Hi Internet, my name's Josh, and this is THUNK.
I THUNK, therefore I am.
Vivaldi's "Spring" rudely interrupted by a loud THUNK.
We stare at a book on a white sheet. What is it trying to tell us? We do not know, we see only its spine.
Last week I talked about logical argumentation.
Although it probably wasn't anything that most of my friends (and hence viewership) didn't know already
there were very few YouTube comments and so I've made two resolutions:
First, I'm going to talk as fast as I possibly can.
Second, more hats.
MORE hats.
MOAR HATS
Alright, so Cartesian Dualism:
You know, if you wanted to make a team of the greatest minds in human history, René Descartes would definitely be a first round draft pick.
Descartes was born on a Sunday in fifteen ninety-six in France.
A place that later changed its name to Descartes because he's that important.
He was an absolute genius in mathematics.
He revolutionized algebra.
He gave us the power notation that we're all familiar with.
He laid the groundwork for Calculus.
And he also gave us that handy little x-y coordinate system that you learned in middle school.
That's named after him, like that town in France.
But Descartes and his giant brain weren't just going to stop at revolutionizing mathematics.
He was also one of the most prolific philosophers of his time
So much so that almost everybody knows a phrase that he coined in sixteen thirty-seven in his "Discourse on the Method"
"Je pense donc je suis."
"I think, therefore I am"
Descartes also thought about the human mind. He suggested that there were fundamentally two different kinds of stuff.
Matter stuff and Mind stuff.
Matter stuff was where he composed the stuff that was subject to the laws of physics.
Stuff like rocks and planets and cubical earth squeezy toys.
In contrast, mind stuff wasn't subject to the laws of physics and it made up things like human consciousness and thought.
This model of the mind as being attached to, but separate from the body is also named after Descartes; Cartesian Dualism.
More generally it's called substance dualism because it suggests that there are two kinds of substances
and although mind stuff and matter stuff can affect each other
they are not the same thing.
Now there are a ton of word games that you can play with how you define consciousness and mind,
but what do you think: Is the mind made of something other than the brain?
Hat Change!
Descartes was definitely one of the staggering intellects of human history
but he was riding the tail end of the renaissance and the field of neuroscience was pretty abysmal at that time.
How abysmal? Well, it took almost two centuries after his death for somebody to discover neurons.
Even so, Descartes suggested that there were things called
"Animal Spirits" that ran up and down the nerves and carried sensation from the extremities to the brain.
After a few centuries of neuroscience this theory has been revised somewhat.
We now know that makes up the nervous system are cells called neurons
Which chatter at each other with chemicals called neurotransmitters turning each other on and off.
We also know that the brain is a dense cluster of highly networked neurons.
Now, that's an intensely complex system,
but it still functions entirely on chemistry.
In fact, there are a few ways that we found to change that chemistry, techniques like deep brain stimulation
work directly on the mechanisms that neurons use to communicate with each other
and in so doing, can fundamentally change how a person feels and thinks
I want to emphasize that; changing the balance and exchange of chemicals in your brain changes how and what you think
If there was some sort of floaty mind substance that wasn't connected to the physical world,
Don't you think that it would at least be a little bit immune to the effects of chemicals
I mean, if you were just to suggest that physiological addiction to heroin has nothing to do with the mind,
isn't that putting Descartes before the horse?
I think that what we call mind is an emergent phenomenon
That is, something that appears complex which arises from simple interactions between simple things.
Think of a snow flake. Water molecules aren't driven by any external force that desires beauty.
They simply follow the laws of chemistry, which cause them to crystallize into beautiful shapes.
The beauty isn't something that is contained within the water molecules themselves, it's just something that happens when they follow the rules of chemistry.
It's also intrinsically tied to the nature and behavior of those molecules.
It is an emergent property of water.
Similarly, the neurons that compose a brain don't have any mind in them
Mind is just something that happens when you get a hundred-billion neurons together, networked and talking to each other in a particular pattern.
That would mean that Descartes, despite having a lot of things right for his day, was wrong
and there is no such things as mind stuff or matter stuff.
Just matter stuff behaving in a particular pattern that we've decided to call "the mind."
What do you think?
Is the term mind just a name for what happens when a bunch of neurons talk to each other or was Descartes onto something?
Is there something about the mind that is greater than the sum of neural chemistry happening in the brain and how would you prove it?
Oh look! A comment box!
Thanks for watching
Next week I'm going to talk about artificial intelligence.
If you'd like to read up on it, I've left some links below.
Blog blog subscribe blog share, and I'll see you next week