Book Note: The Cartesian Brain

New book. May be of interest to some of those who follow this blog.

The Cartesian Brain, a collection of essays edited by Denis Kamboucher, Damien Lacroux, Tad Schmalz and Ruidan She, has just been published by Routledge.

It looks at Cartesian writings far beyond the Meditations. One might get from the Meditations the impression that Descartes didn't care all that much about the brain, and nascent neuroscience. After all, the "I think" is accomplished by an incorporeal spirit.

Actually, it turns out, he did care about the particulars of the human brain. and not just the pineal gland either.

One fascinating tidbit I get from the review of this book recently posted in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews is the applicability of the "law of the conservation of motion" to the action of mind on brain. I put the phrase in quotes because in Newtonian and post-Newtonian physics, our physics, there is no such law. There is a law of the conservation of momentum: but that is importantly different.

But in Descartes' day there was the idea, central to his views on physics, that the sum of the size times the speed of all the objects in the world must be conserved. And here note I said not velocity -- I said speed. The difference is that speed cannot be negative, because speed is understood without reference to direction. So if I bounce a ball off a wall, the speed may be the same (near as matters) after it hits the wall as it was a second before. The velocity, measured with reference to the original vector, may have changed from positive to negative.

According to at least one of the authors represented in this book, that distinction is of great importance to the issue of the interaction of the immaterial mind and the material brain on Cartesian psycho-physics. After all: if the human brain has its "animal spirits" bouncing about in the nerves, in much the same way that a dog's or a snail's brain would, but then the intervention of the mind changes the direction of this movement -- some bit of spiritedness (we might say, anachronistically, some electron in an electrical flow) might change DIRECTION without changing speed at all.

This may be of great importance in seeing how Descartes and some of the interactionist dualists who came after him saw some interactions as, so to speak, ontologically permissible.

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable a...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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