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Consciousness Invented… A Mind Invented Descartes Locke Leibniz Mind in Society Hobbes Spinoza

Consciousness Invented… A Mind Invented Descartes Locke Leibniz Mind in Society Hobbes Spinoza

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Page 1: Consciousness Invented… A Mind Invented Descartes Locke Leibniz Mind in Society Hobbes Spinoza

Consciousness Invented…

• A Mind Invented

• Descartes

• Locke

• Leibniz

• Mind in Society

• Hobbes

• Spinoza

Page 2: Consciousness Invented… A Mind Invented Descartes Locke Leibniz Mind in Society Hobbes Spinoza

Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650)

• Descartes was famous as an original physicist, physiologist, mathematician and philosopher.

• Descartes' best known philosophical ideas are:

• the method of hyperbolic doubt

• though he may doubt, he cannot doubt that he exists (“cogito ergo sum” or “je pense donc je suis”)

• Descartes reasons that he must have the basic characteristic of thinking, and this thinking thing (soul/mind) is quite distinct from his body; the existence of a God; the existence and nature of the external world; and so on

Page 3: Consciousness Invented… A Mind Invented Descartes Locke Leibniz Mind in Society Hobbes Spinoza

Descartes, Science and Knowledge

• Like the humanists Descartes rejected religious authority in the quest for scientific and philosophical knowledge (but he was a devout Catholic)

• Descartes reacted strongly against the Renaissance resurgence of ancient Greek scepticism in a relentless pursuit of certainty.

• Epistemological scepticism suggests that attempts to “know” the world are doomed to failure

• Whereas Bacon suggested that induction was an appropriate method for science Descartes insisted on a deductive approach

• For Descartes three abilities constitute human reason:

• Intuition – the apprehension of the simple natures of a subject

• Deduction – the process of inferring the necessary relationships between simple natures

• Enumeration - a review process used when deductions become so extensive that errors are made due to a faulty memory.

Page 4: Consciousness Invented… A Mind Invented Descartes Locke Leibniz Mind in Society Hobbes Spinoza

Descartes and Dualism

• I have a clear and distinct idea of material substance, the essential or defining attribute of which is extension.

• Therefore, it is at least possible that material substances exist.

• I have a clear and distinct idea of mental substance, the essential or defining attribute of which is thought.

• Therefore, it is a least possible that mental substances exist.

• To say that two things are not really distinct means to say that it is impossible that they could exist separately.

• Matter and mind can possibly exist separately, therefore they must be really distinct.

• 'And although we suppose that God united a body to a soul so closely that it was impossible to form a more intimate union, and thus made a composite whole, the two substances would remain really distinct, notwithstanding this union' (Principles of Philosophy, part one, §60, I, 213).

Page 5: Consciousness Invented… A Mind Invented Descartes Locke Leibniz Mind in Society Hobbes Spinoza

The Relationship between Mind and Body

• Descartes believed that only humans have a dual spirit/body nature. • Other animals have bodies and not souls and are biological automata or

robots which behave according to their internal biological makeup. • Some critics have argued that Descartes believed in a ‘Ghost in the

Machine’ • The connection between body and soul (mind) is so intimate that they

cannot be separated (and is one of God’s miracles)• Ideas are innate

• Compare a piece of wax at two times: once while the wax is in a solid state, and later after the wax has been melted by a fire.

• Between these two states, the wax somehow loses its hardness, colour, shape, odour, and so forth.

• All the sensible properties that might allow us to identify it as the same substance have changed.

• Thus, our senses alone cannot inform us of the continuity of the two states of the wax, so what does?

Page 6: Consciousness Invented… A Mind Invented Descartes Locke Leibniz Mind in Society Hobbes Spinoza

John Locke (1632-1704)

• He most important contribution to understanding psychology and the mind was the book

• Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) begun in 1671

• It addresses issues such as the nature of the self, the world, God, and the grounds for our knowledge of them

• The essay is made up of four books and only the fourth directly addresses the above

• The first three books are the preliminary reasoning that Locke believed necessary to address these issues.

Page 7: Consciousness Invented… A Mind Invented Descartes Locke Leibniz Mind in Society Hobbes Spinoza

Book 1 – Against Innate Ideas

• That something is innate (e.g. knowledge/ideas) is a hypothesis and requires empirical support.

• If propositions are innate they should be immediately perceived (otherwise what is their value?)

• But “children and idiots” do not demonstrate evidence of this

• But perhaps such innate ideas are dispositional (i.e. they are only expressed in certain situations/conditions)

• Locke argued that such dispositional accounts lack an adequate criterion for distinguishing those innate proposition from those other ideas that the mind may come to know from experience

Page 8: Consciousness Invented… A Mind Invented Descartes Locke Leibniz Mind in Society Hobbes Spinoza

Book 2 – Empiricism and The Tabula Rasa

• The mind is a tabula rasa (blank sheet) until experience (sensation and reflection) provides the basic materials out of which most of our more complex knowledge is constructed.

• The mind engages in three different types of action in putting simple ideas together

• Combination – combining simple ideas into complex ideas.

• Relating - bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them.

• Generalisation - the production of our general ideas by abstraction from particulars, leaving out the particular circumstances of time and place, which would limit the application of an idea to a particular individual.

• In addition to these abilities, there are such faculties as memory which allow for the storing of ideas.

Page 9: Consciousness Invented… A Mind Invented Descartes Locke Leibniz Mind in Society Hobbes Spinoza

Book 4 – What can we know?

• What is knowledge?

• "the perception of the connexion and agreement or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our Ideas" (IV. I. 1. p. 525).

• This contrasts with Descartes claim as knowledge as certainty

• We can know our own existence, the existence of God, mathematics and morality with certainty

• Any other knowledge is probable rather than certain

• This is not probable in the statistical/mathematical sense but probable in the sense that evidence exists that leads the mind to judge a proposition true or false but without a guarantee that the judgment is correct

Page 10: Consciousness Invented… A Mind Invented Descartes Locke Leibniz Mind in Society Hobbes Spinoza

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)

• Leibniz was one of the great polymaths of the modern world.

• Engineer - calculating machines, clocks, and even mining machinery.

• Librarian - invented the modern idea of cataloguing.

• Mathematician - ground-breaking work in topology and calculus (his notation has become the standard).

• Physicist – advances in the theory of momentum.

• He also made contributions to linguistics, history, aesthetics, political theory and philosophy

Page 11: Consciousness Invented… A Mind Invented Descartes Locke Leibniz Mind in Society Hobbes Spinoza

Anti-Materialist & Anti-Dualist

• Leibniz denied that there is only a choice between materialism and dualism

• “One is obliged to admit that perception and what depends upon it is inexplicable on mechanical principles, that is, by figures and motions. In imagining that there is a machine whose construction would enable it to think, to sense, and to have perception, one could conceive it enlarged while retaining the same proportions, so that one could enter into it, just like into a windmill. Supposing this, one should, when visiting within it, find only parts pushing one another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine, that one must look for perception”. Section 17, Monadolgy, (1714)

• In essence his rejection of dualism follows from his rejection of materialism as an explanation.

Page 12: Consciousness Invented… A Mind Invented Descartes Locke Leibniz Mind in Society Hobbes Spinoza

Mind/Body Parallelism

• The doctrine of preestablished harmony. • no state of a created substance has as a real cause some state of

another created substance• every non-initial, non-miraculous, state of a created substance has as a

real cause some previous state of that very substance • each created substance is programmed at creation such that all its

natural states and actions are carried out in conformity with all the natural states and actions of every other created substance.

• Suppose someone falls over and hurts themselves (body -> causation)• The experienced pain is not caused by the fall but by some prior mental

state that conforms with the physical event• Suppose someone decides they want a drink and pour themselves a glass

of wine• The movement of the arm and hand is not caused by the desire but that

by some prior bodily state

Page 13: Consciousness Invented… A Mind Invented Descartes Locke Leibniz Mind in Society Hobbes Spinoza

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

• Hobbes main concern is the problem of social and political order: how can human beings live together in peace and avoid the danger and fear of conflict? • We should give our obedience to an

unaccountable sovereign (authority)• The alternative is a situation of

universal insecurity, where all have reason to fear violent death.

• His conclusions follow from his ideas about human nature, knowledge and how the world works.

• These ideas were strongly influenced by his view that ‘Geometry is the onely Science that it hath please God hitherto to bestow on mankind’ (cited by Smith 1997)

Page 14: Consciousness Invented… A Mind Invented Descartes Locke Leibniz Mind in Society Hobbes Spinoza

Combining Materialism and the Rightness of Language

• Hobbes believed that once people used Language ‘rightly’ then the kinds of deductions that can be made in geometry can also be made about humans.• E.g. ‘substance’ means ‘material substance’ and not some

metaphysical, meaningless statement about the mind and mental states.• His view of language was an extreme nominalism wherein universals are no

more that convenient names for remembered sense experiences.• He argued that nature is corporeal and made out of small particles in motion

and everything in nature is corporeal (including the mind).• Humans are mechanisms or machines that operate according to

material laws and thus can be understood by understanding those material laws

• E.g. Each person’s behaviour can be understood by the desire for self-preservation which leads them to seek power over others

• There is nothing intrinsically right or wrong about human action rather those actions can be perceived to good/bad or pleasurable/painful in different situations and contexts.

Page 15: Consciousness Invented… A Mind Invented Descartes Locke Leibniz Mind in Society Hobbes Spinoza

Benedict De Spinoza (1632 – 1677)

• Spinoza was an excommunicated Jew reviled by both Jews and Christians alike.

• Much of his work was suppressed and/or destroyed as it caused such offence.

• Like Hobbes, Spinoza was a substance monist.

• However, his preferred substance was ‘God’

• Spinoza's phrase 'Deus sive Natura’ (‘God or Nature’) captures this relationship.

• He was also a Determinist

• “In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way”

Page 16: Consciousness Invented… A Mind Invented Descartes Locke Leibniz Mind in Society Hobbes Spinoza

Mind and Cognition

• For Spinoza the most important mistaken belief that we have about ourselves is that of free will.

• “Men believe themselves to be free because they are conscious of their own actions and are ignorant of the causes by which they are determined" (IIIP2S)

• To posit a faculty of will by which is autonomous and independent of external causal determinants is to remove it from nature which would be ridiculous