Descartes’ Placeholders
Posted: Fri Aug 13, 2021 1:42 am
Conceiving the universe as composed of two distinct substances res extensa and res cogitans was essential for acquiring reliable knowledge. Mind-matter division was an important step forward in man’s quest to understand the nature of reality. There were gaps in the Cartesian world picture, but they were plugged by integrating 'placeholders' such as the human soul & creator God into the clock-work made of matter.
Why was the mind-matter division a necessary step?
Consider an analogy. Algebraic equations such as x - 1 = 0 are easy to solve. This is not the case for higher degree polynomials. For example, x2 + x + 1 = 0 looks unsolvable. There aren’t any natural number solutions for this equation.
Mathematicians in 16th century came up with the concept of complex numbers to solve such equations. Complex numbers have of two parts, real and imaginary. The real part is a natural number. Imaginary part isn’t. ‘Imaginary’ doesn’t mean unreal, more like ‘impossible to grasp’. Imaginary numbers have no correlates in the world of ordinary experience yet these are very much real and have important applications in science and engineering.
Understanding the world of experience is like solving algebraic equations. Simple problems have self-evident solutions but complex problems need a different approach. Inquisitive minds struggled for centuries to penetrate nature’s secrets. Reliable knowledge could be acquired only after natural philosophers began treating the solutions as having two parts- material & mental, analogous to the real & imaginary parts of a complex number.
Real part of the world of experience was easy to figure out but the imaginary part was problematic. Descartes’ placeholders were a promise to look harder and make them ‘graspable’ in not too distant future. Scientific progress was expected to produce evidence for the missing links. Unfortunately, the model unraveled in no time. Pineal gland, which Descartes believed to be the seat of human soul, turned out to be much less interesting as physiologists investigated its functioning. No evidence for a creator was found when astronomers probed the depths of space.
Descartes’ placeholders were not mere gap fillers to be discarded later. Creator God and human soul were essential for overall consistency of the mechanistic worldview. A clock-work universe made no sense without a creator God who initiated the whole thing. Human body as a machine is consistent with observation only with the postulation of a soul element capable of interacting with the body. Scientific progress in the last 300 years ignored these essential elements of the mechanistic worldview, thereby destroying the consistency of the original model.
Why did science fail to find evidence for Descartes’ placeholders? Looking for something and not finding could mean many things. The stuff looked for may not actually exist or it might take much more effort to find it. These are the most likely reasons but there is another intriguing possibility- the tools employed may not be adequate to identify the object looked for.
That brings us to the question ‘what exactly is scientific knowledge?’ The pivotal role of this question got lost in the circularity of explaining knowledge acquisition as a function of ‘minds’, which no one understood in the first place.
We may never reach an integrated view of nature by undoing mind-matter division. The way forward could be to figure out why Descartes’ placeholders turned out to be invisible to science, and thereby arrive at an appreciation of reality as a complex whole composed of ‘real’ (objectively knowable) quantities and ‘imaginary’ (subjectively experienceable) qualities.
Why was the mind-matter division a necessary step?
Consider an analogy. Algebraic equations such as x - 1 = 0 are easy to solve. This is not the case for higher degree polynomials. For example, x2 + x + 1 = 0 looks unsolvable. There aren’t any natural number solutions for this equation.
Mathematicians in 16th century came up with the concept of complex numbers to solve such equations. Complex numbers have of two parts, real and imaginary. The real part is a natural number. Imaginary part isn’t. ‘Imaginary’ doesn’t mean unreal, more like ‘impossible to grasp’. Imaginary numbers have no correlates in the world of ordinary experience yet these are very much real and have important applications in science and engineering.
Understanding the world of experience is like solving algebraic equations. Simple problems have self-evident solutions but complex problems need a different approach. Inquisitive minds struggled for centuries to penetrate nature’s secrets. Reliable knowledge could be acquired only after natural philosophers began treating the solutions as having two parts- material & mental, analogous to the real & imaginary parts of a complex number.
Real part of the world of experience was easy to figure out but the imaginary part was problematic. Descartes’ placeholders were a promise to look harder and make them ‘graspable’ in not too distant future. Scientific progress was expected to produce evidence for the missing links. Unfortunately, the model unraveled in no time. Pineal gland, which Descartes believed to be the seat of human soul, turned out to be much less interesting as physiologists investigated its functioning. No evidence for a creator was found when astronomers probed the depths of space.
Descartes’ placeholders were not mere gap fillers to be discarded later. Creator God and human soul were essential for overall consistency of the mechanistic worldview. A clock-work universe made no sense without a creator God who initiated the whole thing. Human body as a machine is consistent with observation only with the postulation of a soul element capable of interacting with the body. Scientific progress in the last 300 years ignored these essential elements of the mechanistic worldview, thereby destroying the consistency of the original model.
Why did science fail to find evidence for Descartes’ placeholders? Looking for something and not finding could mean many things. The stuff looked for may not actually exist or it might take much more effort to find it. These are the most likely reasons but there is another intriguing possibility- the tools employed may not be adequate to identify the object looked for.
That brings us to the question ‘what exactly is scientific knowledge?’ The pivotal role of this question got lost in the circularity of explaining knowledge acquisition as a function of ‘minds’, which no one understood in the first place.
We may never reach an integrated view of nature by undoing mind-matter division. The way forward could be to figure out why Descartes’ placeholders turned out to be invisible to science, and thereby arrive at an appreciation of reality as a complex whole composed of ‘real’ (objectively knowable) quantities and ‘imaginary’ (subjectively experienceable) qualities.