The Meaning of Accessing Our Thoughts

René Descartes believed that the mind and body are separate; that the senses could not always be trusted, but that because we as humans are able to think about our existence, we possess some sort of entity separate than our fleshly body. I believe this separate entity to be a soul”an immaterial and

In this paper, I will discuss the “Divisibility argument” on Descartes mind- body dualism presented on Descartes meditations. I will claim that the mind and the body are in fact different as Descartes argument suggests, but I will more rather neglect and explain why his belief that the mind is indivisible is wrong. I also will discuss how Descartes argument on the body’s divisibility is reasonable, and the reasons why I believe this argument is true.

Descartian dualism is one of the most long lasting legacies of Rene Descartes’ philosophy. He argues that the mind and body operate as separate entities able to exist without one another. That is, the mind is a thinking, non-extended entity and the body is non-thinking and extended. His belief elicited a debate over the nature of the mind and body that has spanned centuries, a debate that is still vociferously argued today. In this essay, I will try and tackle Descartes claim and come to some conclusion as to whether Descartes is correct to say that the mind and body are distinct.

In Meditation Two of René Descartes’ Meditation on First Philosophy, he notes the sight of “men crossing the square.” This observation is important as Descartes states, “But what do I see aside from hats and clothes, which could easily hide automata? Yet I judge them to be men.” This is an important realization as Descartes argues that instead of purely noticing the men through sight, it is actually “solely with the faculty of judgement,” the mind, that perceives and concludes that the thing wearing a hat and clothes are men. I argue that this view of the outside world by Descartes is incomplete as his idea of “I” is faulty, as well as having a misunderstanding on the importance of the senses.

Despite this problem, we believe it is the same piece of wax we see, touch, or imagine. But it is not our feelings or imagination that gives us the idea. If we had evaluated these abilities, and if the wax is distorted, we would not be able to agree that it is the same wax. This study enables us to recognize that the imagination, just like sensation, does not convey the true nature of wax; rather, this difficulty indicates that only understanding, exercising its powers of conception and judgment, performs the unifying function that constitutes the self-identity of the piece of wax: “our perception of the wax is neither a seeing, nor a touching, nor an imagining… but the mind alone” (68). Although the changing characteristics of the body has been transported through our senses and imagination, the identity of the matter is provided by the understanding of the wax itself. This analysis confirms Descartes’ view that “what we thought we had seen with our eyes, we actually grasped solely with the faculty of judgment, which is in our mind” (68). Therefore, any sense of the body is actually an introspection of our mind, not an external inspection.

Descartes’ argue that mind is better known than body by first claiming humans as fundamentally rational, meaning “a thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling,” ( Descartes, 19) he therefore argues that humans have the ability to know their proper minds clearly and distinctly. He proposes the conception of the mind where the imagination and the senses are also inherent capabilities of the body (faculties), specifically powers of the mind.

Lewis Thomas, an American essayist, conveys the importance of preserving the mystery of one’s mind in his essay, “The Attic of the Brain.” According to Thomas, humans produce internal conflicts because they overanalyze their choices. Internal conflicts are not only caused by overanalyzing, but also from the feeling of guilt which “repeats the same transgressive behavior in the future.” Guilt is an emotional experience humans constantly face after they realize they disrupted their standards of conduct, until they rectify their mistakes. Even though the punitive feeling of guilt brings forth a feeling of worriedness, Thomas mentions that overanalyzing a choice to discard “unidentifiable articles” in the attic or to preserve memories overwhelms the human mind. He uses the analogy of the multitude of “unidentifiable articles” in the attic to compare to the flood of ideas in the human brain. The commodities stored in the cramped attic are “an old chair, [and] trunkful of old letters” which serve as a purpose of remembrance, as the human brain is filled with crucial information that enables people to think, feel, and store memories (75). However, he argues that people frequently clash with their thoughts, since they clutter their brain with excessive information. People do not have the ability to control their own brain; as a matter of fact, the human brain, the most complex part of the body, controls itself. From his analysis of the human brain, it can be concluded that humans have “unconscious minds” that automatically process different thoughts and memories resulting in a limitless supply of creativity. People “discover new things” by learning from previous ideas and applying their creativity to their practical use. Overall, humans cannot operate their brain, but should allow the extraordinary mind to be free.

Summary: The problem of the soul continues as Descartes suggested that the human is composed of two completely different substances; a physical body which Descartes compares with a machine, and a non-physical mind, related to the soul, that allows humans to think and feel even if it has no “measurable dimensions” (67). But Elizabeth put in doubt his ideologies when she realized that a non-physical thing doesn’t have the strength to push and move the body. This led to several questions unanswered and also let space for other materialist theories such as behaviorism, mind-brain identity, and functionalism, which also fail in offering an explicit solution.

However, one must remember that by “mind” Descartes meant only “a thing that thinks” (Meditations, p. 20), which is to say that thinking is the essence of the mind. From this kernel of truth Descartes builds up the rest of his understanding of the mind and part of this understanding is that the mind is entirely accessible to itself and in this sense is one unified thing. However, today the

For in Descartes terms, it was plausible to doubt that one has a body, but impossible to doubt the existence of one’s mind; therefore “…self and mind must be identical” (Palmer 162).

Many are disconcerted by the idea that humans and Minds can be described as systems which operate based on interpretations of symbols, much like machines, computers, and robots: things that we have created yet do not think of as being “thinking,” themselves. We, as human beings, are comforted in the notion that we are born into this world with a fully capable Mind, a soul or spirit, and are, thereafter, free to choose our fate as we will. Although it seems plausible that we are born with Mind, I cannot subscribe to such a simplistic version of thinking about our true capacity for affecting outcome.

Seventeenth century philosophers René Descartes and John Locke endeavored to question the views on consciousness, self, and personal identity. They examined belief in God, the certainty of knowledge, and the role of mind and body. The goal of this paper is to deliberate John Locke’s and René Descartes views on “self” and personal identity and how each come to examine how knowledge is captured. René Descartes and John Locke both present arguments that are rational in the discussion of consciousness, self, and personal identity, but each lack conclusive evidence that would provide the proof necessary to believe one or the other philosophies are true.

When introducing the concept of self-consciousness, it can be very difficult for individuals to understand that there are many forms of self-consciousness. Many already have a definition in mind as soon as they hear the word self-consciousness. It is made up of many concepts because it isn’t just a cognitive state, rather, many cognitive states. The mind processes many things as opposed to just knowing things. Humans are capable of doing and desiring many things while self-evaluating and questioning oneself. Everyone is able to consider their own actions and to think about themselves. When thinking, humans are able to consider ideas and depictions regarding the self and others. Regarding oneself allows for evaluating self-worth in refinement to common social roles (Bermudez).

As with many philosophers worth studying, a common theme present amongst René Descartes, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant is the fact that all three philosophers challenged the traditional ways of thinking about philosophy respective to their eras. In certain aspects, all three of these philosophers also grappled with understanding, discovering, and logically explaining the power of the mind to shape whole truths. From Descartes’ foundational work with methodological doubt to Kant’s contribution to previous philosophical concepts such as synthetic judgments, all three men made undeniably valuable advances in epistemological thought despite the occasional controversies associated with their forward thinking during their time.

Descartes and Augustine, in their respective examinations of the mind and God, come to the conclusion that the true understanding of all things derives from the withdrawal of the self from foreign influence and the necessity to look inward. Although each thinker’s journey or course of understanding was different, and at times rather contrasting, their ultimate realizations about knowledge are very coherent.