“Ah, but the outer reality is essentially different from the reality of thought.
Descartes now maintains that there are two different forms of reality—or two
‘substances.’ One substance is thought, or the ‘mind,’ the other is extension, or
matter. The mind is purely conscious, it takes up no room in space and can therefore
not be subdivided into smaller parts. Matter, however, is purely extension, it takes up
room in space and can therefore always be subdivided into smaller and smaller
parts— but it has no consciousness. Descartes maintained that both substances
originate from God, because only God himself exists independently of anything else.
But although both thought and extension come from God, the two substances have no
contact with each other. Thought is quite independent of matter, and conversely, the
material processes are quite independent of thought.”
“So he divided God’s creation into two.”
“Precisely. We say that Descartes is a dualist, which means that he effects a
sharp division between the reality of thought and extended reality. For example, only
man has a mind. Animals belong completely to extended reality. Their living and
moving are accomplished mechanically. Descartes considered an animal to be a kind
of complicated automaton. As regards extended reality, he takes a thoroughly
mechanistic view—exactly like the materialists.”
“I doubt very much that Hermes is a machine or an automaton. Descartes
couldn’t have liked animals very much. And what about us? Are we automatons as
well?”
“We are and we aren’t. Descartes came to the conclusion that man is a dual
creature that both thinks and takes up room in space. Man has thus both a mind and an
extended body. St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas had already said something
similar, namely, that man had a body like the animals and a soul like the angels.
According to Descartes, the human body is a perfect machine. But man also has a
mind which can operate quite independently of the body. The bodily processes do not
have the same freedom, they obey their own laws. But what we think with our reason
does not happen in the body—it happens in the mind, which is completely
independent of extended reality. I should add, by the way, that Descartes did not
reject the possibility that animals could think. But if they have that faculty, the same
dualism between thought and extension must also apply to them.”
“We have talked about this before. If I decide to run after a bus, the whole
‘automaton’ goes into action. And if I don’t catch the bus, I start to cry.”
“Even Descartes could not deny that there is a constant interaction between
mind and body. As long as the mind is in the body, he believed, it is linked to the
brain through a special brain organ which he called the pineal gland, where a constant
interaction takes place between ‘spirit’ and ‘matter.’ Therefore the mind can
constantly be affected by feelings and passions that are related to bodily needs. But
the mind can also detach itself from such ‘base’ impulses and operate independently
of the body. The aim is to get reason to assume command. Because even if I have the
worst pain in my stomach, the sum of the angles in a triangle will still be 180 degrees.
Thus humans have the capacity to rise above bodily needs and behave rationally. In
this sense the mind is superior to the body. Our legs can age and become weak, the
back can become bowed and our teeth can fall out—but two and two will go on being
four as long as there is reason left in us. Reason doesn’t become bowed and weak. It
is the body that ages. For Descartes, the mind is essentially thought. Baser passions
and feelings such as desire and hate are more closely linked to our bodily functions—
and therefore to extended reality.”
“I can’t get over the fact that Descartes compared the human body to a machine