[과제] Descartes vs. Huxley

For this assignment, I'd like you to explain in 1-2 pages ( between 300 and 500 words) where Huxley diverges from Descartes, whether in his reasoning, his assumptions, or his evidence.

 

For Descartes, his main corpus of evidence are the results of introspection and meditation, and his main mode of reasoning can be characterized as being deductive and principle based. On the contrary, Thomas Huxley, a famous advocate of Darwinism and a biologist himself, employs a wholly different approach. Huxley is intent on engaging with evidence provided by experiments and case studies, which can either be repeated or in the least verified by several observers—data conventionally deemed to be “scientific.” From such physiological and behavioral data, exemplified respectively by the frog experiments and the case of the injured soldier, Huxley proceeds to draw conclusions about the brain and consciousness through abductive reasoning, where he attempts to infer the best explanation of the data at his hand. As such, while Descartes’ arguments often accompany phrases like “therefore, it must necessarily be…”, Huxley’s statement of his conclusion instead reads “this… view is the best expression of the facts at present known” (pg. 28).

 

Such differences in the form of argumentation ultimately lead to differences in the contents of their conclusions as well. A stark example is their views on the material counterpart to the mental. Descartes’s oft-ridiculed statement that the pineal gland is the “principle seat of the soul” is a product of Descartes’ own argument based on first principles; in his argument, Descartes appeals to the intuition that since we have one simple thought at a given time, the region that is responsible for such a thought must be unique as well. Meanwhile, Huxley, based on experimental observations on animals and humans, proposes that the anterior division of the brain is actually the region responsible for consciousness. Huxley’s view is a product of abductive reasoning that aims to explain experimental interventions and their observable effect on behavior.

 

Descartes’ and Huxley’s metaphysical conclusions also diverge due to their focus in reasoning. Descartes, beginning from his first principle of cogito ergo sum, and the conceivability of the soul without the body, derive and establish the dual existence of the mental and the material as separate substances. Such metaphysical commitment to the mental’s comparable status to the physical is the crux of Cartesian dualism. On the other hand, Huxley, focused on explaining the data at hand, is less interested in the “soul” and instead opt to find causally relevant explanations. As such, whether the abstract soul exists becomes a matter of secondary importance—“the hypothesis that animals are conscious automata… is perfectly consistent with any view that may be held respecting… whether they have souls or not” (pg. 29) Souls, in Huxley’s understanding, only occupy an auxiliary role that is irrelevant to the causal network, as everything can be explicated in terms of the molecular changes in the brain. As a result, Huxley’s epiphenomenalism treats the mental and the physical not as equal counterparts (as Descartes does), but pictures their relationship as a one-way relation in which the physical, which is sufficient on its own, unilaterally gives rise to the mental.

 

References

Chalmers, D. J. (2002). Philosophy of mind: Classical and contemporary readings. Oxford: Oxford University Press.