Not sure what your point is.
I’m not dismissing Descartes outright, not at all, I’m questioning interpretations more than his work.
If taken strictly within the frame of reference of his time, he’s really an amazing man who wrote a fascinating piece of work on human thinking (of course bound by his own background), which listening to it and reading it myself mades plain to me. It’s also humbling, though perhaps it does’t seem that way from the outside, but I deeply appreciate these great deep thinkers for their, internal discipline, perseverance. etc. etc. that I only have in my dreams.
But you know the computer adage: Garbage in, Garbage out
no matter how well said.
Descartes (and his time) had minimal understanding of our cosmology and Earth geological-biological ways & means.
Hume said we should always be skeptical, and I have been, I don’t read these books, I have dialogues with them, at times arguments and more often than not I get my butt spanked as I keep reading and cogitating, still, some things keep surviving every tearing down and abandoning.
For instance, consciousness must be framed as a dynamic interaction, not a thing:
For one, we are like a sensing instruments, think of the voyager hurling through space. Our senses taking in what they can and what we process limited by what we absorb.
… But we are living things that must maintain our bodies and energy levels by manipulating & consuming some part of the world around you.
… As you are assessing your environments, you are also projecting yourself into that environment and the creatures that inhabit it - and visa versa.
… Everything linked together in some fashion, with the outcomes of each linkage passing through time having rippling effects that impact other members of the community - in any number ways and over differing time scales.
Another truth that keeps reassembling itself is that the “Brain in the Vat” conception and all the muchoblahblah talking heads have churned out, is a waste.
How you ask your questions and frame your exploration dictate the kind of information you gather.
I contend that it doesn’t matter how much genius anyone has, the Brain in the Vat offers only dead-ends.
It may offer occasional tidbits of understanding - but there’s nothing coherent, nothing to help prepare the human intellect for understanding today’s modern flood of scientific, **evidence-based, understanding and the whole actual pulsating complexity of the brain, that is actually factually plugged into every cubic centimeter of our body, monitoring, opining, maintaining, that is producing the mind that reflects upon itself.
The same imperative that are reflected, if to a decreasing degree, in all the creatures that came before us.**
Descartes asserts with certainty that cutting off your arm won’t impact your brain or mind at all. Seriously? Ya think? How’s that work?
This is 2022 and he was writing this is the 1630s, so give the man a break, but junk the misleading mind experiment.
As for our super and perfect mind (oh that’s another thing, Descartes obsession with perfection and his assumption that its possible to achieve - ergo God.)
Human’s are aware and we are introspective, we tell stories and we record our stories, so has build up a knowledge base and mastery, unknown in the rest of the animal kingdom,
while our own bodies are busy getting us through life. That is really unique.
.
Of course, probably most animals are not aware of “self” as we are, but that doesn’t mean that most animals neural system aren’t every bit as engaged and focused on the same tasks of self monitoring and action, and for the same pragmatic existential reasons as we, complex biological creatures are Otherwise, you if you are clueless, you die and get eaten.
Human have simply been blessed with a few extra systems that added extra layers of emergent “mirroring” and processing ability onto the mammal foundation. which of course is based on previous foundations being achieved.
From my limited perspective that truth still isn’t being incorporated into the philosophy of who we are and what are minds are…
I find that very wrong.
Another thing,
it seems to me that the realization the our gods are in fact produced from our own human minds, both individually and collectively, is a revolutionary idea of the first order,
and that ought to be rippling through every aspect of religious/philosophical talk and writings.
But is it?
I never come across anything, but admit to a very narrow bandwidth.
Same with Evolution, it can’t be grasped as a “thing”, because it’s an “interactive dynamic”!
Thanks for the dialogue