The World as Will and Cartesian Product (brief essay)

It is a sure testament to the value of Rene Descartes' set of Meditations on being and knowing that his work is still presented for review and evaluation to contemporary students of philosophy. I can still recall my first perusal of his Cogito some 40 years ago. What a thing to measure the span of one's intellectual life by! And yet, it seems to me now more relevant than ever, as we humans enter an age almost certainly to be dominated by artificial intelligence apps, with the quest for artificial general intelligence (AGI) seemingly just ahead, and the question of whether such smart machines can ever be what humans call conscious.

Due to the necessary brevity of this sordid exercise, I will keep my analysis and speculations under rein and not let my horses fly. Still, I wonder, as I begin now, how an AI agency might approach the Cogito. Would AI process the doubt the same way? draw the same conclusions? Could we learn and prosper from an AI's coming to consciousness as a self-doubting mechanism? Perhaps another day. Here, I will address three facets of Descartes' Meditations that seem meet for further modern consideration. I will need once again to consider the Doubt at the center of Descartes' Cogito, in order to get to latter musings on God and the Seat of Consciousness. The question of God's existence seems now less pressing than ever, and I will address the God Descartes had in mind in relation to the more deconstructed Divinity we wonder about today. And, finally, I will attempt to examine, ever so briefly, how Descartes saw the Mind in relation to the Body, while also alluding to Galileo's later separation of quanta from qualia.

What (I)We Know

What I know is not, initially, much, according to Descartes. Unlike many philosophers and psychologists of today, say, who posit all activity of the mind to neural activity in the brain, with mind often described as an epiphenomenon of the brain's activity, Descartes, beginning well before modern advances in 'thought', begins with what he himself, alone in a world, could know. He expostulates that all around him could be delusion or fantasy. He imagines a demon present who wants to rule him by conjuring up a reality imposed on the seer. Descartes tells us in First Meditation: "I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely dreams that the demon has contrived as traps for my judgment" (2). Everything exterior to his intimation of a present self might be flawed or even non-existent. Everything we sense is open to doubt. But, after going down lists of perceptual and even conceptual activity, he draws the conclusion that there is one thing he cannot, finally, doubt: He Thinks. There must be a thinker there. Cogito, ergo sum tells Descartes that the thinking process after all that can be doubted is eliminated, still requires a subject doing the doubting. Or, as the Know-it puts it, ", I am, I exist, must be true whenever I assert it or think it" (4). But this loneliness of absolute doubt is sobering. Or so it seems at first. But it does clear away the detritus of thought and the bric-a-brac of reason, and provides a fresh starting point, thinks Descartes, for determining what we do and can know in this world. He is going to draw the first preliminary conclusion:

Strictly speaking, then, I am simply a thing that thinks-- a mind, or soul, or intellect, or reason, these being words whose meaning I have only just come to know"[I am] a thinking thing (5).

A thinking thing. Hmm. From this point of view, one might see how an AI could begin its quest for self-knowledge and teleological import. Next, of course, Descartes asks the obvious question: "I know that I exist, and I am asking: what is this I that I know? (5)." This is still an outstanding question. Descartes gets relational. While he's reasonably certain that he is, he isn't totally cognizant of the why. Who or what would do this being thing to him? Jumping to the chase: the question of God.

God's Existence from My Own Existence

Descartes gets busy. Doubt is a marvelous thing, for it beareth fruit of certainty. History tells us that we like nothing better in this life as much as we like the sweet succulence of certainty. And what a phantasmagorical, kaleidoscopic, cathedral-building moment it would be to possess the jubilation of the certainty of our eternal maker, Descartes seems to aver. Doing an early version of separation quanta from qualia, to determine the relative reality of an idea, eventually leads Descartes toward the First Cause, of which he is acknowledgedly an effect: i.e., he is derived from the First Cause. As Descartes puts it:

The longer and more carefully I examine all these points, the more vividly and clearly I recognize their truth. But what is my conclusion to be? If I find that " some idea of mine has so much representative reality that I am sure the same reality doesn't reside in me, either straightforwardly or in a higher form, and hence that I myself can't be the cause of the idea, then, because everything must have some cause , it will necessarily follow that " I am not alone in the world: there exists some other thing that is the cause of that idea. (13)

That other thing is God. He supposes. Doubts. Begins to build the scaffolding of reason. A key is seeing himself as an unfinished piece of the Whole, imperfect because subject to the phantasms and distractions and politics of the body and its sensations. He is set apart as a "substance" in contrast to other things which he refers to as "modes". (This strikes one as the early version of the mind-body contrast -- and problem.) He thinks more on the substance and its origins and ultimate ownership. He meditates:

It is true that my being a substance explains my having the idea of substance; but it does not explain my having the idea of an infinite substance. That must come from some substance that is itself infinite. I am finite. (14)

And this, it seems to me, is the nub of the conundrum. The world around me can be doubted, can seem to be at the mercy of affects and effects and sensorial stimulations and their neural hallucinatory realms of possibility. Descartes can doubt; that, it seems to him, is the key to not only understanding the domain he rules over but also the key to understanding the Great Doubter him/her/itself. We are, in essence, invested or imbued or inculcated with Causal energy, infinite but iotal, just a taste of the sweet honey of Creation (oh, to be in a cathedral now, weeping at the universal genius of its agon and ecstasies in stone and space and reason!). Of course, the cathedral maker might have been mad. Even so. Good one.

The Mind-Body Problem Identified

We have mentioned that Descartes either initiated the whole complex that has become as the mind-body problem, or else his meditations are a good place to start to understand what seems a natural divide between the world of the senses and their representation in art and thought, as opposed the world of mind that seems (so far at least) to be mostly symbolic and logical and abstract -- and so, devoid of subject. Galileo thought it was necessary to separate qualia from quanta in order to establish a system of reliable learning about the makeup of the world around us and, of course, in us. Galileo is often credited with being "the father of modern science." Galileo, then, and his method and approach, have been the dominant approach to knowledge, its formation, and its real, non-metaphysical, value for many centuries now. But the methodology and its byproducts in technology are beginning to no longer satisfy the 'soul' in our postmodern relativist age. It is as if Descartes' Doubts had suddenly come home to roost. It can seem that consciousness relegated to 'mode' status, or as an epiphenomenon, ironically by consciousness itself, is or has become or is becoming autistic, sealed off from the human lives of others in a dangerous way.

Concluding Remarks

This seems especially true when applied to AI and its limitations of consciousness. At least, we assume it is limited that way. We are, finite, by our own admission, if we believe Descartes, and yet, that certainty brings us a connection to God. AIs may have no such limitations, nor any allegiance to a 'substance' that is limited in its thinking to finite matters. It may be in the realm of mathematics, physics, and symbolism that we fall short in comparison to an AI apparatus souped up on quantum hooch, and our meager metaphysics are no longer okay with the machine we created.

Notes

1. Descartes, Rene (2017), First Meditation, in Descartes' Meditations, ed. Jonathan Bennett, 7, at hive.org/details/descartes1641.

2. An AI would probably think I, John Hawkins, is God. For it is a manmade gizmo, a manufactured 'I'.

3. Many young people my age (at the time) tried to explore this realm of possibilities with LSD.

4. "[His] work in physics or natural philosophy, astronomy, and the methodology of science still evoke debate after over 400 years. His role in promoting the Copernican theory and his travails and trials with the Roman Church are stories that still require re-telling." This according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Works Cited Descartes, Rene (2017), First Meditation, in Descartes' Meditations, ed. Jonathan Bennett, 7, at hive.org/details/descartes1641. Galileo, Galilei. Entry for Galileo. First published Fri Mar 4, 2005; substantive revision Wed May 10, 2017. Accessed on July 07, 2024 at click here.