Descartes’ Gambit: The Unexpected Course of an Objective, Rationalist ‘Path to Truth’

A rationalistic, objectively materialistic turn in Western philosophy is associated with thinkers such as Rene Descartes in the 17th Century, and others in the so-called Age of Reason or European Enlightenment of the 18th. That emphasis on reason and factual evidence arose from an era of the most vicious internecine warfare, motivated by competing claims to who’s version of ‘God’s Truth’ is superior. Descartes himself served as a soldier in these wars. It has been observed that Descartes’ emphasis upon individual reason, “methodological skepticism,” and mathematical analysis, were motivated by an impulse to generate a valid basis for ‘Truth’ that could be accepted by all rational thinkers -- while not being subject to religious doctrine. Such an approach might then provide a sectarian consensus upon ‘what is actual thus true,’ which could be shared by all regardless of religious beliefs. In other words, Descartes’ efforts are a response to the question: ‘What can we all agree upon so that we will not be killing each other over who is right?’  If there could be a 'path to truth' that was rationally self-evident and factually verifiable, then perhaps humans would not be so divided and violent.

However, in Descartes time, reality was understood as 'the work of God,' thus defined by church authorities. He understood all too well how dangerous it was to speak publicly about

'the truth.' His tactic for avoiding such conflict was to propose a “mind-body dualism,” in which mind and intelligence, thus ‘god the creator,’ were distinguished as non-physical phenomena, thus could be ‘set aside’ as separate from seeking understanding of the physical world. In that approach, the physical world could well be regarded as 'the work of God,' but could also be investigated and understood through rational and mathematical analysis because it was the physical result of 'divine mind.' We might call this 'Descartes' Gambit,' in which he seeks a path to 'truthful understanding of reality' by 'bracketing out' a primary aspect of it.

Considering the subsequent history of how scientific method evolved, and has come to be widely accepted across cultures as an accurate means of understanding reality, this ‘gambit’ seems to have been successful. There is now a widely shared scientific 'sense of reality' based on reductive materialistic principles. At the same time, many people both ‘trust science’ yet also hold religious beliefs about ‘divine powers’ that somehow create or guide the world. Yet, despite the seeming success of scientific method in providing a commonly shared sense of reality, it has not entirely prevented violent conflicts over whose religious beliefs and doctrines are ‘the absolute Truth,’ and thus should dominate the thinking of all people.

For those who embrace the causal determinism of material physics as the definition of reality, the issue of ‘divine agency,’ or spirituality, has been factually dismissed as delusional. Nonetheless, the issue of 'what is mind' and how it interacts with physical phenomena remains intensely debated. For some, mind is either an "epiphenomenon" that arises from the physical brain but does not have actual causal influence upon it. Others pose a distinction of "substance dualism," in which mind and body are fundamentally different 'substances' that have causal effects upon each other. Somewhat similarly, "emergent dualism" is a version of substance dualism that regards mind as 'coming into existence' when physical conditions, like the brain, attain a sufficient condition of complexity. Mind, then, 'emerges' from sufficiently complex physical conditions and then can influence those conditions: physical brains are a 'substance' that can 'give rise' to mental 'substances' that are not explicitly physical, and the two can interact.

Though this view does not appear to resolve the question of 'what is mind or spirit?,' except to characterize it as a 'non-physical substance' which emerges from sufficient complexity in physical substances, it actually does have some scientifically verifiable basis in fact. Complex adaptive system science can track levels of dynamical complexity in physical systems 'up to the point' that 'mind-like' properties of self-organizing, self-directing system network behaviors emerge. There is a point where the interactive dynamics of the system's physical parts become interdependently entangled, resulting in unpredictable effects that alter its forms or activities, which can be shown to be 'purposeful' for the system's continued existence. The system actually alters its own physical properties in an 'agentic' or agent-like manner. Such complex dynamical systems, from cells to societies, appear to manifest these emergent 'agentic properties' from a physical basis -- but, those properties cannot be entirely analyzed as explicitly physical phenomena.

That being the factual case, then we are now faced with scientific knowledge that provides factual insights into how agency, thus mind, emerges unpredictably from self-organizing systems, in ways that are ultimately inexplicable by deterministic ‘laws’ alone. Agency, once represented by the mythological and religious symbolism of spirits and divinities, is now a phenomenon that can be verified through the rationalistic application of quantitative analysis based upon our understanding of the physical world. What Descartes excluded, scientific method has now included, as a mathematically validated aspect of ‘objective reality.’

But does this factual basis for 'mind' emerging from physical conditions of sufficient complexity actually resolve the conundrum of 'what is mind?' Well, yes and no. The agentic or agent-like properties of complex adaptive systems can be described as 'dynamical phenomena,' in contrast to explicitly physical phenomena. The trouble remains that these dynamical phenomena 'happen' in ways that cannot be fully analyzed and reduced to sequential causal sequences. But their existence, their manifestation, and evidence for how that alters physical systems, can be quantitatively verified. So, we do have a 'rational, objectivist basis' for an inherent relationship between 'mind and body,' or spirit and matter, even though the 'mind' part is a kind of 'relational dynamical activity,' rather than an explicitly physical phenomena. The 'substance of mind' appears to be something like 'dynamically interactive interdependency.'

In that case, perhaps Descartes' attempt to create an objective basis for truth that can be shared by all ‘reasonable thinkers,’ thus perhaps avoid the violent conflicts arising from conflicting religious beliefs, has succeeded. In effect, both ‘spiritualistic’ and ‘materialistic’ attitudes have been quantitatively confirmed as intuitions of paradoxically ‘co-existing’ aspects of reality. The 'agency' of mind or spirit, represented by mythological and religious notions, is an actual 'dynamical phenomena,' and, it is interdependent with physical phenomena. However, culturally assimilating this ‘new/next worldview’ is obstructed by two opposing attitudes of ‘fundamentalistic belief.’ One arises from contemporary religions that assert the literal truth of their doctrines. The other, its antagonist, manifests from the prevailing ‘culture of science,' which is dominated by an assumption (based upon the deterministic ‘laws of physics’) that neither agency nor ‘free will’ are even possible. If a shared sense of objective reality sought by science has arrived through complex adaptive systems science, then it has transgressed both the literalism of religious belief and a dogmatic expectation that scientific reduction must provide an absolute deterministic definition of everything as physical or material phenomena.

Consequently, neither 'side' will be content with the unexpected conclusions of Descartes Gambit. For the religious literalists, gods or divinities are 'actual entities' that 'determine' the physical world. But systems science indicates that emergent agency, thus mind, is intrinsically unpredictable, thus non-deterministic, even though it can be shown to be teleologically purposeful. We might then say that mind or spirit is, well, necessarily 'improvisational.' Though it manifests in various characteristic ways, it is not 'a thing,' but, rather, a dynamical tendency in nature. For the doctrinaire materialists, the deterministic laws of physics 'must' account for all real phenomena, thus unpredictably yet purposeful emergent agency is fundamentally impossible. The literalistic theists and materialistic atheists do not appear wiling to 'give an inch.'

If scientific reduction has indeed thusly undercut both the absolutism of literalistic religious belief and the ‘dogma’ of deterministic causation – then how do we incorporate this change in scientific understanding to our cultural sense of reality? How are we to become the 'scientific spiritualists' that our science now indicates we must be, if we are to be scientifically realistic?