Does Descartes, working from the inside out, “escape subjectivism”? Very simply, he does not.
Consciousness is known as “the hard problem” of philosophy—neurology might tell us something of the mechanics of how we experience qualia, how we process phenomena, but it says very little of why. For example, it’s really quite simple to answer how we know a sour taste from a sweet taste—the physical reaction to sour foods, like lemons or spoiled milk, has much to do with an early genetic mutation that selected for an expansive autonomic reaction to alkaloids, which are more often than not quite poisonous.1 The actual step-action sequence of events involved with the pucker and gag reflex are likewise expressible in terms of anatomical movement. But …show more content…
Descartes championed the notion of working from doubt, and this superficially seems very similar to the scientific process of disproving an hypothesis. But if Descartes had truly wanted to answer the question of viable external objectivity, he ought to have started from the notion of the objective world and worked in toward the subjective understanding. In order to demonstrate what I mean by this, let’s take an example from modern artificial intelligence …show more content…
In this case, “we” is a placeholder for “world”—the AI, lacking direct interaction with a sender (such as a caregiver providing food at supper), will be unable to develop a sense of individual self because it has no relationship data to compare itself against.4 Once such interaction occurs and is recognized, the AI develops a sense of “you” as opposed to “we”; and from this follows the opposite of “you”—“I”. If one were to hear echoes of Heidegger and Marcel at this point, one would not be far off the
Consciousness is known as “the hard problem” of philosophy—neurology might tell us something of the mechanics of how we experience qualia, how we process phenomena, but it says very little of why. For example, it’s really quite simple to answer how we know a sour taste from a sweet taste—the physical reaction to sour foods, like lemons or spoiled milk, has much to do with an early genetic mutation that selected for an expansive autonomic reaction to alkaloids, which are more often than not quite poisonous.1 The actual step-action sequence of events involved with the pucker and gag reflex are likewise expressible in terms of anatomical movement. But …show more content…
Descartes championed the notion of working from doubt, and this superficially seems very similar to the scientific process of disproving an hypothesis. But if Descartes had truly wanted to answer the question of viable external objectivity, he ought to have started from the notion of the objective world and worked in toward the subjective understanding. In order to demonstrate what I mean by this, let’s take an example from modern artificial intelligence …show more content…
In this case, “we” is a placeholder for “world”—the AI, lacking direct interaction with a sender (such as a caregiver providing food at supper), will be unable to develop a sense of individual self because it has no relationship data to compare itself against.4 Once such interaction occurs and is recognized, the AI develops a sense of “you” as opposed to “we”; and from this follows the opposite of “you”—“I”. If one were to hear echoes of Heidegger and Marcel at this point, one would not be far off the