Descartes! You French Bastard!

I just purchased an interesting book: "The Pig Wants to be Eaten- 100 Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher" by Julian Baggini. After looking through it, I realized that this would provide me maybe 100 topics for my blog. I will address each example in a separate posting and will, of course, let the reader know if I haven't actually read any of the primary material. Hope this is somewhat interesting and that some of you engage me.

Alright. I'll start at the beginning. Rene Descartes. Why, oh why did this book begin with him? Descartes is my nemesis and I hold him largely responsible for the denegration of modern philosophy. I was once an acolyte instinctively understanding the Spinozan idea of belief coexisting with understanding. Only as a member of the congregation could I honestly appraise the validity of Cartesian thought. It survived for many years at the forefront of my thinking. I don't know when it fell from grace. I don't think it was a grand event, more of a slow and inevitable decay. Now, more and more, I see the damage caused by such a philosophy.

Baggini, in his first thought experiment, brings up the concept of the Evil Deceiver. In brief, suppose you are under the influence of an Evil Deceiver who has tricked you into believing that everything real is false and vice versa. Because of this, everything you believe must be called into question, even the simplest things like if you are awake or asleep. Obviously, the Deceiver doesn't have to be a demon. It could be mental illness or a fundamental set of logical principles. Whatever the case, reality, even as a self-perception, is now open to being challenged.

"The genius of this thought experiment is that, in order to judge its plausabillilty, we have to rely on the one thing the test is supposed to call into doubt: our capacity to reason well. We have to judge whether we are able to think well by thinking as well as we can. So we cannot set ourselves apart from the faculty of thought we are supposed to be assessing to judge it from a neutral perspective. It is like trying to use a suspect set of scales to weigh itself, in order to test its accuracy."

-Julian Baggini
The Pig Wants to be Eaten

We are all familiar with Descartes famous, "Cogito ergo sum." There is no denying his nice tidy logic but the fact remains that he is just wrong. You can separate yourself from your faculty of thought and indeed you have to if you have any hope of perceiving the world clearly. (Notice, I'm not saying accurately which implies something else.) Do to my heritage and my upbringing, I have schooled quite naturally in both Eastern and Western thought. Whereas much of my mental energy as an adult has been used in an attempt to reconcile Greek cognition with Judeo-Christian morality, my youth was spent trying to reconcile Western Christian and Zen Buddhist thought. Only recently have these disparate elements reached some sort of simpatico. For most of my life, it was a battle with both sides giving and gaining ground over time. What I am sure of at this point is that there does exist a space the human mind can exist in before thought. The pre-cognitive place is what yogis, Buddhist Monks, and various adherents can achieve through meditation. Because of the nature of Eastern thought, this event is often referred to as spiritual but understanding it in a Western way isn't accurate. There is a methodology to achieving this space. Everyone has the capacity, if not the discipline to get there. When understanding it like this, it doesn't get in the way of Christianity at all. One of my teachers once described it as quiting the mind so one can hear God free from our own petty judgments. Interesting enough, the founder of Aikido, Morihei Ueshiba once remarked that practicing aikido made it possible for a person to be a better Christian. I know what he means by that.

This understanding was shaped by many things. A few years ago, I started noticing an interesting thing when invovled in high pressure negotiations. I am chagrined to toot my own horn, but I began noticing that my assessment of the various situations I found myself in uniformly led to better results than that of my colleagues. For about a second, I thought I was smarter than everybody else. It didn't take long to shake that delusion. At the level I was working at, everybody was smart, everybody could reason and everybody had done the work. What made my assessments different? After much reflection and many hours of going over videotapes, I realized what it was. I was able to slip into the "zone" in times and situations my associates couldn't.

What is this "zone?" We hear of it all the time in athletics and even in music. Difficult to explain, it has been described as a state of grace. It is unconscious competence and it can only be achieved through practice. That's why we see it in sports and music. In modern American society, these are practically the only pursuits where practice, rote practe, is common. It's easy to see the advantages of the "zone" when we see Michael Jordan or Yo Yo Ma slip into it but what about daily life? How did this help me in negotiations?

The main flaw of Cartesian thought is that it stovepipes information. It fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the acquisition of data. It doesn't work like the Matrix where one's brain can be programmed with kung fu skills. The very acquisition of knowledge shapes that information making unbiased thought, outside of mathematics, impossible. According to Cartesian thought, the process of accepting a piece of information is two fold. First you assess the validity of the proposition then you choose to accept it or not. Spinoza is much more accurate here saying that comprehension and acceptance is the same step. Once you have accepted it, you can only then determine its validity. This is obviously true. When confronted with new information (of the paradigm shifting variety) most people judge according to past personal experience, the only standard a person has. Only by accepting a proposition and expanding you understanding can a person then honest test its truthfulness. The problem here is that when a person is confronted with fundamentally different material, the Cartesian mind is making judgments and assessments as information comes in, preventing the accurate intake of information.

My process is a little different. I try to quiet my mind to the extent I am able in an emotionally charged situation. I am constantly in receiving mode and I'm trying to accumulate as much raw data as possible without judgment. Then as I need to, I slip out of it to make a point or adjust the mood in the room and then I go back to receive. Easy enough right? Simple but not easy. The greater the pressure, the louder the voice in your head gets and the harder it gets to silence it. And the louder it gets, the more inaccurate your reception of all the information in the room. This again is obvious. Even with no pressure, how many people misread a document when it discusses something they are emotional about?

But why am I so upset with poor Mr. Descartes? Because according to him, thinking is everything. The creation of a tight, logical, cogent piece of thought is all. Cartesian thought allows people to believe that it is enough because it is the only thing you can trust, though his point was less about truth and more about proving one's own existence. I don't know how many people I have run into who have mindlessly blundered into situations oblivious to the damage they were causing simply because they were confident in their own reasoning. It doesn't matter how good your reasoning if you misassess the world. It doesn't matter how clever you are if you are working with bad data provided by senses clouded by thought. You will invariably reach the wrong conclusion or learn the wrong lesson from the experience.

Cartesian thought is only part of the big picture. As loyal readers of my blog will attest to, I'm less concerned with proving things right or wrong than I am trying to make an intellectually honest and beneficial blend. The East, having spent millenia trying to learn to perceive clearly, have poor logical and reasoning skills. The West, while advancing logic and reason to it very pinnacle, has spent no time developing the inner technology that allows the body to receive information as pristinely as possible. Neither provides the complete picture and I believe that it is through a blend that we will advance the human condition.

Viva la France! Decimate the whining Italian team!