The Mind-Body Duality Fallacy: A Critique of Descartes

I look at the mind-body duality and critique Descartes’ radical Cartesian Doubt in mediations, showing how the thinking individual mind separate from the body is a fallacy. I draw upon thinkers like Deleuze, Proust, and Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error.

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Credits:

Sources:

Dennett, Daniel C. (25 Aug 1995). Review of Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Times Literary Supplement. 3-4.

Descartes, Rene, Meditations

Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition

Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error

[japongo]

Superb introduction about the necessity of a specific context for some ideas to be successful, also depicting how history is a stream of could-have-beens and could-bes and not a linear process bearing unquestionable events and dynamics. Important ending as well, putting your critique of individualistic philosophy in line with a proposal for a new political framework organized around the collective. Our times deeply need videos like this one. Thank you, sir.

[MrStranger]

Heidegger offers a significant critique of Descartes' mind-body duality in "Being and Time."

[novahina]

I love your reading on Descartes references.
My teachers weren't as deep in their readings, unfortunally, people in class mostly had a bad view on descartism.

[geraldoarnoldo]

Isn't it odd that the effects of sensory deprivation the mind quickly descends into chaos followed by insanity.

[lizgichora]

Think! Communal good and shared responsibility. Renee Descarte thank you once again.

[slgnssp]

I like that in a sense the idea that the personal and the social are not severed in nature goes against an idea that was, at least in part, a reaction to empiricism/"mechanicism" - because it's common for people to react to more socially integrated views as "less objective" or even more "idealist"

[jbw]

Dennett's dismissal of the first-person ontology of consciousness is not convincing. The implications of the irreducibility of mind are too serious to be hand-waived away. There is still not satisfying solution to the hard problem articulated by Chalmers. Eliminative materialists are too reliant on the scientific paradigm

[casteretpollux]

Sometimes I think and I am. Other times I don't think and I still am. I could think without my body. I am constantly in a state of change. What's so difficult?

[KundelX]

4:00 using outside world's logic and science to disprove the superiority of mind is completely contradictory. My thoughts are closer and more certain to me than neuroscientist's claims, so they are more truthful

[gidalyahbrons]

Empathy can never truly rival self interest, since empathy is merely a product of self interest. To live for everyone is to live for no one.

[roybecker]

Yes. "I think, therefore I am." The "I" is merely asserted here.

[lesprilib]

The first person who showed this fallacy was a woman: Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia. Give her credit.

[meltingpoint]

Does an object orientated ontology somewhat ‘debunk’ mind-body dualism

[dimitricariou]

You’re right, it’s intresting how Western philosophy places so much value on the free individual. As for example, in certain cultures, your relation to the totem of the snake is more important than the fact that you’re a free individual.

[andystitt]

This assumes the existence of a physical body.

[HxHDRA]

"What rules the body? The Mind. What's The Mind's greatest weapon? The Body. What is the connection between The Mind and The Body? The Mind controls The Body, The Body controls our enemies, our enemies control jack shit when we're done with them."
RIP netflix daredevil

[Franklin]

In 1967 and 1968, when I was a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I received a copy of the following limerick from a professor or teaching assistant. It was marked with the author's name as "Kenneth Brown"

Descartes is the Man we must damn
For Modern philosphy's jam.
Said he, though I doubt
What I'm thinking about
I never can doubt that I am.

It's a clear and distict proposition
That my being implies a condition,
And it's easy to show
(This much I can know)
That God must be real in addition.

But this is important, you see;
It implies a divine guarantee
That in reason I must
Put a rational trust
When it posits a world besides me.

My system is further attended
By duality ever unblended,
For reason has taught
That no body has thought
And a thinking thing's never extended.

And so we must ponder in wonder
A hudge philosphical blunder;
When thus you've defined
Both body and mind
You always must leave them asunder.

[mythbusterman]

Similarly in modern physics they keep trying to reduce reality to smaller and smaller more abstract scales . If you reduced your car for example to a seething mess of atoms in the absence of infinite computational power and attempt to study those atoms would provide no information whatsoever on what it is like for an object to be like a car or anything about how a car works .

[wrxin]

Great video! Although I agree with you I believe perhaps the best philosopher on this topic was Merleau-Ponty through the Phenomenology of Perception.

[StatickShoot]

one thing that really kinda throws away anything you said about the split between body and mind being an illusion, is that scientist found out that the heart has a neuronal net, it thinks and feels for itself, and its the only organ that sends much more information to the brain than it receives. The problem with Descartes was that he was born into Western Culture (and if you think about Existentialism vs Structuralism) he wont be able to surpass the barrier of its own culture, if he was more exposed to, lets say, buddism (with a mere philosophical approach) his line would have been (we exist within this system, therefore we are indivisible from it). Wich makes sense if you think about the perceptual incapacity of quantum particles to become sentient humans.