Up@dawn 2.0

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Great philosophers taking the red pill - Part2

Part 2: Rene Descartes

Rene Descartes is best known, at least in the layperson knowledgebase, for his famous saying "I think, therefore I am".  This basically means that if you can think about existing, you must exist.  He is less widely known, however, as the original author of the entire premise and concept of "The Matrix".  Granted, he didn't specifically mention it in any of his writings, or as far as we know didn't mention it to anyone verbally either, but I think he (quite correctly it turns out) assumed that given what he did write, we would eventually put it together.  
There are two concepts of Descartes' that clued me in to this.
The first is actually the famous saying, "Cognito ergo sum".  Not so much it's literal interpretation, as that seems to be a basic truth of consciousness of all sorts and not specific to a Matrix movie, but the manner in which he came up with it.  He was seeking to reason out a baseline of sorts, by whittling away anything he couldn't be absolutely sure of.  Then he planned on starting from this base and, by means of pure logic and intestinal fortitude, construct a solid philosophy of life.  However, he found that by tossing assumption after assumption out the window, he realized that we take an astounding number of things for granted.  The very state of consciousness, for instance.
  We've all had dreams that seemed to be real.  Or even the one where you wake up, take a shower, get dressed, and then wake up for real.  And realize you have to get ready all over again.  Doh!
  How can you ever detect that you are awake?  At any time you could be dreaming one of those hyper-real dreams, and you'd have no way of knowing until you woke up.
  The Matrix asks the question, "What if you never wake up?".
  Descartes passed through this question to an even deeper one.  If we can't be sure that we are really perceiving the world, that we are even awake at any time, how can we tell that we even exist at all?
  Rene realized that by even considering the question, he has proven that he exists.  After all, something must be asking the question.
  This brings us to Descartes' second Matrix-inducing point.  If you can be sure that you exist to ponder your own existence, but you cannot be sure that the world is as you perceive it, it is therefore entirely possible that your mind exists but your body does not.  Therefore the mind and body must be two separate things.  Rene Descartes stamped his name on this concept (and a lot of other things too, I think he was slightly vain about it), and it is now known as Cartesian Dualism.
  Nowhere in American popular culture is Cartesian Dualism more prominently displayed than in The Matrix.  While in the Matrix, your mind and body are literally separated.  You have no awareness of your body, all you have are perceptions of a non-existent virtual body, in a non-existent virtual world.  Your mind is transported from the physical into the digital and exists as simply energy, processing and interacting on a totally non-physical plane.  This complete separation of the mind and body is an often overlooked aspect of the Matrix concept.   It also has the same basic problem as Cartesian Dualism, in that it begs the question of how can anything as ethereal as the mind affect a physical body.  In the movie, Morpheus simply informs us in an authoritative tone that "the mind makes it real".
  Stay tuned for the third and final chapter, where we see how Immanuel Kant feels about all this...

1 comment:

  1. Actually, Carrtesian dualism is stamped all over American religion, for anyone who expects to experience post-mortem soul-survival. But that belief was implicit pre-Descartes, so maybe he doesn't get "credit" for it.

    Descartes doesn't think our minds make anything real, but that God guarantees the reality of our clear and distinct thoughts.

    Did I miss Kant?

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