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The Origins of Physicalism
It is ironic that among the most strident critics of Cartesian dualism are the physicalists and the identity theorists, since Cartesianism was the original mechanistic philosophy, and it could be said that the whole physicalist program has its roots in Descartes.
Indeed, the whole of physicalism could be said to be implicit in Cartesianism and to have developed into its present form as a natural extrapolation of the same.
Thomas Henry Huxley thought so, and said as much in his 1870 essay On Descartes’ “Discourse Touching the Method of Using One’s Reason Rightly and of Seeking Scientific Truth”:
I hold, with the Materialist, that the human body, like all living bodies, is a machine, all the operations of which will, sooner or later, be explained on physical principles. I believe that we shall, sooner or later, arrive at a mechanical equivalent of consciousness, just as we have arrived at a mechanical equivalent of heat.
And in the following paragraph of Huxley’s essay:
I am prepared to go with the Materialists wherever the true pursuit of the path of Descartes may lead them; and I am glad, on all occasions, to declare my belief that their fearless development of the materialistic aspect of these matters has had an immense, and a most beneficial, influence upon physiology and psychology. Nay, more, when they go farther than I think they are entitled to do — when they introduce Calvinism into science and declare that man is nothing but a machine, I do not see any particular harm in their doctrines, so long as they admit that which is a matter of experimental fact — namely, that it is a machine capable of adjusting itself within certain limits.
I would argue that the “true pursuit of the path of Descartes” has led to precisely what Huxley envisioned, namely, “a mechanical equivalent of consciousness” — or, least least, the attempt to formulate a mechanical equivalent to consciousness. This attempt has not been successful. I will go farther and argue that the attempt cannot be successful.
There is a different path that can be pursued that also has its origins in Descartes, and this is the mind-body continuum that I have recently attempted to outline in Naturalism and the Mind, Of Distinctions, Weak and Strong, and Of Distinctions, Principled and Otherwise.
Both mechanism and organic continuity have their origins in Cartesianism; mechanism seeks to pursue the extension of the mechanistic until it swallows the mental entirely; the organic continuity of the mind-body continuum seeks to demonstrate that the mechanistic is an extension of the mental or the mental is an extension of the mechanistic, depending on your point of view. The important thing is that there is a continuity between the mechanistic and the mental, although that continuity is distinct from identity.
Seen in this perspective, these theories are not entirely alien each to the other. Indeed, we can see at least three obvious approaches to overcoming Cartesian dualism while starting from Cartesian premises:
1) starting with matter and working toward an explanation of mind, or
2) starting with mind and working toward an explanation of matter, or
3) starting someplace between the two and working outward toward both.
There are, of course, other possibilities, but today I just wanted to point out the similarity between the programmatic responses to Descartes.
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