Am I a machine?

Am I a machine?
In true philosophical fashion, I shall answer ‘yes’ with a qualified ‘no’. Should it bother me that I am? Probably not.
Such a simple question belies a complex and inter-related web of philosophical, ethical, neurological and linguistic concerns, to mention but a few. One needs to consider the whole mind-body debate, dualism and monism, Artificial Intelligence, various theories of mind, other minds and what it means to be conscious, to be human and what it is to be alive. In this short essay, however, I shall be focussing on Descartes’ notion of dualism and subsequent refutations, with reference principally to Ryle and Wittgenstein. I shall look at some mind-body theories, as attempts to solve the mind-body problem, which is perhaps best and most simply stated as the problem of defining or describing the relationship between the body and the mind, or perhaps more accurately and possibly more controversially between the brain and the mind.
The notion of biological life as mechanical harks back to Descartes and his rigid mind-body dualism. Animals, famously and rather callously, some might add, he relegated to the ranks of machines, having no feelings. His analogies with clockwork and simplistic machinery of his time were intuitively comforting, in terms of explaining physical operations (though ran counter to that intuition when dismissing animals’ ability to feel pain). Descartes, as a product of his time, was clear that the human being consisted of two separate but related parts – a mechanically functioning body, and a soul. ‘I suppose the body to be just a statue or a machine made of earth’ he declares.
Descartes sought to build a firm foundation of knowledge which could resist the challenges of the skeptics. In doing so, he arrived at the conclusion that he existed as ‘a thinking thing’. His famous cogito is essentially this: ‘I am then, in a strict sense, only a thing that thinks, that is I am a mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or reason…’ Descartes argued that losing parts of his body did not entail losing ‘self’ and that it followed from this that the self was not in the body per se, but bound with the body. The conceivability argument which Descartes uses to assert dualism suggests that as he is able to conceive of himself without a body, then the body is not essential to ‘who he is’. And hence the body is a tool, a thing which he uses. Whilst the body had material properties, such as extension and motion, and was subject to the laws of physics, the mind – or soul – was a non-material thing, lacking extension and motion, and not subject to the laws of physics, thus existing independently of body. This mechanistic view of the body suggests also that the body could exist independently of mind. Steven Wagner refers to this as the separability argument. The body is variously described as a machine or an automaton and its various functions likened to mechanical devices of the day, such as clocks and fountains. He goes so far as to posit a machine built and put together along the schema of a human body which, though lacking a soul, or a will to drive it, could still move mechanically. ‘I made special efforts to show that if any such machines had the organs and outward shape of a monkey or of some other animal that lacks reason, we should have no means of knowing that they do not possess entirely the same nature as these animals.’ Interestingly, Descartes thought that an automaton in the form of a human could be easily detected since it could never appropriately master language nor act rationally in all contingencies.
Descartes also cites another reason for believing mind and body to be separate, commonly known as the divisibility argument.
‘…there is a great difference between the mind and the body, in so much as the body is by its very nature always divisible, while the mind is utterly indivisible. For when I consider my mind, or myself insofar as I am merely a thinking thing, I am unable to distinguish any parts within myself; I understand myself to be something quite single and complete.’
Descartes recognized a close connection between body and mind, but he denied that this was the mind as the programmer entirely separate to the body as the machine. In his own terminology, Descartes claimed, ‘…I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but very closely joined, and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit.’ Copleston (1963) suggests that Descartes faces a dilemma in wanting to affirm body and soul as separate entities, because ‘he does not want to accept the conclusion which appears to follow, namely, that the soul is simply lodged in a body which it uses as a kind of extrinsic vehicle or instrument.’ Descartes also never really put forward an adequate explanation for the causal relationship which would have to operate between mind and body. The immediate problem here is the interaction between a material thing – the body – and a ghostly one with no extension and no interaction with normal physical laws – the mind. In attempting to explain this, Descartes suggested a seat of interaction in the pineal gland, which he understood, wrongly from a modern biological viewpoint, to be specific to humans only, and hence an ideal candidate for the intervention of the soul.
Thus dualism would indeed suggest that the body is a machine. However, that I am a machine, as opposed to my body being a machine, is quite another argument. Descartes never suggested that human beings were machines. He would have been happy with the notion that our bodies are machines , but the entire drive of his thinking was that the divine soul separated us from other animals, that our reason or soul was unique to us and ensured that we were not purely mechanical. There was a twofold influence at work – the tradition of religious doctrine, an influence paramount to Descartes, and the way our very language is shaped. And it is to this latter, the role of language, that many critics of Descartes in particular, and dualism in general, have since addressed themselves.
Whilst I may baulk at the idea that I am a machine, I am likely to accept that my body is, even if I do not accept the dualist notion of a separate and everlasting soul. The body is the ultimate tool. Accepting ‘my body is a machine’, however, implies fairly strongly that my body is not all that I am, that there is something else, not-my-body, which one would not accept was a machine. What is it, after all, that does the accepting? This takes us back to Descartes and dualism. In fact the very notion ‘my body’, setting apart the body as a thing which is a possession of mine, poses the question, ‘Where or what am I, if not my body?’ Our very language not only exacerbates the situation, but may be seen to be a root cause.
This was certainly the argument put forward by Gilbert Ryle in his book, ‘The Concept of Mind’. An attack on dualist thought, Ryle posited that the whole notion of a separate entity which could be construed of as mind, or soul, was a simple category mistake. Language was at fault. Having outlined the official theory of the Cartesian dualism, Ryle remarks ‘I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as ‘the dogma of the ghost in the machine’. Ryle sets out to dismiss the idea that there is a ‘ghost’ dwelling in the human body, somehow operating the machinery, as entirely unnecessary, following Ockham, but also as patently false. ‘Nothing is known of how it [the mind] governs the bodily engine,’ he states. He gives his classic example of a category mistake – the visitor to a University, having been shown the individual buildings of which it is composed, asks where the actual university is, failing to grasp that it is the organisation of the separate buildings which makes up the concept of University. Ryle goes on to make his telling point, referring to this and other examples he has given, saying that ‘Their puzzles arose from inability to use certain items in the English vocabulary.’ Descartes, he argues, was simply wrong in thinking that there were separate entities of body and mind. There was no separate entity of mind for which to search.
Ryle perhaps sympathised with Descartes – recognising that he was a product of his time, so influenced by the scientific claims of his times that whilst he had to endorse the claims of mechanics vis-a-vis the body, he could not accept what necessarily followed, ‘namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork. The mental could not be just a variety of the mechanical’ . Ryle would contest that the body was a machine, seeing the entity as a whole and that minds, specifically are ‘not bits of clockwork, they are bits of non-clockwork’. Further, in a comment upon biological thought, he wrote:
“The Newtonian system is no longer the sole paradigm of natural science. Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely, a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man.”
For Ryle, the category-mistake made by Descartes was that there were both bodies and minds, both physical processes and mental processes. Mechanical processes caused bodily movement and mental processes caused bodily movement. Ryle suggests that the conjoining or disjoining of these two processes, which are very different, is linguistically absurd. ‘The belief that there is a polar opposition between mind and matter is the belief that they are terms of the same logical type,’ argues Ryle, likening the illegitimate comparison to the comparison between ‘she came home in a flood of tears’ and ‘she came home in a sedan chair’, clearly a case of identical language meaning very different things. A more recent description from Baggini (2010) explains,
‘...the mistake made by Descartes, and countless others after him, was to think of mind as if it were a kind of object, rather like a brain, table or flower....Mind is not an object at all. Rather, it is a set of capacities and dispositions, all of which can be explained without any reference to ghostly substances’.
If, as Descartes suggests, the mind is non-material and not subject to the laws of physics, then it is essentially unknowable – at least my mind is to someone else, and vice versa. Hence mind can strictly only mean ‘what it is like to be me’, since it cannot be known about anyone else. Ryle suggests that looking for such a substance as separate from the body and observable behaviour is simply an error. He contests Descartes’ notion that the mental is private and unknowable – even the most private emotion is, he posits, observable and hence public. If he is right, and the mind can be explained in causal, mechanical terms, then I am, perhaps, a machine. Clearly, this is dependent upon a definition of machine devoid of Ryle’s negative interpretations of the mechanical – a much wider conceptual model including a multitude of mechanical/biological and chemical interactive processes.
Taking up this theme, Ludwig Wittgenstein also objected strongly to the Cartesian notion of duality. He offered, as part of his private language argument, the analogy of a beetle in a box. If everybody had a beetle in a box, but each person could only ever look inside her own box, the word beetle, he suggested, would only ever mean ‘what is in everyone’s box’. There would be no way of checking to see if my box contained something identical to yours, but we could assume that there was something at least similar in everyone else’s box. ‘But suppose the word ‘beetle’ had a use in these people’s language? If so, it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.’ The analogy is clear – ‘mind’ means simply ‘what is in your head’. (Though Wittgenstein was referring to mental states, in particular his example of ‘fear’, the argument is still valid, I think.) For Wittgenstein, given that language is a public function, ‘mind’ (and indeed language as a whole) simply cannot refer to something intrinsically private and unknowable, hence not to Descartes’ non-extended ‘ghostly’ substance.
Wittgenstein asserts that ‘there is no such thing as the soul – the subject etc…’ and that ‘there is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas" His argument is that our language creates the false impression that “I" refers to ‘something bodiless, which, however, has its seat in our body….In fact this seems to be the real ego, the one of which it was said, 'Cogito, ergo sum.'’ Wittgenstein argues in his Private Language Argument in Philosophical Investigations (1953) that there have to be public third-person criteria for ascribing sensations. Mental concepts cannot mean anything by reference to “I”, a private labelling of one's own feelings. If this were the case, there would be no criterion for the correctness of a ascribing a state: there would be no way of knowing if a particular labeling of an instance of a feeling were true or false. It follows, for Wittgenstein, that there are no logically private psychological ascriptions, and so mental terms cannot be purely personal. This can be interpreted as a direct attack on the soul.
Along with Ryle, Wittgenstein seemed to think that humans were not comparable to machines and did not need a hidden concept to explain their supra-mechanical capacities. It is perhaps this notion of machine as clockwork, as pre-programmed and determined, which leads to a natural aversion to likening ourselves to machines. Perhaps this is then purely a definitions and perceptions issue, and that our very concept of ‘machine’ needs expanding to include the wondrously complex and intriguing mechanisms of neural circuitry and the potentially undiscoverable systems of consciousness.
This may be seen to lead to the more mechanistic explanation of body, brain and consciousness which is currently favoured. I am indeed a machine, though infinitely more sophisticated than Descartes’ clockwork analogies. Searle (1986) says that the brain is a machine and that the brain can think, by logical extraction, he posits that machines can think. And if the brain is the ‘thinking thing’ then it is the mind. In total, therefore, body and mind make the mechanistic system that is ‘me’. Body, then, includes mind. As Friedrich Nietzsche states in Thus Spake Zarathustra:
"Body am I, and soul"- so saith the child. And why should one not speak like children? But the awakened one, the knowing one, saith: "Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the body… Behind thy thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage - it is called Self; it dwelleth in thy body, it is thy body."
The Cartesian Theatre, that comic book image of the little man in our heads watching the images we see on a screen, was a derisive term coined by Daniel Dennet to describe what is left over once dualism has been debunked . The lingering intuitive appeal of Cartesian thinking has plagued philosophical thought ever since however, as Dennet acknowledges: "Scientists and philosophers may have achieved a consensus of sorts in favor of materialism, [but] getting rid of the old dualistic visions is harder than contemporary materialists have thought.”
Dennet paints a picture of a mechanical human being – no shame, he says, in being a machine, far from it. In a review of Damasio’s ‘Descartes’ Error’, Dennet writes:
“[Damasio] is providing a model of the mechanisms - and barring miracles, there have to be mechanisms - that subserve and implement those precious human activities and propensities. There is still as much room as ever (perhaps more, now that the mists have parted a little) for praise and blame, for desert and self-criticism and wonder. These gifts never could be made to reside in some precious pearl of Cartesian mind-stuff, so the sooner we find out how our bodies make room for them, the better.”
Bibliography
Books
Baggini and Fosl The Philosopher’s Toolkit Wiley-Blackwell 2nd edition 2010
Cottingham, J. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol I CUP 1985
Cottingham, J. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol II CUP 1984
Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991.
Descartes, René Meditations on First Philosophy, revised, edited, and translated by John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.
Descartes, René The World and Other Writings (1633), trans. and ed. Stephen Gaukroger (1998), Cambridge University Press 2004 edition
Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949.
Searle, John Minds, Brains and Science Harvard University Press, 1986
Sluga, Hans and Stern, David The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein CUP 1996
Stich, Stephen and Warfield, Ted (Ed) The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind 2003 Blackwell
Leiber, Justin Can animals and machines be persons? A Dialogue Hackett Publishing Co, Inc; New Ed edition (1 Jan 1985)
Wittgenstien Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974
Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations (1953) Hacker and Schulte (ed) revised 4th Edition Wiley-Blackwell 2009
Articles and Internet Sources
Cottingham John (1978). ‘A Brute to the Brutes?’: Descartes' Treatment of Animals. Philosophy, 53, pp 551-559 doi:10.1017/S0031819100026371
Dennet, Daniel C. ‘Review of ANTONIO R. DAMASIO, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994 in the Times Literary Supplement, August 25, 1995, pp. 3-4.
Elton, Matthew ‘Persons, Animals, and Machines’ Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 23, No. 4, Special Issue: Humans, Animals, and Machines (Autumn, 1998), pp. 384-398 Sage Publications Inc.
Nietzsche Thus Spake Zarathustra translation Thomas Common Section 4, Despisers of the Body http://philosophy.eserver.org/nietzsche-zarathustra.txt Accessed 20 September 2010
Tanney, Julia ‘Gilbert Ryle’ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ryle Revised November 2009 Accessed February 2010

Wagner, S.J. ‘Descartes’ Arguments for Mind-Body Distinctness’ in Philosophy and Phemomenological Research, Vol. 43, No. 4 (June 1983) PP499-517 (Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2107644 13.02.10)

Sobottka, Stanley ‘A Course in Consciousness’ http://faculty.virginia.edu/consciousness 8 Octob

Athiest

The following quotation from Stephen F Roberts is worth a few moments of anyone's contemplation:

"I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

Is Descartes misinterpreted or a simply a brute?

Descartes is often attributed with the coarsest of opinions about animals. Malebranche, one of Descartes’ staunch followers, certainly emphasised this view, “They eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.”[1] A weak, or uncharitable, reading of his work can certainly lead one to such assumptions. The conventional view is summed up by David Sztybel, who writes of Descartes, “A dualist, he believed that only two kinds of substance exist in the universe: mental substance and corporeal, or bodily, substance. Human beings, he thought, are composed of mind (which he equated with the soul) and body. Nonhuman animals, however, he saw as mindless automata or machines. The traditional interpretation is that he even denied that animals have feelings.”[2] Non-human animals, according to Descartes, are nothing but complex automata: they have no souls linking them to the mind of God as do humans, no minds and no ability to reason. They can see, hear, and touch, he concedes, but they are in no sense conscious; they can neither suffer nor feel pain.[3] So goes the argument which elicited such fury from contemporary and subsequent philosophers.

In this essay, I shall attempt to re-assess Descartes’ writings about animals, and show that, in fact, he held no such barbaric and monstrous views. Although not always entirely consistent in his writings on “animal consciousness”, as we would now call it, one can discern a more measured and wholly more “humane” view of our nonhuman relations.

Voltaire (1694-1778), incensed perhaps by the counter-intuitive claim Descartes seems to posit in much of his writing regarding animal feelings, wrote with undisguised disdain, “Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel? [H]as it nerves in order to be impassible? Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in nature.”[4] Criticism has been strong and consistent, and somewhat besmirches an otherwise impeccable philosophical pedigree. Norman Kemp Smith went so far as to call Descartes’ position ‘monstrous’.[5] Indeed, in the century after Descartes, “Cartesian anatomists could blandly claim that the screams of vivisected animals nailed to their work benches were of no more significance than the chimes of a clock, or the piping of a church organ when certain keys were pressed.”[6]

To take the approach explicit in the ‘principal of charity’[7], one needs first to appreciate Descartes’ writing both within its historical context, and in relation to his stated or perceived aims. Descartes was writing in an era when direct observations of nature and behaviour led naturally to mechanistic interpretations. Descartes posited a designer God who had set in motion the processes of nature and was now content to sit and watch the Universe unfold. He makes frequent and detailed comparisons to ‘automata or moving machines’, the following being representative: “they regard this body as a machine which, having been made by the hands of God, is incomparably better ordered than any machine that can be devised by man, and contains in itself movements more wonderful than those in any such machine.”[8] Descartes was also writing with a clear purpose in mind – he was at pains to deny to animals the idea of a soul. The divine nature of humankind was unique and he had to be able to explain animal movement and appearance of will, sense and intelligence in mechanistic terms which could avert the necessity for a soul – and hence immortality, since “...it is less probable that worms, gnats, caterpillars and the rest of the animals should possess an immortal soul, than that they should move in the way machines move”.[9]

This view would appear to exclude non-human animals, not only from having consciousness, reason or thought, but also from having any sort of sensation. If animals are simply moving machines, they can have no sense of self, a concept of ‘I’, for sensations to occur to. Thus no pain is felt, no fear, no joy, no hunger, no anything. This seems intuitively ridiculous. Indeed, it is this traditional reading of Descartes which Cottingham (1978) refers to when he describes the notion that “animals are totally without feeling” as a “monstrous thesis”.[10]

There is good reason for looking for a more charitable reading of Descartes in this regard. His conclusions seem to open the door to a moral-free zone on animal welfare. Many have indeed directly cited Descartes in defence of practices such as vivisection (which he may or may not have performed himself). Any theory which can be so interpreted needs carefully looking at, given the huge implications not just for the moral status of animals but also for human actions in general. Kant, although never conceding consciousness to animals, was quite ardent about the fact that they ought not to be tortured or harmed unnecessarily, due to the effect this behaviour might ultimately have on our actions towards other humans, desensitizing us to brutality and sadism[11]. This is more recently echoed by Carruthers (1992) when he states that such acts as torturing an animal “...betray an indifference to suffering that may manifest itself...with that person’s dealing with other rational agents.”[12]

Cottingham argues that much of the recognised response to Descartes Is based upon a misunderstanding of his position. Harrison (1992) outlines Cottingham’s position by listing assertions as follows:

(1) “Animals are machines.

(2) Animals are automata.

(3) Animals do not think.

(4) Animals have no language.

(5) Animals have no self-consciousness.

(6) Animals have no consciousness.

(7) Animals are totally without feeling.

No-one disputes the Descartes held (1)-(5). The mistake many commentators have made, in Cottingham’s view, is the assumption that in holding to these weaker assertions, in particular (2) and (3), Descartes was thereby committed to (7).”[13]

The argument hinges on the fact that there is no direct and necessary relationship between the label of ‘automata’ and the notion of a lack of feeling. There is indeed precedent for considering human beings as conscious automata, totally negating the corollary that automata are without feelings.[14] That animals do not think, have no language and are not self-conscious would all be areas of uncertainty today. Research not available to Descartes – indeed unthinkable to him – proves animal thought exists[15], shows that language is utilised[16] and suggests self-consciousness.[17] However, in assessing Descartes’ own position, it is necessary to go back to his own assertions about thought and language. Descartes essentially had two arguments against thought and reason in animals, his Language-Test argument and his Action-Test argument.

For Descartes, occurrent thought and declarative speech were inextricably bound. They are propositional, independent of stimuli and independent of action.[18] Indeed, Descartes assumed that declarative speech was directly indicative of reason: “...it has never been observed that any brute animal has attained the perfection of using real speech, that it to say, of indicating by word or sign something relating to thought alone and not to natural impulse. Such speech is the only certain sign of thought hidden in a body.”[19] Descartes thought that the only explanation for lack of speech (in which he included sign language) in animals was the concomitant lack of thought. His later writing seems to conclude that all forms of thinking and consciousness depend upon thought in this sense, which is the reason many commentators conclude that Descartes hence intended that animals be viewed as mindless machines. One response to the Language-Test is that Descartes failed to consider that dispositional thinking is not dependent upon occurrent thought – the fact that a cat is unable to entertain the thought the bird is in the cage is no reason to doubt that the cat thinks the bird is in the cage.[20]

The Action-Test argument attempted to prove that animals lack reason. Descartes saw reason as “a universal instrument which can be used in all kinds of situations”.[21] So for Descartes, reason is the acting on general principles which can be transferred to a range of novel situations. Descartes thought that although some animals act in agreement with such principals, they do not act for them. Descartes thought that “many animals show more skill than we do in some of their actions, yet the same animals show none at all in many others”[22] constituted evidence that they lacked intelligence – rather than what more recent thought would probably identify as being domain-specific intelligence.[23]

One must remember the context of Descartes’ philosophy. As already stated, he was in the business of denying immortal, non-corporeal souls to animals, as well as using the bête-machine concept to support his cogito argument. Descartes needed to prove that animals operated on a different level to humans. Humanity needed to have an intimate connection to God, in the guise of an immortal soul. Any suggestion that animals also had such a soul would denigrate man. Returning to Cottingham’s list of assertions, we see that Descartes indeed held to (3) and (4), but it is still not clear that he directly supports either (6) or (7).

Whilst Descartes clearly states in his Second Meditation that “what is called ‘having sensory perception’ is strictly just this, and in this restricted sense of the term it is simply thinking,” he is often harshly translated as having said to feel is to think. But Descartes also states, in a letter to Mersenne, that “in my view, the feeling of pain exists only in the understanding”, and in denying thought and understanding to animals, it is perhaps a logical conclusion that they therefore cannot experience pain. However, this quotation from that letter continues: “What I do explain is all the external movements which accompany this feeling in us; in animals it is these movements alone which occur, and not pain in the strict sense.”[24] What Descartes is alluding to is that an animal cannot feel pain in the sense that it is aware that it exists and that it is ‘it’, the specific animal itself, which is feeling pain. He is also making the argument that we cannot assume cause from observations of effects (Russell’s argument from analogy used in support of the existence of other human minds): in a later letter to Gibieuf in 1642, he states, “We observe in animals movements similar to those which result from our imaginations and sensations; but that does not mean we observe imaginations and sensations in them.”[25] This argument, that an assumption of animal feeling based on analogy is untenable, does not amount to a declaration that animals have no feeling whatsoever. He writes clearly in the Sixth Set of Replies: “My critics...say they do not believe that the ways in which the beasts operate can be explained ‘by means of mechanics without invoking any sensation, life or soul’ (I take this to mean ‘without invoking thought’; for I accept that the brutes have what is commonly called ‘life’ and a corporeal soul and organic sensation [my italics])”[26] In his February 1649 letter to More, Descartes again stresses that in denying thought to the animals, he is denying neither life nor sensation: “I do not deny life to animals, since I regard it as consisting simply in the heat of the heart; and I do not even deny bodily sensation, in so far as it depends on a bodily organ.”[27] So Descartes is describing animal sensations as a mechanical process, not something occurring in a spiritual soul, and something which can occur outside of consciousness. Descartes’ apparent ambivalence in this regard might in part be explained by the difference in meaning between passions and feelings. It is only the latter he seeks to deny animals, accepting that they can have physical sensations – passions – without being necessarily aware of them in the sense that we are aware of ourselves when we consciously ‘feel’.

In seeking to deny animal souls, Descartes was operating within the context of few alternatives. He needed to make animals different from humans, and sought to do this at the level of thought. To the suggestion that animals might think as we do, he wrote in a letter to the Marquis of Newcastle that, “This is unlikely, because there is no reason to believe it of all animals without believing it of all, and many of them such as oysters and sponges are too imperfect for this to be credible.”[28] Descartes was perhaps guilty of lack of vision, failure to recognise the possibility of a continuum of consciousness, rather than a black and white dividing line, but almost certainly was not suggesting, for example, that vivisected animals felt no pain at all. The passage oft cited to suggest this, referring to the cries of an animal as being akin to the sound from a church organ, was a direct reference to self-consciousness. Writing to More, Descartes state that, ‘though I regard it as established that we cannot prove there is any thought in animals, I do not think that it is thereby proved that there is not, since the human mind does not reach into their hearts.”[29] Descartes, then, lays out his case – he has attempted to show that animals cannot think as we do, in order that they can have no claim to equality under God, but feels it cannot be proven one way or the other. Harrison (1992) concludes that “Perhaps the most accurate way to characterise Descartes’ view is to say that he was cautiously agnostic on the whole question. He did not adamantly insist that animals could not feel ...but rather showed that there are no irresistible reasons for asserting that they do.”[30]

Descartes wrote about animal consciousness in the context of his religious beliefs and the prevailing dualistic view of his time. He wrote about automata and machines as a direct response to observations of nature, and from the necessity to defend human divinity. Even so, he was no brute. He questioned the grounds for attributing consciousness to animals. He never claimed that they could feel, but that their feeling somehow did not matter, which would have been a crueller thesis. Perhaps Descartes had become so obsessed with the idea of consciousness, that he was guilty of missing a more important point, one famously and eloquently put by Bentham: “The question is not, can they reason? nor can they talk? but, can they suffer?”[31]

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Dawkins, Marian Stamp, “Animal Minds and Animal Emotions” American Zoologist, Vol. 40, No. 6 (Dec., 2000), pp. 883-888 Oxford University Press http://www.jstor.org/stable/3884335 Accessed: 08/03/10

Harrison, Peter “Descartes on Animals” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 167 (Apr., 1992), pp. 219-227. Blackwell Publishing for The Philosophical Quarterly http://www.jstor.org/stable/2220217 Accessed: 27/02/10

Lurz, Robert, “Animal minds” IEP 2009 http://www/iep.utm.edu/ani-mind/

Murray, Michael J. and Ross Glenn “Neo-Cartesianism and the Problem of Animal Suffering” Faith and Philosophy Journal, University of Notre Dame 2006, VOL 23; NUMB 2, pages 169-190 http://edisk.fandm.edu/michael.murray/Animal.pdf Accessed 01/03/10

Southwell, Gareth “Talking clocks and Deranged Springs” PhilosophyOnline.co.uk 2008 http://www.philosophyonline.co.uk/philosophy-study-resources/descartes-meditations/further-reading/#philosophical

Steiner, Gary “Descartes on the Moral Status of Animals” published in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. Volume 80, Issue 3, Pages 268–291, ISSN (Online) 1613-0650, ISSN http://www.referenceglobal.com/doi/abs/10.1515/agph.1998.80.3.268 (Print 0003-9101, 1998)

Thomas, Marion “Are Animal Just Noisy Machines?” Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Autumn 2005) pp425-460 http://www.jstor.org/stable/4331965 Accessed 08/03/2010

Walter, Sven “Epiphenomenalism” 2007 http://www.iep.utm.edu/epipheno/ Accessed 12/04/2010

Wilson, Scott – “Animals and Ethics” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2010 http://www.iep.utm.edu/anim-eth/ Accessed 09/03/10

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[1] Nicholas Malebranche, Œuvres complets Ed Rodis-Lewis Paris J. Vrin 1958 2, p. 394 quoted in Harrison, Peter “Descartes on Animals” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 167 (Apr., 1992), pp. 219-227.

[2] Sztybel, David Descartes,Rene http://sztybel.tripod.com/Descartes.html March 13^th 2010

[3] Midgley, Mary “Descartes' Prisoners” Newstateman 24 May 1999 http://www.newstatesman.com/199905240041.htm March 13th 2010

[4] Woolf, H.I. “Voltaire – Animals” The Philosophical Dictionary 1995 (capital [H] mine) http://history.hanover.edu/texts/voltaire/volanima.html

[5] Steiner, Gary “Descartes on the Moral Status of Animals” published in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. Volume 80, Issue 3, Pages 268–291

[6] Cottingham, John Descartes 1986 p108

[7] see Hursthouse, R. ‘Ethics, Humans and Other Animals’ Routledge 2000 p4

[8] Cottingham, J et al (trans) Descartes - The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume 1 CUP 1985

Discourse on the Method V p139 NB All quotes from Descartes are taken from Vol 1 or 2 of this work.

[9] From correspondence to More 1649, quoted in Williams, B. Descartes 1978 Routledge p273

[10] Cottingham, J. “A Brute to the Brutes?: Descartes’ Treatment of Animals Philosophy 53 (1978) p551 quoted in Murray m.J. and Ross G. “Neo-Cartesianism and the Problem of Animal Suffering” Faith and Philosophy Journal, University of Notre Dame 2006, VOL 23

[11] see Wilson, S. “Animals and Ethics” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2010

[12] Curruthers, P. The Animals Issue: Morality in Practice (CUP – 1992) quoted in Wilson, S 2010 ibid

[13] Harrison, Peter “Descartes on Animals” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 167 (Apr., 1992), p221.

[14] “Huxley agreed with Descartes that animals are automata, but he was unwilling to accept that they are devoid of mentality: “Sleeping dogs frequently appear to dream. If they do, it must be admitted that ideation goes on in them while they are asleep; and, in that case, there is no reason to doubt that they are conscious” (Huxley 1898, 125). Huxley therefore segregated the question of consciousness from the question of the status of an automaton: animals do experience pain, but that pain is, like their bodily movements, just a result of neurophysiological processes. Animals are conscious automata. In contrast to Descartes, Huxley argued that considerations similar to those about reflex actions in frogs also suggest that we are conscious automata.” Walter, Sven “Epiphenomenalism” 2007 http://www.iep.utm.edu/epipheno/

[15] see, for example, the research of Boutan in Thomas, Marion ‘Are Animals Just Noisy Machines?’ especially p451

[16] see, for example, Fouts, R.S. and Fouts D.H. ‘Chimpanzees’ Use of Sign Language’ pp 28-39 in Cavalieri, Paola and Singer, Peter (Ed) The Great Ape Project St. Martin’s Griffin Edition 1996

[17] see, for example, DeWaal, Franz Primates and Philosophers p69 appendix B – Do apes have a theory of mind? 2006

[18] Lurz, Robert, “Animal minds” IEP 2009 http://www/iep.utm.edu/ani-mind/

[19] Letter to More, 5 February 1649, in Cottingham, J et al (trans) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume 3 CUP 1985 p366

[20] Lurz, op cit

[21] in Cottingham (ed) Vol 1 op cit Part Five 57 p 140

[22] in Cottingham (ed) Vol 1 op cit Part Five 59 p 141

[23] Lurz, op cit

[24]Letter to Mersenne, 11 June 1640, in Cottingham (ed) Vol III op cit p148

[25] Letter to Gibieuf, 19 January 1642, In Cottingham ibid p 203

[26] in Cottingham (ed) Vol II 426 p288

[27] Letter to More, February 1649, in Cottingham (ed) Vol III op cit p 366

[28] Letter to the Marquis of Newcastle, 23 November 1646 in Cottingham Vol III op cit p 304

[29] Letter to More, 5 February 1649 op cit

[30] Harrison, Peter 1992 op cit

[31] Bentham, Jeremy. Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation 1780, in Selected Writings on Utilitariansim, chapter XVII, footnote p284