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