 Objects experienced are represented within the mind of the observer In philosophy of mind, Cartesian materialism is the idea that at some place (or places) in the brain, there is some set of information that directly corresponds to our conscious experience. Contrary to its name, Cartesian materialism is not a view that was held by or formulated by René Descartes, who subscribed rather to a form of substance dualism. Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (864x576, 450 KB) Symbolic illustration of Cartesian materialism. ...
Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (864x576, 450 KB) Symbolic illustration of Cartesian materialism. ...
A Phrenological mapping of the brain. ...
René Descartes (March 31, 1596 – February 11, 1650), also known as Renatus Cartesius (latinized form), was a highly influential French philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and writer. ...
René Descartes illustration of dualism. ...
In its simplest version, Cartesian materialism might predict, for example, that there is a specific place in the brain which would store a coherent representation of everything we are consciously experiencing in a given moment: what we're seeing, what we're hearing, what we're smelling, and indeed, everything that we are consciously aware of. In essence, Cartesian materialism claims that, somewhere in our brain, there is a place (or set of places) where a hypothetical outside observer could 'look in' and essentially 'see' the content of conscious experience moment by moment. In contrast, anything occurring outside of this "privileged neural media" is nonconscious.
History
Multiple Meanings Historically, "Cartesian materialism" was another name for Cartesian mechanism — a philosophy which replaced the dualism in Cartesian dualism with materialism. Adherents of Cartesian mechanism accepted Descartes' physics, but rejected his metaphysics. These philosophers (such as Regius, Cabanis, and La Mettrie) used parts of Descartes' views to explain physical and biological phenomena as purely mechanical effects. (Marx & Engels 1845) Cartesian dualism was Descartess principle of the separation of mind and matter and mind and body. ...
In philosophy, materialism is that form of physicalism which holds that the only thing that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. ...
Henricus Regius (July 29, 1598 - February 19,1679) was a Dutch philosopher, physician, and professor of medicine. ...
Pierre Jean George Cabanis (June 5, 1757 - May 5, 1808), was a French physiologist. ...
Julien Offray de La Mettrie (December 25, 1709 - November 11, 1751) was a French physician and philosopher, the earliest of the materialist writers of the Enlightenment. ...
Philosopher Daniel Dennett has repopularized the term, using it to emphasize what he considers the pervasive Cartesian notion of a centralized repository of conscious experience in the brain. Dennett says that "Cartesian materialism is the view that there is a crucial finish line or boundary somewhere in the brain, marking a place where the order of arrival equals the order of 'presentation' in experience because what happens there is what you are conscious of." Daniel Clement Dennett (b. ...
Other modern philosophers have generally used less specific definitions. For example, W. Teed Rockwell (2005) defines Cartesian materialism in the following way: "The basic dogma of Cartesian materialism is that only neural activity in the cranium is functionally essential for the emergence of mind." And O'Brien and Opie (1999) define it as the idea that consciousness is "realized in the physical materials of the brain". (O'Brien and Opie (1999)).
In general, Dennett's version of the term is by far the most popular, and most philosophical literature that uses the term "Cartesian materialism" uses it in Dennett's sense.
Cartesian Dualism Main article: Cartesian dualism Cartesian dualism was Descartess principle of the separation of mind and matter and mind and body. ...
Descartes believed that a human being was composed of both a material body and an immaterial soul (or "mind"). According to Descartes, the mind and the body could interact. The body can affect the mind; for example, when you place your hand in a fire, the body relays sensory information from your hand to your mind, which results in your having the experience of pain. Similarly, the mind can affect the body; for example, you can decide to move your hand and your muscles obey, moving your hand as you desired.
Descartes noted that, although our two eyes independently see an object, our conscious experience is not of two separate fields of vision each possessing an image of the object. Rather, we seem to experience one continuous, oval-shaped field of vision that possesses information from both eyes which seems to have somehow been 'merged' into a single image. (Consider in a movie, when a character looks through binoculars and the audience is shown what he is looking at, from the character's point of view. The image shown is never made up of two completely separate circular images-- rather the director shows us a single figure-eight shaped region made up of information from each eyepiece.)
Descartes noted that information from both eyes seems to have been merged somehow before "entering" conscious perception. He also noted similar effects for the other senses. Based on this, Descartes hypothesized that there must be some single place in the brain where all the sensory information is assembled, before finally being relayed to the immaterial mind.
His best candidate for this location was the pineal gland, since he thought it was the only part of the brain that is a single structure, rather than one duplicated on both the left and right halves of the brain. Descartes therefore believed that the pineal gland was the "seat of the soul" and that any information that was to "enter" consciousness had to pass through the pineal gland before it could enter the mind. In his perspective, the pineal gland is the place where all information "comes together".
Materialism Main article: Materialism In philosophy, materialism is that form of physicalism which holds that the only thing that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. ...
Materialism is a competing philosophy which rejects the notion of an immaterial mind or soul. While Cartesian dualism claims that the mind is an immaterial thing completely unlike matter, materialism argues that the mind can be completely explained in terms of matter. According to materialism, the brain's functions can be completely explained by the laws of physics, without any need for an immaterial mind. In this view, the brain is not unlike a biological computer, rather than an adjunct to a soul.
Dennett's Cartesian materialism At the present time, the consensus of scientists and philosophers is to reject dualism and its immaterial mind, for a variety of reasons. (See Dualism -- Arguments Against). Similarly, many other aspects of Descartes' theories have been rejected; for example, the pineal gland turned out to be endocrinological, rather than having a large role in information processing. René Descartes illustration of dualism. ...
According to Daniel Dennett, however, many scientists and philosophers still believe, either explicitly or implicity, in Descartes' idea of some centralized repository where the contents of consciousness are merged and assembled, a place he calls the Cartesian theater. The Cartesian theatre is a somewhat disparaging term coined by philosopher Daniel Dennett to pointedly refer to the defining aspect of Cartesian materialism, which he considers to be the often unacknowledged remnants of Cartesian dualism in modern materialistic theories of the mind. ...
In his book "Consciousness Explained", Dennett writes:
- Let's call the idea of such a centered locus in the brain Cartesian materialism, since it's the view you arrive at when you discard Descartes' dualism but fail to discard the imagery of a central (but material) Theater where it "all comes together"
Although this central repository is often called a "place" or a "location", Dennett is quick to clarify that Cartesian materialism's "centered locus" need not be anatomically defined-- such a locus might be comprised of a network of diverse regions.
Dennett's Arguments Against Cartesian Materialism In Consciousness Explained (1991), Dennett offers several lines of evidence to dispute the idea of Cartesian materialism. Cover of Consciousness Explained Consciousness Explained (published 1991) is a controversial book by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett which attempts to explain how consciousness arises from interaction of physical and cognitive processes in the brain. ...
No exact place One argument against Cartesian materialism is that most neuroscientists have discounted the idea of a single brain area where all information "comes together". Instead, information seemed to be stored and processed in a variety of disparate neural structures. For example, once information from the eyes reaches the visual cortex, it is analyzed by a variety of overlapping feature maps, each detecting a particular aspect, but a central location where this information is merged back together to re-represent it has not been found. [1] Dennett argues that there would be no point to such a merger since all the analysis has already been performed and there is no homunculus who would benefit from a reconstructed composite.
Timing anomalies of Conscious Experience Another argument against Cartesian materialism is inspired by the results of several scientific experiments in the fields of psychology and neuroscience. In experiments that demonstrate the Color Phi phenomenon and the metacontrast effect, two stimuli are rapidly flashed on a screen, one after the other. Amazingly, the second stimulus can, in some cases, actually affect the perception of the first stimulus. In other experiments conducted by Benjamin Libet, two electrical stimulations are delivered, one after another, to a conscious subject. Under some conditions, subjects report having felt the second stimulation before they felt the first stimulation. The Color Phi phenomenon is a perceptual illusion described by psychologists Paul Kolers and Michael von Grunau in which a disembodied perception of motion is produced by a succession of still images. ...
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These experiments call into question the idea that brain states are directly translatable into the contents of Consciousness. How can the second stimuli be 'projected backwards in time', such that it can affect the perception of things that occurred before the second stimulus was even administered?
Two attempted explanations Two different types of explanations have been offered in response to the timing anomalies. One is that perhaps sensory information is assembled into a buffer before being passed on to consciousness after a substantial time delay. Since consciousness occurs only after a time lag, the incoming second stimulus would have time to affect the stored information about the first stimulus. In this view, subjects correctly remember their having had inaccurate experiences. Dennett calls this the Stalinesque Explanation (after the Stalinist Soviet Union's show trials that presented manufactured evidence to an unwitting jury.) In computing, a buffer is a region of memory used to temporarily hold output or input data, comparable to buffers in telecommunication. ...
Iosif (usually anglicized as Joseph) Vissarionovich Stalin (Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Сталин), original name Ioseb Jughashvili (Georgian: იოსებ ჯუღაშვილ...
A second explanation for the timing takes the opposite tack. Perhaps the subjects, contrary to their own reports, initially experienced the first stimulus as being prior to and untainted by the second stimulus. However, when subjects were later asked to recall what their experiences had been, they found that their memories of the first stimulus had been tainted by the second stimulus. Therefore, they inaccurately report experiences that never actually occurred. In this view, subjects have accurate initial experiences, but inaccurately remember them. Dennett calls this view the Orwellian Explanation, after George Orwell's novel 1984, in which a totalitarian government frequently rewrites history to suit its purposes. Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903[1][2] – 21 January 1950), better known by the pen name George Orwell, was a British author and journalist. ...
Nineteen Eighty-Four (commonly written as 1984) is a dystopian novel by the English writer George Orwell, published in 1949. ...
How are we to choose which of these two explanations is the correct one? Both explanations seem to adequately explain the given data, both seem to make the same predictions. Dennett sees no principled basis for choosing either of the explanations, so he rejects their common assumption of a theater. He says:
- "We can suppose, both theorists have exactly the same theory of what happens in your brain; they agree about just where and when in the brain the mistaken content enters the causal pathways; they just disagree about whether that location is to be deemed pre-experiential or post-experiential. [...] They even agree about how it ought to "feel" to subjects: Subjects should be unable to tell the difference between misbegotten experiences and immediately misremembered experiences." [p.125, original emphasis.]
Dennett's Conclusions Dennett's argument has the following basic structure: - 1. If Cartesian materialism were true and there really was a special brain area (or areas) that stored the contents of conscious experience, then it should be possible to ascertain exactly when something enters conscious experience.
- 2. It is impossible, even in theory, to ever precisely determine when something enters conscious experience.
- 3. Therefore, Cartesian materialism is false.
According to Dennett, the debate between Stalinesque and Orwellian explanations is unresolvable — no amount of scientific information could ever answer the question. Dennett therefore argues (in accord with the philosophical doctrine of verificationism) that, since the differences between the two explanations are unresolvable, the explanations are logically meaningless. In philosophy, epistemic theories of truth are attempts to analyse the notion of truth in terms of epistemic notions such as belief, acceptance, verification, justification, perspective and so on. ...
Dennett feels that the insistence on a place where 'it all comes together' (the Cartesian Theater) is fundamentally flawed, and therefore that Cartesian materialism is false. Dennett's view is that "there is no single, definitive 'stream of consciousness,' because there is no central Headquarters, no Cartesian Theatre where 'it all comes together'". The Cartesian theatre is a somewhat disparaging term coined by philosopher Daniel Dennett to pointedly refer to the defining aspect of Cartesian materialism, which he considers to be the often unacknowledged remnants of Cartesian dualism in modern materialistic theories of the mind. ...
To avoid the perceived shortcomings of Cartesian materialism, Dennett instead proposes the Multiple Drafts Model — a model of consciousness which lacks a central Cartesian theater. Daniel Dennetts Multiple Drafts Theory or Model of Consciousness is a physical theory of consciousness based upon the proposal that the brain acts as an information processor. ...
Replies and Objections to Dennett and his Arguments
A philosophy without adherents? Perhaps the primary objection to Dennett's use of the term Cartesian materialism is that it is a philosophy without adherents. In this view, Cartesian materialism is essentially a "Straw Man" — an argument explicitly constructed just so it can be refuted: A straw man, or straw person, argument is a logical fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponents position. ...
- The now standard response to Dennett’s project is that he has picked a fight with a straw man. Cartesian materialism, it is alleged, is an impossibly naive account of phenomenal consciousness held by no one currently working in cognitive science or the philosophy of mind. Consequently, whatever the effectiveness of Dennett’s demolition job, it is fundamentally misdirected (see, e.g., Block, 1993, 1995; Shoemaker, 1993; and Tye, 1993). (O'Brien and Opie 1999)
It is a point of intense debate as to how many philosophers and scientists even accept Cartesian materialism. On the one hand, some say that this view is "held by no one currently working in cognitive science or the philosophy of mind" (O'Brien & Opie) or insist that they "know of no one who endorses it." (Michael Tye) On the other hand, some say that Cartesian materialism "informs virtually all research on mind and brain, explicitly and implicitly" (Antonio Damasio) or argue that the common "commitment to qualia or 'phenomenal seemings'" entails an implicit commitment to Cartesian materialism that becomes explicit when they "work out a theory of consciousness in sufficient detail". (Dennett 1993).
Dennett suggests that the Cartesian materialism, though rejected by many philosophers, still colors people's thinking. He writes:
- "Perhaps no one today explicitly endorses Cartesian materialism. Many theorists would insist that they have explicitly rejected such an obviously bad idea. But as we shall see, the persuasive imagery of a Cartesian theater keeps coming back to haunt us — laypeople and scientists alike — even after its ghostly dualism has been denounced and exorcised."
Replies from Dualism Many philosophers question Dennett's immediate rejection of Dualism (dismissing it after only a few pages of argument in Consciousness Explained), pointing to a variety of reasons that people often find dualism to be a compelling view.(see Arguments for Dualism). René Descartes illustration of dualism. ...
To proponents of dualism, mental events have a certain subjective quality to them, whereas physical events obviously do not. That is, for example, what a burned finger feels like, what sky blue looks like, what nice music sounds like, and so on. There is something that it's like to feel pain, to see a familiar shade of blue, and so on; These sensations independent of behavior are known as qualia, and the philosophical problem posed by their alleged existence is called the Hard problem of consciousness by Chalmers [2]. Redness is the canonical quale. ...
Various formulations: Why does awareness of sensory information exist at all? Why do qualia exist? Why is there a subjective component to experience? Why arent we philosophical zombies? Categories: Stub | Philosophy of mind ...
Dualists argue that Dennett does not explain these phenomena, so much as ignore them. Indeed, the title of Dennett's book Consciousness Explained is often lampooned by critics, who call the book Consciousness Explained Away or even Consciousness Ignored.
Replies from Cartesian Materialists Some philosophers have actively accepted the moniker of Cartesian Materialists, and are not convinced by Dennett's arguments.
O'Brien and Opie (1999) embrace Cartesian materialism, arguing against Dennett's claim that the onset of phenomenal experience in the brain cannot in principle be precisely determined, and offering what they consider to be a way to accommodate Phi phenomenon within the Cartesian materialist paradigm. The phi phenomenon is a perceptual illusion described by Max Wertheimer in his 1912 Experimental Studies on the Seeing of Motion, in which a disembodied perception of motion is produced by a succession of still images. ...
Block (1995) has described an alternative called "Cartesian Modularism" in which the contents of conscious experience are distributed in the brain.
Replies from Neuroscience Despite Dennett's insistence that there are no special brain areas that store the contents of consciousness, many neuroscientists reject this assertion. Indeed, what separates conscious information from unconscious information remains a question of interest, and how information from disparate brain regions are assembled into a coherent whole (the Binding problem) remains a question which is actively investigated. Recently Global Workspace Theory has argued that perhaps the brain does possess some universally accessible "workspace". [citation needed] The binding problem is, basically, the problem of how the unity of conscious perception is brought about by the distributed activities of the central nervous system (Revonsuo and Newman (1999)). In its most general form it arises whenever information from distinct populations of neurons must be combined. ...
Global Workspace Theory (GWT) was proposed by Bernard Baars (1988, 1997). ...
Another criticism comes from investigation into the human visual system. Although both eyes each have a blind spot, conscious visual experience does not subjectively seem to have any holes in it. Some scientists and philosophers had argued, based on subjective reports, that perhaps the brain somehow "fills in" the holes, based upon adjacent visual information. Dennett had powerfully argued that such "filling in" was unnecessarry, based on his objections to a Cartesian theater. Ultimately, however, studies have confirmed that the visual cortex does perform a very complex "filling in" process (Pessoa & De Weerd, 2003).
The impact of this is itself controversial. Some assume that this is a devastating blow against Dennett, while others have argued that this in no way confirms Cartesian materialism or refutes the Multiple Drafts Model, and that Dennett is fundamentally right even if he's mistaken about this detail. [3]
Related Philosophy Articles Image File history File links Wikibooks-logo-en. ...
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René Descartes illustration of dualism. ...
Epiphenomenalism is a view in philosophy of mind according to which some or all mental states are mere epiphenomena (side-effects or by-products) of physical states of the world. ...
Redness is the canonical quale. ...
In philosophy, materialism is that form of physicalism which holds that the only thing that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. ...
Eliminativists argue that our modern belief in the existence of mental phenomena is analogous to our ancient belief in obsolete theories such as the geocentric model of the universe. ...
Direct realism is a theory of perception that claims that the senses provide us with direct awareness of the external world. ...
Indirect Realism is the view in cognitive psychology that perception functions via internal representations of external reality. ...
Representationalism, or the representational theory of perception, is a philosophical doctrine that in any act of perception, the immediate (direct) object of perception is a sense-datum that represents an external object, which is the mediate (indirect) object of perception. ...
References - Block, N. (1995). On a confusion about a function of consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (2): 227-287. http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/OldArchive/bbs.block.html
- Dennett, D.C. (1991), Consciousness Explained, Little, Brown & Co. USA (ISBN 0-316-18065-3)
- Dennett, D.C. (1993). The Message is: There is no Medium (reply to Jackson, Rosenthal, Shoemaker & Tye), Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, 53, (4), 889-931, Dec. 1993.
- Engels, F. and Marx, K. (1845). The Holy Family. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch06_3_d.htm
- O'Brien, G. & Opie, J. (1999), "A Defence of Cartesian Materialism", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59:939-63.
- Pessoa, L. and De Weerd, P. (2003), "Filling-In: From Perceptual Completion to Cortical Reorganization", Oxford University Press, USA (ISBN 0-19-514013-3)
- Rockwell, W. Teed. (2005), Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory, MIT Press (ISBN 0-262-18247-5)
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