René Descartes is remembered as the prototypical dualist, proposing two substances or domains of existence: res extensa (stuff in space), and res cogitans (the stuff of thought/imagination/experience): matter and mind. Despite rejecting dualism, our culture is deeply cartesian.
Descartes' universe seems to mirror the biblical separation of the domains of earth and heaven: a world of matter coexisting with a world of agentic ideas, while our scientific universe only admits the existence of matter and pattern. Yet we are closer to him than the Christians.
In the common Christian view, God and human soul were considered supernatural. Descartes did not actually believe in the supernatural; due to the inquisition, he tried not to express that too clearly. But he did associate res extensa with physics, which leads to the Hard Problem.
Matter and space are both mental models and mathematical abstractions that describe high level patterns well, but fall apart when we measure at higher resolution. The material objects and space we experience are constructs of our mind; the physical universe cannot be experienced.
After the end of Christian metaphysical dominance, our culture got rid of the supernatural, but not of Descartes two substances, because res extensa seems given, yet in the way we understand it (intuitive physics modified by Newton and Einstein), how can it produce consciousness?
The most important philosophical contribution of the 20th century are computational languages, and that they can be implemented in physics (eg in brains), and that both world model and agentic ideas (including the idea of being conscious) can be implemented in such languages.
Repairing Descartes should not reduce res cogitans to res extensa, but give res extensa its rightful status as a mental domain (the real-time world model), so that res extensa and res cogitans coexist in every mind, while a computationalized physics implements the mind.
I think that many cultures before ours have discovered that world, self and ideas are dreams of the mind, while some parent universe produces the mind. Many have also forgotten it, sometimes due to the influence of the Christian and secular dualisms of a dominant West.
This puts us into a weird position: while our shared metaphysics confuses us about how minds are producing the experience of reality, no culture before ours had the conceptual tools to explain how minds are produced. These tools are found within Artificial Intelligence.
@Plinz I don’t think so. Descartes’ thinking was influenced by the animated (hydraulic) statues of the time. Ours by computers.But as a machine becomes more complex, in order to resemble us more closely, it becomes increasingly dissimilar aconventional.com/2021/06/ai-and…
@shackletonjones At a certain level of understanding, thinkers are less influenced by metaphors, deeply distrust them, and instead build from first principles. The idea that the insights of every era must be derived by popular engineering achievements is probably overapplied
@Plinz Today, we are neo-Cartesians - our first principle is that we are supernatural beings: thinking things.
@Plinz @shackletonjones Tfw I realize computationalist epistemology isn't a product of Joscha's workplace but rather the inverse.