other things exist because God didn't deceive us.
And our mind can know some things.
When we're doing things correctly.
It seems like we get things wrong all the time.
Here's why for for Descartes, part of the reason that we miss
reason or reason incorrectly is due to our senses and our body.
(21:09):
OK, He thinks that our body and our physicality and our
experience gets in the way of pure thought, right?
Things like mathematics, things like being these deeper thoughts
our body gets in the way of. In fact, from the time we're
little kids walking around sticking stuff in our mouth and
eating things and learning how to move and all that, we're very
body focused. We're very down here since
perception focused. He thinks that causes errors in
(21:31):
our reasoning. The other thing he thinks that
causes errors in our reasoning is that we we make cognitive
mistakes because our finite willoutruns our embodied intellect.
OK, Our finite will outruns or outstrips our embodied
intellect. What does that mean?
It means that our will goes beyond our intellect.
(21:54):
We go too far with our will and what we decide versus what we
know. And that leads us to make
mistakes and miss reason. Little break, little break, Get
some water. Maybe we'll throw some music in
the background. Descartes, he loved to sleep.
This episode's brought you by pillows.
Pillows makes a great silent weapon and a place to lay your
(22:17):
head and your guilt afterwards. OK, so rationalism, let's talk
about rationalism. He is considered a rationalist
in the early modern period alongwith guys like Spinoza or
Spinoza and Leibniz. Let me let me describe it this
way. This is a crass
oversimplification and a lot of people have written about how
this is an oversimplification. So I know that don't, don't DM
(22:39):
me. I know that I'm just trying to
make it easy for a podcast. When it comes to thinkers and
epistemology in this in this time period, they're typically
divided up into rationalist and empiricist, OK.
A rationalist does not say that all your knowledge is only in
the mind, OK? That's not what they say that a
lot of people have heard them say that That's that's confused.
A rationalist says the most certain and the most important
(23:00):
things you know through reason, but you also have some knowledge
from the body. It's not sure it's probable.
It's less perfect, but obviouslyyou experience things OK, But
the rationalist is going to put,the rationalist is going to say
some of and most of your important knowledge is come to
by reason. An empiricist is going to say
that none of it is innate, that none of it's like that.
(23:20):
It's all comes to experience. A true empiricist is going to
say that all your knowledge is going to come through
experience. You might have innate
dispositions like what we think of as instincts, but as far as
actual content knowledge, that'sgoing to come through
experience. Again, they're different guys
that are more or less on that spectrum.
It is more of a spectrum. Some people think some things
can be known this way and boringanyway.
(23:41):
Descartes though, is a strong rationalist and he believes that
there are ideas that are innate that you cannot learn from
experience. OK, so he, he to to give you
just a few that rationalist would use, for example, the idea
of Infinity. You don't ever experience
anything infinite. OK, now what some people think
(24:01):
is they think it's empirical. They think, OK, I see one stick
and I pick up another stick. And then I pick up a third stick
and in my mind I say dot, dot, dot.
What if I picked up sticks forever?
That's how we get to the idea ofInfinity.
The rationalist will then say, gotcha, what the hell does dot
dot dot mean? What does it mean to say we'll
(24:23):
pick up sticks? Wait for it forever?
The idea of foreverness was already in you, which is why you
could read it on to the idea of individual sticks.
OK, so the idea of Infinity, theidea of substance, right?
We don't actually see the thing that stands under things,
attributes or accidents, the things we actually perceive.
The we don't actually see hoarseness.
We just see like fur and brownness and we hear the weird
(24:46):
sound that horses make, but we don't actually see the substance
of hoarseness, the law of non contradiction.
To know that something can't both be and not be in the same
way at the same time, or that something can't be true and
false in the same way at the exact same time without changing
our terms. That just seems to be something
innate that we know. Were we taught that?
I don't think so. The concept of equality.
I don't mean like social justiceor something.
(25:09):
I mean like if I have 3 pennies and I have 3 pennies and I'm
like huh, those are the same. Did I experience the concept of
them being the same or did I just experienced 3 pennies and
three pennies? How can I put together this idea
that those are the same if it wasn't already in my mind, the
idea of causation, which David Hume will eviscerate, the idea
(25:29):
of perfection, et cetera. So the minds job for Descartes
is to find truth and he believesthat we do have innate ideas all
right in the mind of the baby isalready some some type of ideas
that will be shown to come to fruition later but not gained
through experience. OK.
The mind's job is to find truth and the body's job is to
(25:49):
survive. That's one of the reasons that
we make mistakes in our reasoning.
Our body is here to survive and our mind is trying to find
truth. So that's his rationalism.
All right now let's talk about mind body dualism, which is
fascinating. It is a problem that was there
way before Descartes, but it hasnever actually been solved.
People think that they've solvedit.
(26:10):
I'm not sure that it's been solved.
It is a problem that bedevils philosophers to this day, and it
is mind body dualism. OK.
So for Descartes and his metaphysics, of all the things
that exist, of all the things that have been, there are
actually three things. There is body, OK, Not just our
physical bodies, but like thingsthat are corporeal, things that
(26:31):
are material. There's body.
There's these, these the stuff, there's mind, right, which
thinks, and the mind is different in the brain.
We'll talk about that in a second.
And then there's infinite mind, which is God.
So only God fits into that last category and that is a type of
mind. So really when we're talking
about things that are created things down here, we're really
just talking about mind and body.
(26:52):
So hence the mind body dualism. So Descartes basically thought
there's really only two kinds ofstuff other than God, who's in a
whole different category than everything else.
There's body, there's what's physical, there's what's
corporeal. And it's it's, it's main
component, its chief attribute, its nature is extension.
(27:15):
OK, which is a pretty good definition.
This little fan has extension and this water bottle has
extension in the water in it hasextension in the air in it has
extension in the microphone and my face has extension.
So like extension is kind of thething OK for him for for what's
corporeal and the nature of mindthough, is thought.
(27:37):
It's thinking. OK.
He says this in principles of philosophy, by the way.
That's that's probably his best work in my opinion.
You only need to read the philosophy part of it though.
The the rest of it's a lot of his science which is outdated,
but it does give you an insight into thinking and science.
During the the Enlightenment. He says this thought and
extension can be regarded as constituting the natures of
(27:58):
intelligent substance and corporeal substance.
They must then be considered as nothing else but thinking
substance itself and corporeal substance itself.
That is as mind and body essentially what I had just
said. There's physical things that are
extended and then there's mentalor mind things that are not
extended. Who's, you know, chief thing is
(28:20):
thought that's really what they are.
And he talks about this elsewhere.
He'll mention how that that chief attribute is really the
same thing as the substance. But OK, let's do a little fun
experiment. Are you you ready for a
funtivity? OK, this is going to be great.
Let's do this. I need you for a second to
suspend what you think you know about the brain and the mind in
(28:41):
philosophy. The brain and the mind are not
the same thing, and they're not the same thing for Descartes.
Your brain is this. What is it?
8 poundish clump of grey matter that looks like a gross Raisin
inside your head. And that is merely physical.
OK, It's it's a physical clump. The things that go on in your
brain, physical. The electricity, the chemicals,
(29:02):
the synapses, whatever that is, beta, block, block or something.
Anyway, that's all physical, OK?Your mind, or as it would have
been called in the Middle Ages, your soul is the immaterial part
of you. It is the part that actually
does the thinking. It can't be the physical part.
So a brain is physical. It takes up extension.
(29:23):
It has matter. The mind though, or the soul is
not physical. Here's what I mean by that.
Let's use your thoughts for for for as an example, think of a
pink elephant. OK, go, go for it.
I'll give you just a second. Pink elephant.
Now, my brain is physical. The chemicals that just changed
(29:45):
in my brain so that I could havethe thought of a pink elephant
are also physical. The thought though itself of
pink elephant is not physical. Well, Zach, it has to be.
Then we'd see it on an MRI, you idiot.
An MRI sees everything in your brain, especially when you do it
with iodine. Contrast you.
(30:07):
They can see tumors, they can see blood vessels, they can see
lesions. They can see anything physical
in your brain, entire brain. They can zoom in and they can
see it. If your thought of a pink
elephant was physical, was material, was corporeal, on the
screen would be a small pink elephant.
But you can't see the thought. You can only see the brain and
(30:29):
the chemistry and the electricity that causes it.
The thought itself takes up no extension.
How big is that elephant thought?
Think of it as bigger. Oh my gosh.
Did it take up more space? No.
What do you do with that? My experience of pain is not
physical. You know why?
(30:50):
Let's say I stick my hand on a burner.
What's happening are nerves, which by the way are in my hand,
are going up here into my brain,and my brain is causing a pain
sensation, but yet I feel it in my hand, but it's actually going
on up here. My hand can't feel anything
apart from the brain, which is why if you're paralyzed or
(31:11):
whatever, you can't feel certainthings.
So I'm actually, my brain is giving me a conscious experience
of pain, which is different thanjust a hot stove.
A hot stove does not have pain in it.
We push it stronger with everyone thinking that AI can
really think. Will a robot ever really feel
pain? I mean, we can program it to act
like it feels pain and yell and hop around, but it can't have
(31:34):
the conscious experience of painor the conscious experience of
what we experience, right? Like we experience emotion, we
experience self consciousness, we experience pain.
Pain is an idea. OK, if you take a dead person
and you burn their hand, even though their skin will burn and
(31:54):
the nerves are still connected to their brain because there's
no notice all the physical stuffstill there.
Notice all the I almost lost my soul right then coughing, all
the physical stuff still there. Yet they don't feel pain.
Why their brain's still there. In fact, right after they die.
It's because there's not the conscious experience.
The conscious experience, the mind, the soul seems to be
different than the body or the brain.
(32:17):
To say it simpler, what is immaterial, the mind has to be
completely different than what is material, the body.
So how on earth do they interact?
How on earth do they interact ifthe primary essence of mind is
thought and the primary essence of physical things is extension,
(32:37):
which includes things also like size, shape, motion, these are
all things that extended things do.
How on earth do they go together?
Say it this way, say I have thiswater bottle and I were to just
look at it and like stick out myhand like this and it were to
just start floating. We would freak out.
(33:00):
Do you know why? Because my will, something that
supposedly is not material, not made of matter.
The thought, not the things thatcause the thought, those are
material, but the thought itselfsomehow moved something that's
physical. I willed this bottle to float
and it just started floating. That would be miraculous and it
would seem like a magic trick. Now let me just show you
(33:21):
something that's equally as amazing.
Ready. Boom, I just moved my hand, my
will, my immaterial thoughts andimmaterial mind slash soul
somehow just jumped the gap to my material physical hand and
raising my hand just 'cause I want to check this out, I want
to move it down. What is happening?
I am moving physical things withwill.
(33:41):
Your will is not physical. Again, in an MRI, can a doctor
see your will, your your voluntariness?
No, what do you do with that? That is the mind body problem
and it's hard to solve. You can say that everything is
idea. You can say that everything is
physical and that our thoughts and experiences are just
physical. We just don't know how it works
(34:03):
yet. There is something to be said
that it seems like our minds arealways pretty close to us, so it
seems like they're somehow they're not omnipresent, so it
seems like they're somehow in space and time.
What do you do with that? Well, Descartes doesn't have a
good answer for this. The you can't say you have one
substance that has no extension and is only thought and another
that is extension and not thought.
(34:24):
And the two interact. How?
How could they interact? And yet it seems like they do.
So what do we do? Or do we just say there's not
two things? Do we just say the mind is the
brain, that the thought? We don't know enough about
science yet, but eventually we'll see how thoughts and our
conscious experiences is extended and we can put it under
a microscope. That still sounds ridiculous.
(34:44):
Well, Descartes doesn't have a good solution for this, and I
don't think anybody does since Descartes.
But what he says is that the place where this mind body
interaction happens is this tinylittle gland in the middle of
your brain called the pineal or pineal because it's funny gland,
the pineal gland or the pineal gland in the middle of your
(35:06):
head. Why does he think that?
Well, most if not all of your brain is duplicated on the other
side, right? Like it's a mirror image.
Your, your, your right part of your brain controls left side of
your body and left part of your brain controls right side of
your body. But there's this gland in the
middle that is not replicated onboth sides.
And so logically he thinks, well, obviously this is like the
primary, the souls everywhere inyour body, but this is like the
(35:27):
primary place. It is this is where this
happens, which makes no sense atall if the issue is how mind and
matter can interact. Taking a little gland that's
material doesn't answer the question.
OK, cool. Well figure it out, you know,
post in the comments. Let's figure out the mind body
problem and the the dualism. OK, more fun things about our
(35:50):
boy Descartes. Here's the next one.
Ready. Atoms do not exist.
By that there's nobody in the world named Adam.
Kidding, dad joke. How could atoms exist?
Let me tell you what atom. Atomos is the Greek word that we
get that we used to get the wordatom.
(36:11):
It means uncuttable. An atom is a concept.
Everyone thinks we've seen atomsunder microscopes.
You can't see an atom, somethingthat is the smallest thing, that
it cannot be divided. Conceptually, that makes no
sense. What we've seen is a tiny clump
of matter and we call it an atom.
But that's not what they meant by atoms.
What he's saying is if anything material is extended, which all
(36:33):
things that are material are extended, then there can be no
smallest uncuttable thing. You could always cut it in half,
further and further for Infinityto say it's stronger.
If you had a ruler, could God keep cutting that ruler in half
and then cutting that in half and cutting that in half and
cutting that in half forever? Yeah.
So therefore there's no smallestpart of that ruler.
There's no atom. There's not this tiny uncuttable
(36:54):
ball. In fact, an atom.
Wait for it. If you're like, no, Zach, we we
see atoms all the time and they surely exist.
Cool. They might.
They might exist conceptually. They might really exist.
We just don't know. We just haven't seen the
smallest piece of matter becauseit can always get smaller.
You know, smaller than atom, a quark, you know, smaller than a
quark, 1/2 quark. You know, smaller than 1/2
(37:15):
quark, 1/4 quark. You know, smaller than 1/4
quark, an eighth quark, cork quark, quark, quark.
OK, so the point is, is conceptually, if anything has
extension, you can divide it forever.
So there can't be a smallest thing that you can't divide.
Again, an atom is made-up of twohalf atoms.
That means it's still, even if we don't have the tools to do
it, conceptually divisible. OK, so there can't be atoms.
That's wrong. There's also no such thing as a
(37:36):
void or a vacuum. OK, How could there just be
nothingness? How could there just be
emptiness? Wouldn't that at least have?
Like, if you think of an empty BLOB of black space, you're
still thinking of blackness and space.
Even in a vacuum where there's supposed to be nothing in there,
in there, radiation from the universe in there, aren't there?
(37:59):
Doesn't that vacuum still have extension if there was to be in
a vacuum? So he doesn't think there can be
a true vacuum. I don't mean like what you get
chips off the carpet with, I mean like an absolute void in
nature of nothing in it. Like there there would have to
be something especially for things to be able to move and
interact with each other. If there's just a true gap with
(38:19):
nothing in there, you couldn't move anything at a distance.
So things are in a plenum for him.
So think of like, you drop a Pebble into a pond and it
ripples out because the water all touches he thinks that of
the universe. So even what you're thinking of
as empty space in space is not empty.
It's got radiation, It's got temperature, It's got color.
It's got all kinds of things. All right.
So more interestingly, you ready?
(38:42):
Pete is going to hate this. This episode is brought to you
by PETA. PETA, kill some dogs.
OK, So he thought animals don't have souls and therefore don't
feel pain. Remember, for Descartes, if you
have a mind, that's the same thing as your soul.
And only humans have souls. So animals, and he would
actually operate on animals livebecause he was convinced that
(39:03):
they didn't have souls, because they couldn't actually feel
pain. He he thinks that animals are
just fleshy machines. OK, they're just fleshy robots.
They don't actually have souls and therefore they don't feel
pain. Pain is a conscious intelligent
experience. OK, this desk doesn't feel pain
because it's it's it doesn't have a soul.
It doesn't have a mind. Zach, that's insane.
(39:24):
Like the dog has to be yelping and screaming and whatever.
Stop reading your experience of pain onto the dog.
Let me say it another way. Let's say I created a mechanical
dog, like a robot dog and I programmed it to when you step
on its little doggy paw, it yelps and pulls its paw back.
And when you it poops on the carpet with its fake dog poop
pellets, it acts like it's sad. At any point does the mechanical
(39:48):
robot dog actually feel sad? No.
Does the mechanical robot dog actually feel pain?
No. It's just programmed to Yelp to
preserve itself. He thinks that's the case with
animals. OK, to push it farther, what can
a real dog do that you could not, with enough technology,
train and program a robot dog todo?
(40:09):
And if you say, well, actually feel pain or actually love me or
actually understand, you've begged the question.
That's what we're trying to prove.
You can't appeal to that. And so his view is because they
don't have souls and minds, which you would have to have to
have things like pain and conscious experience and, you
know, act of thought and all these kind of things.
They're just fleshy machines. So we thought that they didn't
have souls and therefore did notfeel pain.
(40:29):
Regardless of your view on this,I would encourage you not to
harm your pet. Let's leave those fleshy
machines alone, OK? What is his view on ethics?
He's been critiqued for not being a huge ethical
philosopher. That doesn't mean he was
unethical. It just means that he, you know,
that he, this wasn't his main focus.
He does deal actually more with ethics than people think,
especially in his work passions.But he here's basically his view
(40:53):
of ethics. It's not super novel.
He says that the passions exist to incite us to action that
helps with our survival. So our our passions are helpful.
They give us utility, they help us survive and stay alive.
But he promotes a type of modified stoicism as far as his
ethic goes. So this is mainly explained in
his work, You know, the passionsof the soul.
(41:14):
But he has a great line in discourse on the method where he
says my third maxim was always to try to conquer myself rather
than fortune. Hear the stoicism in that.
If you haven't listened to the Stoicism lecture, do it.
It'll change your life. You'll learn how to not let
outside things affect your happiness, but it rather it's
within. The third maxim was always to
try to conquer myself rather than fortune, and to change my
(41:35):
desires rather than the order ofthe world, and generally to
accustom myself to believing that there is nothing that is
completely within our power except our thoughts.
OK, that's going to be his general ethic.
There's a critique. I'll end with this.
There's a critique against our boy Descartes, and the critique
(41:57):
is that his whole system is flawed because the cogito ergo
sum is flawed. So this critique goes back to
Bertrand Russell, and then otherpeople have hinted at this
actually, both before and after him.
What Russell would say is the only thing Descartes has shown
is that thinking is going on. He's presupposing the eye.
(42:18):
So after he does all this methodof doubt, the only thing he
knows is that thinking is happening.
He doesn't know that there's an IA self that does the thinking.
And so guys like Russell think Descartes starting point is
incorrect. Now I I disagree with them.
I think they misunderstand. Descartes is not saying I know
two things. There's an I of existence and
(42:39):
also there's thinking. Descartes defines himself as a
thinking thing. That's the only thing he so the
I and thinking are the same thing for Descartes.
So where if Descartes just said,OK, cool, Russell, I'll agree
with you, Thinking is happening,happening.
That's what I know for certain or thinking exists.
That's what I know for certain. It does not change his program
at all. He then defines the eye as the
(43:01):
thinking thing. So I think the critique of
Descartes here is misfounded. I think Descartes is smarter
than a lot of these other guys, and so I, I, I, I don't think
their critique against his foundationalism works.
Another thing he's been critiqued for, and this
especially comes out of the reformed epistemology camp, is
that you don't have to only believe things.
(43:23):
You can know that there are justsome brute facts that you know
without being able to prove it with Cartesian certainty,
assuming that a demon's trickingyou and all this other crazy
stuff, that you can just start there.
You can just say I had breakfastthis morning, my cognitive
faculties are working correctly.That's reasonable for me to
assert that I'm acting rationally and I don't have to
prove it with the type of certainty that Descartes wants
(43:45):
where he cannot be wrong even ifGod's trying to trick him.
So that's been another critique against him.
What do you think about our boy Descartes?
Love him or hate him, he is a big deal.
I hope that it stretches your mind.
If you want to do more reading on Descartes.
He is. I mean, he's a profoundly deep
thinker. He's a pretty clear writer.
And so you need to read Discourse on Method.
(44:07):
You need to read Meditations on 1st Philosophy, especially
Meditations. If you're only going to read one
thing by him, read that. You can read The Passions of the
soul. It's kind of boring and
technical in the the science andit's not actually correct.
He's written on things like optics and diatropics and all
these other things. There are little selections that
are taken from principles of philosophy.
There are several editions you can get online.
(44:29):
That's actually pretty good too.So those are the main things.
I hope that you found this to behelpful.
You know, Cogito ergo sum. Go get some this week.
You know, keep keep thinking andbeing, you know, keep sayla.
Let's just end there. Thanks for joining in on
ideological. We will see you next time.
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