The Cartesian vision fulfilled: analogue bodies and digital minds is an essay in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (2005, v. 30, n. 2) by Ian Hacking that first argues that despite the dislike for the Cartesian mind-body split in philosophy there is a degree to which Western culture is acting as if the body was analogue and the mind digital. Our metaphors, our representations, our sciences are Cartesian. Medicine treats the body as a messy mechanism, cognitive science treats the mind like a computer. Here is the abstract:
Current intellectual wisdom, abetted by philosophers of all stripes, teaches that the Cartesian philosophy is both wrong and dead. This wisdom will be overtaken by events. Present and future technologies – ranging from organ transplants to information coding – will increasingly make us revert to Descartes’s picture of two absolutely distinct types of domains, the mental and the physical, which nevertheless constantly interact. We as humans are constituted in both domains, and also must inhabit them. This is less a matter of facts – for what a person is, is never simply a matter of fact – than of how we will come to conceive of ourselves in the light of the facts that will press in upon us.
What is impressive and distracting about the essay (and what makes it accessible) is that he takes us on a tour of contemporary media culture from Japanese entertainment robots, manga, to Stelarc. It is only at the end that he makes his second move, which is to declare, without giving us a similar tour, that the representation of the mind as digital is “dated”.
Minds, on the other hand, we represent as information processors. And in this age we represent the processing of information by sequences of binary digital operations. Here I am less confident of the metaphor, which I find a bit dated. (p. 164)
He concludes by talking about Antonio Damasio’s theory which is that, “A human being is a neurologically nested triad of mind, brain and body.” (p. 165) The science that is showing the importance of the body to emotion and emotion to mind “leaves the digital mind in the dust.” (p. 165) Hardly. I find it hard to believe that science will give up on trying to formally model the mind as a method for testing hypotheses and understanding.