Here are my comments:
>
> Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650) was a French philosopher who applied
> what he called the "method of doubt" to everything he thought he knew:
> He would see whether he could be certain about it, and if not, he set it
> aside, to see whether there was something else he could be certain
> about: perhaps there would be nothing at all.
I couldn't stop asking why go to all this trouble, and where was he coming
so I read a little. He seems to have been a very original and independent
thinker (soldier even), in a time of Church control over intellectual
institutions, "currents" of scepticism and attempts to derive theories
of everything. I couldn't help admiring him and was sad that he died
younger than I am now. I found his eventual reconstruction of God and the
external world difficult to understand.
> Arithmetic is based on
> axioms, which we assume to be true. Our assumptions could be false, but
> that does not matter, because when we do a proof it is always
> CONDITIONAL on the truth of the axioms: In mathematics, I never prove
> that something is true "no matter what"; I only prove that it's true IF
> the axioms are true. In fact, the longhand version of a proof, if it
> starts right from the axioms, is always of the form: If the axioms were
> true and this were false, that would create a contradiction (so, this
> must be true!).
If you can't prove axioms, isn't anything that follows cheating?
> Scientific laws are only PROBABLE; they are not certain.
> All the evidence seems to support them, but evidence cannot PROVE them.
> It is not self-contradictory that future evidence should fail to support
> them.
Couldn't you say that scientific parameters are a bit like axioms. Eg the
melting point of a specific substance is always x if it's purity is y and
the pressure is z? Couldn't scientific theory one day explain and exactly
predict this kind of data form crystal structures etc which are fixed?
> Descartes did find that there was one thing left that he could not
> doubt, and that was the fact that he was doubting! His famous "cogito
> > is going on (even if the person having the experience doesn't understand
> > this!). For an experience is of how things SEEM. It is possible that the
> > outside world, for example, IS NOT the way it seems, but it is not
> > possible that it does not SEEM the way it SEEMS. Because seeming is just
> > experiencing. You can doubt what your experience tells you about the
> > way things ARE (and, in the case of, say, hallucinations, you would be
> > right!), but, you cannot (if you are in your right mind, rather than
> > delirious) doubt what your experience tells you about the way things
> > SEEM.
Is this all saying that doubting can not be doubted
doubting is experience
therefore all experience can not be doubted
but all experience isn't doubt?
> > So where did dualism and the mind/body problem come from? Well, how can
> > you possibly equate something as certain and immediate as experience with
> > something as uncertain and remote as a physical substance? How, in other
> > words, can you give a PHYSICAL explanation of experience?
I have always felt it was the other way round in practice. How can a mind,
if it has no physical explanation, operate in a physical world. I don't
believe there is an homunculus or in the pineal gland interface (was that
Descartes?), or is there a virtual homunculus in a virtual reality?
I'm worried that doubt and certainty are just two constructs or categories.
In practice don't we absolutely have to assume a physical world whatever
philosophy we seem to believe? Doesn't the idea of conscious experience as
a property, an currently unexplainable by-product of neuronal processes,
fit best in the real world, even if we don't like the implications?
Now I have a horrible feeling I've missed the point saying things like real
world.
Some quotes (based on patients incapable of emotion)
in case they are interesting:
"pure reason is a self-defeating ideal"
"pure reason is a pathological rather than an ideal form of reason"
"Cogito ergo sum is neurophysiologically wrong, since human thinking
cannot exist as pure thinking without bodily experience"
from:
All in the mind. Sven Ove Hansson. Review: of Descartes' Error:
Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. Antonio R Damasio. Picador, 1995.
in The Skeptic, Vol 9, No 4, p 26, 1995.
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