The Third Cartesian Error – in One Post!

The main development or change in how Descartes understands the mind from Meditations on First Philosophy to Passions of the Soul is that in this latter book his theory makes it possible for the body to act without the mind. In fact, I argue, he doesn’t leave the mind any way to affect the body at all even though he of course wants it to. There are a couple of reasons for this state of affairs. First, as we saw in the first Cartesian Error, he argues that the only thing the mind can do is think, and the body cannot think at all. Then in the Second Error, he argues that emotions aren’t thinking and explains that the human body works in such a way as to be able to start, continue and end emotions and emotion-based behavior. I call this organization, this explanation, an example of half-duplex communication between body and mind, a type of communication I previously said was exemplified by walkie-talkies and text messages. Let’s briefly review why this can’t be a reasonable way to look at how the mind and body interact.

If the mind were like a walkie-talkie, by definition only one end at a time can communicate. So if you had a spider on your leg, what would have to happen for you to get rid of it? First, the body would feel the pressure on your flesh. But for your mind to know the spider was there too would require one of four things, all of which have problems and raise more questions than they answer, (at least for Descartes):

1) That by a stroke of luck, at the same moment when the body felt the pressure, the mind happened to not be communicating out any messages and so is  able to receive transmission, OR

2) The body not only feels the pressure on the skin, but also “knows” that the mind should stop transmitting and instead listen, and can force the mind to do so by accompanying important messages with a message such as “over” to tell the brain to start talking, OR

3) The body itself would just “know” how to stop the bug (like a reflex), OR

4) The body is constantly transmitting messages whether or not the mind is in a position to hear them, and sometimes it listens in for whatever reason.

On the other hand, Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius argued for something different, an interactive and reciprocal communication between the body and the mind (and the emotions), a process I called duplex communication. For them, the mind and the body are both duplex transmitters, such as cellular phones, which allow two constantly running communications to both be understood by their targets.

This not only fits common sense and firsthand experience, but our more advanced understanding of the body tells us this is correct. Duplex communication between the brain and the rest of the nervous system throughout the body allow for immediate response to outside stimuli by real-time measurement and analysis – Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius each saw that the body feels things that don’t quite rouse the mind, and that our bodies are actually sentient – aware – in a way akin to the way the mind is. The duplex process also allows for conscious analysis of the stimuli, the body’s responses, the results of the responses, what goals are being achieved, and what goals might be better, as well as the ability to seek after those goals. The body can run “on its own” but a conscious person can study her reactions and change her behavior to her preference. After all, they are made of the same stuff. Half duplex communication doesn’t allow this.

So the third Cartesian Error is that the theory cannot explain how the mind and body could have duplex communication, which the P-A-L theory gave an excellent argument for, and which I conclude is a fundamental aspect of the emotions backed up by contemporary research. More specifically, third error has to do with how Descartes thinks the mind and body communicate with each other.


Descartes’ half-duplex theory argues that the mind/soul is united to all parts of the body, not just the pineal gland (If you read carefully this theory is also there in Meditation VI) but that the soul is able to exercise its unique function – thinking – best in the pineal gland (and its my opinion that he really does think of it as more physically extended than he is usually given credit for). He says that the soul and body act on each other by taking turns “radiating”: as in the soul “radiates” into the rest of the body from the pineal gland. Think of it as sort of like an x-ray in reverse. Instead of shooting x-rays through our body to give us an image of our body, things like bears shoot ‘bear-rays’ at our eyes. A similar process happens from the pineal gland to the soul and vice versa. This is completely incorrect but such particulars don’t really matter. What matters is that he has in mind a physical process by which he thinks we receive our sensory information, and it works like in the diagram above. Think of sending a text or SMS message to a friend with your cell phone. Basically, what happens is that a message goes from your phone to an SMS site, and the site attempts to deliver your message to the other phone. If it is ‘delivered’, your friend can read and reply in the same manner.

Here is a “play by play” of his argument:

1) the soul is truly joined to the whole body, no part is excluded,

2) because of the centrality of the [pineal] gland’s location the soul can perform its function in a more particular way there than anywhere else,

3) The central location of the pineal gland allows the soul to “better alter the course of the spirits (chemicals) with the slightest movement”.

4) Similarly, the slightest change in the course of the spirits can greatly change the movements of the pineal gland, affecting the soul greatly.

5) This activity can happen because of the “mediation” of the spirits and the nerves and blood that carry them.

6) Our bodies use “fire” or “heat” to make all possible movements, and it is wrong to think that the soul can impart either to our bodies (A5-A8).

So what we’ve learned here is that because

A) Descartes has a complete, purely physical account of how sense perception and muscular movement are possible,

B) we have all manner of non-conscious motion (eating, breathing, walking aimlessly, etc) and

C) He firmly argues the soul imparts no motion to the body,

then it is fundamentally impossible on his theory for duplex communication to occur between the mind and the body. In fact, it seems impossible for him to seriously, coherently defend any meaningful communication between them. At best what he has is a “half-duplex” system, but that doesn’t match reality and it couldn’t work, as we discussed briefly in the sections on Lucretius.

The next post, the last one to focus on Descartes, will discuss the ethical implications of the three Cartesian Errors.

Whew! The last word on the Second Error!

Last time I finished up by saying that because of his interests and assumptions, Descartes was unable to reach the conclusion he wanted, that emotions are purely mental, and that he looked to be forced into one of two other conclusions: 1) that emotions can exist without mental content, or that emotions can exist without the soul; or 2) that his theory contradicts his assumptions because it's actually lends itself fairly well to defending the idea that emotions must be a type of thought and must have a physiological basis. 

Let's have one last closer look. At the very beginning of his book (A1) he explains emotions are "passive events" that happen to the person/soul, but are specifically referring to the person who they happen to. This fits well with his theory of how perception of things like pictures works. However, he also determined that what emotions are made from and how they are made is completely explainable by mechanistic physiology! To put it super-briefly, though he fixes the "home" of emotions in the soul, it is the body and memory that do nearly all, possibly even all, the work of supplying the mental/belief content necessary to start the physical processes that are emotional actions and reactions. This is actually pretty brilliant, but it was a disaster for his beliefs. So he had to find a way out, a way to show that emotions are perfomances of the mind and could not possibly be performances of the body. 

To flesh it out a little more, lets look at how fear would work (A38): he explains that the movements of the body that "accompany" the emotions do not depend on the soul, all that is required to put a passion in the soul is the proper course of certain chemicals towards the nerves in the heart. From there they can then strike the nerves that make the legs move - and sustain the action - which automatically causes movements in the pineal gland, which causes the soul to "feel and perceive" that we are fleeing from danger. This process can be started by a learned response (as a child you saw a bear eat your dog, now you see a bear and you run), or by "dispositions of the organs" (think reflexes or innate behaviors (flinching when you believe you see a snake, even if its a stick). That is, in a word, bodily volition. 

Descartes goes on to explain (A40) that the emotions mainly incite and dispose the soul to will things for which the passions already are preparing the body. To me, that sounds like a rubber stamp, not an instigator.

Perhaps worse, this sort of explanation leads to a very hard question - in what sense is fear a mental object? How is it cognition, the thing that only the soul/mind can do? Consider - don't animals "fear"? If they do, and they don't have souls/minds, how is that possible? (Descartes would say they don' t have souls and don't fear). But beyond that, we've seen that in some cases the body can start and sustain an emotion, like fear, without any direct influence of the soul. So whatever mental content they have is included in them by means other than the soul!

Remember, on Descartes' view, the body is supposed to have absolutely no part in cognition, yet the first two Cartesian errors have already exposed that instead, he's nearly made the mind/soul impotent or redundant, a position that we'll see later fits easily with Sentimentalism in ethics.

While Descartes is making these points, he also tries to tie on a couple of saving moves: 1) He argues that the pineal gland is really where emotions are felt, even though they feel like they are happening in our body (A33-34), and 2) he argues that the only use of the emotions is to inspire volition/will in the soul (A52). If these two things were right, he'd be making a decent case that the emotions provide the initial motivation for volitions, create them and sustain them. BUT at the same time he is denying #2, saying that the emotions incite a "will for" doing actions they already prepare the body to do, and #1 is very hard to believe (much less prove). 

To conclude, bodily voliton exists: In at least some cases the body is already performing and doing what needs to be done in emotion-situations, as well as in day-to-day actions, just from an image in the brain ("bear") + either learned responses or human nature, and though he wants it to be that the souls is ultimately the "decider", it really seems to be a lot less involved than that. Descartes' theory has two arguments smashing into eachother - one explaining how the emotions are of the body, and the soul is irrelevant, and another concurrently arguing that the body is merely the substratum on which the emotions of the soul perform.

The Last Words on Lucretius

Intro

As I said earlier, Lucretius thinks the mind controls cognition and the particles it is made up of are localized in the chest. On the other hand, anima, the vital spirit, is everywhere else in the body but the mid breast. Vital spirit’s particles move to the sway of mind particles and give the body sensation; thanks to vital spirit “even the teeth share in sensation”. Keep that in mind as we talk below about "registering" and "bodily awareness".
The View from 10,000 Feet
Echoing Plato’s analogy of the psyche with a country, where the rational part is the leaders and the spirited part is the military,

Basically like this, but I see courage as an example of the broader concept "spiritedness"

Lucretius says that while mind rules, vital spirit is the “body’s guard and cause of health”. It’s a safety mechanism to protect your flesh. In fact, vital spirit and flesh “twine together with common roots” and he thinks trying to tear them apart would be all but impossible, like taking separating the scent out of curry. He also describes it as being so thin and light, so sensitive, that even thoughts can make it move.
Getting Our Hands Dirty
Now that we have the basics on what mind and vital spirit, animus and anima, are, its time to get down to brass tacks. We’ve noted that Lucretius is a strict physicalist, believing that everything that exists is made out of physical particles. And he thinks that mind and spirit are one and the same thing, yet that mind is cognitive and spirit is not. But why should the same substance be able to act so differently?
Isn’t that paradoxical, or worse, impossible? Well, to avoid that conclusion he’s going to need to give us a satisfactory explanation for this apparent strangeness.
The reason, he says, why they can be the same “stuff” but act so differently is that while the mind is affected the same way as the body, vital spirit is “not one and simple”. What he means is that there are different properties to mind and spirit, they are not pure and simple like, say, hydrogen, carbon or iron. Instead mind and spirit are two subtypes of the same basic type of stuff, an “uber-soul” material, vital spirit. And vital spirit is not a basic element either. It’s a mixture of some sort, like water or soda.
We don’t need to go into the actual physical stuff he thinks make up vital spirit, the mind and spirit because its just not even close to being right as far as what we know to be the components of the nervous system. How could it have been, it would be about 1,500 years before the microscope was invented,

Seawater maginfied 25x

and roughly another 360 before the Electroencephalograph (EEG,  the measurement of the electrical activity of the brain) became widely available.

EEGs measure the activity of neurons

But if you’re interested in knowing more, contact me and I’ll send you my fairly detailed discussion of it from my dissertation.
Whatever physical bits it is actually made of, in practice this vital spirit is basically what we’d call “bodily awareness”, the mechanism that allows us to do things like avoid running into people walking past us the other way even by the slimmest of margins. And as I’ve said before, given the way he describes them it’s fair to think of its components, animus and anima, as what we’d say are aspects of our overall nervous system.
So to put a bow on it, he is saying that the best explanation for our capabilities is that there is a physical system spread throughout the body that is responsive to outside stimuli, and that is directly connected to a centralized core, made of the same material. This core component uses in various ways the input to guide the actions/responses of the whole being. This centralized material, when activated by the spread-out system, is able to think and feel to varying degrees. Or as we’d say today, the nervous system allows for or creates the initial conditions for basic things like reflexes but also for our ability to measure and judge, and our ability for abstract thought.
Let’s be clear: Lucretius does not think that the chest-brain-stuff (animus) simply takes in data from the anima, stops the flow and considers the data, then sends commands to a body that is silently waiting. Instead the components that make up vital spirit allow for duplex communication between the brain and the rest of the nervous system throughout the body. It allows for immediate response to outside stimuli by real-time measurement - he explains that the body feels things that don’t quite rouse the spirit, and that our bodies are actually sentient – aware – in a way akin to the way the mind is. But this duplex process also allows for conscious analysis of the stimuli, the body’s responses, the results of the responses, what goals are being achieved, and what goals might be better, as well as the ability to seek after those goals. The body can run “on its own” but a conscious person can study her reactions and change her behavior to her preference. After all, they are made of the same stuff.
Yet its interesting to note and accept with Lucretius that our bodies register a lot more info than we ever actually register consciously. Think of micro-facial expressions, gut reactions, goose bumps, mosquito bites, or even navigating foot traffic on a busy sidewalk. These are all clearly things the body “notes” – or as I will put it sometimes, registers – even though you as a thinking person aren’t aware. And common sense tells us he’s right: not only are we not conscious of things such as mosquitoes biting us, we have no feeling whatsoever of things such as radiation, yet clearly our body registers it, sadly, to very poor results.
Emotion
Lucretius thinks that emotions are qualities of both animus and anima; they both process and communicate information, and so they can’t be irrational. But its hard for him to call them rational too. He’s convinced that emotions are felt physically in the heart and concludes in part from this that the mid-region of the breast is the seat of intellect and mind. But just because they are felt there doesn’t mean they are only felt there. In fact, he believes that there is more than one kind of emotion; one more or less purely mental (but of course physical) and “spirit-based” or “visceral” emotion that is much deeper and stronger but of course still “cognitive”.
On Lucretius’ account, due to the interactions of the physical particles that make up vital spirit, the mind emotes in an interesting way. Basically, anyone in an emotionally charged situation, anyone emotionally agitated, ends up at whatever emotion they end up at (or calm) by going through a progression from the burn of anger, to the chill of fright, and eventually back to calmness, as the duplex communication between the mind and spirit continues.  Whether true or not, given the importance that anger and fear responses have to survival this makes some sense.  These emotions are utterly important to our survival. The problem of course is that they can sometimes be a little antiquated and therefore lead us to misunderstand what our best reactions to a perceived stress should be.
The idea is that for some emotions, say fear for instance, up to a certain threshold only the mind is “emoting”, but there is a tipping point where the vital spirit is roused. As such, the chest-brain area is usually the part handling (and ‘showing” fears, but after a point the whole spirit system gets involved and you see other behaviors related to fear.
He also explains that while vital spirit moves to the “sway” of the mind, it does not always follow mind’s influence. At least sometimes, perhaps even most of the time, it does, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Whether it does or doesn’t depends on what beliefs are followed. When incoherent or mistaken beliefs are followed, we get bad desires and bad results. When correct beliefs are followed we get good desire and satisfaction. So to the extent an emotion keeps you from making a smart choice, or makes you feel like doing something stupid, or counter-productive, they would seem to be irrational, yet the real thing to blame here is not that system, its job is to protect your body, and its perceiving a threat!

A very basic kind of fear

But the animus! It’s the job of the animus to be rational, to oversee things. If the mind doesn’t do its job the times when it is within its power to do so, then the cause must be a physiological limitation, stupidity, laziness, or bad character. Nothing about emotions, or mind, or spirit makes it have to be that emotions and emotional responses have to be irrational or bad.
Conclusion
So we’ve seen Lucretius follow Plato and Aristotle very closely in some fundamentally important respects: 1) He’s keenly sensitive to the impact the emotions can have on other thoughts and on actions; 2) He believes there are two types of emotions; one more or less purely ‘mental’ and one ‘spirit-based’; more visceral and deeply felt, but still cognitive. (Of course both are still purely physical.) While some, say an existential dread, are cases where the mind is by and large the only part emoting, there may be a threshold past which the vital spirit is roused. Similarly, there can be emotions, say fear of a predator, that are more basic and active at the level of the spirit, but past a certain point the rest of the spirit system, the mind, may get involved; 3) he believes in duplex communication between the ‘mind’ and the body, and that 4) the mind and the body are both physical. In sum, he’s in basic agreement with Plato and Aristotle’s insights on ethics and psychology. At the very least nothing they said is directly contradicted by Lucretius.
The improvement Lucretius makes is that he not only understands that there must be a physiological explanation to all this, he tries to explain it. At length. And with some very imaginative, even penetrating insights. In fact, it was absolutely state-of-the-art science for 55 B.C. In fact, it was pretty state-of-the-art for a lot longer than that!
Combining the thoughts of Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius on the emotions, the mind, and ethics, we can see a pretty well worked out, defensible position. I call it the P-A-L account, and I call the theory of emotions in the P-A-L account the “pluralist account” of emotions. That’s in comparison to the visceral account, first developed by Homer, and the third candidate-account, which we're about to start discussing, cognitivism.
Review and Preview
We have a “scientific” (physiologically centered), state-of-the-art for its time explanation of how the mind and body are  parts of a functioning system, how they interact and impact each other, and what thinking and the emotions are. And it all fits in just fine with the psychological and ethical insights of Plato and Aristotle. In fact, I think this P-A-L account is so defensible that I try to update it to current state of the art science in the final chapter of my dissertation, and that updated version is my own belief about how the emotions work in ethics.
Unfortunately, This P-A-L account didn’t exactly set the world on fire at the time. Not long after it was all put into place the Stoics came along and did every thing they could to bury it alive. The fact that I had to write this dissertation at all gives you a good idea of how successful they were. Unfortunately for us.
But before we get to them we have to look at the Epicureans, who have their own strengths and weaknesses to examine.

We'll have to see what you think after the next handful of posts!

Wrapping up Plato

Think for a moment about what it might be like to be a baby. Sure you’re adorable but most of your few waking hours you lay drooling, with blurry vision, no understanding of object permanence, unable to remember or recognize much of anything or any one besides mom and dad. How do we get from that to where you are today (which hopefully does not involve you needing to wipe your chin and be burped)?

Well, babies don’t seem to have a lot going on with their minds but they do have bodies. And Plato realized that the most basic thing about a body, any kind of body, is that bodies are the type of thing into and out of which things flow. Sure enough, this describes babies pretty accurately.

Well, how can something that is constantly leaking and being invaded possibly keep intact, much less grow and thrive? The short answer is sense perception. A living body is going to have to have the capacity to monitor what’s going in and out of it to some extent, even if it can’t immediately do anything with the info. This insight makes Plato say that in a way, sense perception flowers out of the “forceful disturbances” of the outside world.

While sense perception is essential to a living body such as a baby surviving, social animals such as humans are going to need more built-in capacities to survive and thrive. Plato thinks social animals would have to have built in the ability to feel pleasure and pain and the capacity to love. The first two probably make total sense, but what about the third? Why does Plato think social animals like us need to be born with the capacity to love? Well, it’s pretty tough to think of a society, even if it’s a wolf pack, where the members don’t have a strong bond with each other. And assuming that wolves can’t get to know each other’s interests and become friends and partners that way, then they must be bonded to each other some other way. So the idea is that societies form from a natural, instinctual kinship. If Plato were alive today he’d say it’s in our genes.

On Plato’s theory, we start out as these leaky bodies with the tools to sense perceive, to feel pleasure and pain, and to love. But he didn’t say the tools are automatically used or used well. Still, based on these we also soon come to have fear, “spiritedness” (a ‘fire inside’ sort of like pride) and “whatever goes along with having those emotions” and their opposites. What gets us to make use of all these capacities are forceful disturbances” of our bodies.(An aside I discuss elsewhere: the fact that the basis of mental life, of intelligence, is the physical reality of our bodies, the needs we are born with because we have bodies, is the real problem undermining AI research).

Now remember we talked about their being a brain psyche (mind) and a body psyche (emotions + appetites). As babies, our body psyche is clearly way more advanced than our brain psyche, and more specifically, our appetites are running the show. But we have the emotions right there too. As the outside world makes its presence felt and our appetites assert themselves on us, we begin to use the basic tools we just mentioned. Imagine being a baby again. You’re pretty well clueless as to what’s going on around you but when you want something you are agitated, you want it now. It hurts a lot not to have it and it feels great to get it. As Plato says, the appetites are a beast whose sustainment cannot be avoided “if a mortal race were ever to be”.

But it seems wrong to say you spend all your time awake afraid, it doesn’t seem as if babies flail around all day terrified of things so much as it seems they are just waiting for (and occasionally looking for) stimulus. When the stimulus comes, it is either pleasing or not. If it is pleasing they want more until it loses its luster, and when it is painful they want it to stop immediately. And in each case the body has ready at hand responses, clumsy as they may be. Over time, just like any dog or chimp, it will learn to be afraid, or to be hostile, or to care about different things.

To get along much farther than dogs or chimps though, junior is going to have to develop her brain psyche to master its emotional states. To the extent to which she can do this, Plato says, her life will be just and she’ll gain the reward of a “life of happiness”. If the emotions master the psyche, though, or if the appetites go unchecked, look out.

Speaking of the appetites (whatever a body, given its nature, feels a need for): Plato thinks it’s quite important that for anything with powerful appetites there’s immediately a clash between those appetites and the outside world, which is totally indifferent to them. This is the original version of what for humans will become the main moral issue of the rest of their lives: the tension between what you want and your realizations that other people want the same for themselves, and that the world is indifferent to any desires at all.

Let’s review what Plato has said so far. At the core of what we are as bodies imbued with minds, what starts our mental lives and mental development, is the physical ‘violence’ done in and upon our bodies - and so our minds. Our brain psyche is going to have to work with our body psyche and more specifically, our emotion-psyche in our lifelong struggle with the “mighty river” of desires coursing through our body. At first the brain psyche is pretty much just going to get tossed around by the current and we’re going to suffer everything from blurred vision, to clumsy grips, to bladder control issues, to constant crying. And when our bodies collide with the outside world, well, that’s going to be a whole other set of problems.

However, we have built in the mental capabilities to have reasonably effective “baseline responses” to our internal needs and to external impositions, (even if at first they don’t amount to much more than crying and flinching). Over time these responses are honed and changed as our bodies, piloted by our body psyche, have more experiences and develop more coordination. But you need to realize how important this observation by Plato is: this means that our bodies are conduits of information – for themselves and for the brain psyche. The body psyche is replete with information about our changing internal physical states, whether they are caused by other internal events or by external events flowing through us and out of us. All of it registers with us even if we aren’t conscious of it or cognizant of it and the body is capable of acting on some info while ignoring other info. (Its really a kind of judgement, an idea I'll be talking a lot about towards the end of this project.)

Eventually, the appetites’ initially overwhelming force gets mitigated, and as time progresses, the rational or cognitive mind establishes itself more and more, to a degree such that like a successfully adapted animal, the growing person can more and more control its body and get what it wants out of its surroundings. The brain psyche becomes more and more “intelligent”, more and more capable of applying the concepts of sameness and difference, without mastery of which there no judgement and so no deliberate action. We’ll return to Plato and the tripartite soul at the end, but for now we have enough to move on and watch the basic Platonic psychology develop and evolve in the capable hands of Aristotle.

Plato on how the brain and body influence each other

As I said last time, Plato takes up the Homeric concepts of ‘psyche’, ‘thymos’ and ‘phrenes’ and develops a detailed theory with various similarities and differences to the originals. I also explained that Plato realized that if we could figure out how the living body of a being registers stimuli, it would go a long way toward us understanding how the more intelligent system, the perceptive consciousness of a human, works. He originally set out his theory in his classic Republic (audio), but he offers an extended, more ‘scientific’ discussion of the interplay between mind and emotion in the Timaeus.

His major theoretical development is to talk about the mind as having a tripartite nature, and argues that it is this that allows us to move beyond the child-like behavior of the Iladic people. Upon thinking about human capabilities and behavior, Plato argues that it seems certain that unlike merely conscious animals, humans depend upon two “mental’ systems to live and interact with the world. One is found throughout the body, focused in the chest, and the second is localized at the brain and interconnected with the first one.

Let’s call the first, more basic system ‘body-psyche’. It is basically what today we’d call the central nervous system and its job is to take in the literally “necessary disturbances” of life, such as pleasures and pain, while also being the source of others such as boldness, fear, anger and expectation. Note that all of these are tools necessary for dogs as well as humans to survive, and they are at the core of the ability to socialize. The mental activities of the body-psyche are still aligned closely with simple ‘unreasoning’ awareness (e.g. lusting).

Plato notes, however that humans can sometimes overcome lust and other such unreasoning awareness, but other animals, such as dogs in heat, cannot. This leads Plato to say that the body-psyche appears to be ‘separated’ from the other psyche, the one capable of reasoning, as if by some barrier.

But what is this barrier, what distinguishes the brain-psyche from the body psyche? Plato answers that it stands to reason that something in or about the (human) brain allows for our ability to sometimes overcome unreasoning awareness. (And he thinks, somewhat naively, that it’s quite important that the brain is geographically separated from the rest of the ‘mind-system’ by the neck.)

At this point you may be thinking this two-part distinction is pretty clear cut and are wondering how he’s going to find a third “part” to distinguish. Plato thinks it overly simplifies what is going on, but to move forward he has to write you a check and promise to cash it a little later. He asks a series of probing questions: Do we as a matter of fact note any mental activity at all that is neither pure reasoning nor unreasoning awareness? Is it is possible to explain how such activity is created physiologically? Is there any benefit to pursuing this speculation? He answers “yes!” to all of these.

Getting a better view

Let’s take a step back to look at what is going on here, what Plato is doing. He is in the business of trying to understand how simple awareness and perceptive consciousness work and linking them to higher cognitive functions such as abstract thought. He’s committed to a physiological relationship between them that runs: registering (seeing, hearing, feeling a thing)à consciousness (being aware of and paying attention to the thing) à higher cognition (reasoning about the thing).

So we think that there’s more to the story about perception and mentality than the Iladic story can explain and we’ve got the brain-psyche on one hand and the body-psyche on the other. Plato then stipulates that the bodily psyche itself has two parts. The superior part of the bodily psyche has the following properties: it exhibits “spirit” and ambition; it is physically closer to the brain; it can and does listen to and work with reason; it forces compliance from the (lower) part of the body-psyche that consists of appetites, as for food and sex.

Plato gives a lot of reasons why human physiology supports this view. To show the reality and power of the ‘lower” body psyche, he notes that no humans, in fact no animals at all, could exist if the appetite for things the body needs such as food and rest were not 1) sustained and continual and 2) strongly felt. In fact, this set of necessities we call appetites constantly need satisfaction; I’m sure you know how hard it is to think straight when you’re starving or really have to relieve yourself. Further, when we look at how the heart works and how we can raise and lower our heart rate, we get an idea of how ‘reason’ can use the body to exert its will on the body.

To better explain what the “superior” bodily psyche is, Plato says that by and large the appetites don’t “understand” the deliverances of reason and to the extent they do, they have no innate regard for reason. Instead, it appears to common sense that appetites are enticed – and so controlled – by “images”, they react immediately to what they see. However, the superior body psyche, which I can now tell you is the emotion center, clearly does respond to reason. After all, many people, probably even you, have appetites or desires for things that you wish you didn’t. In fact, many people have desires for things that they really are embarrassed by, and they get really mad at themselves for indulging them. So mad, even, that they often can force themselves to stop. Plato thinks that the fact you can be aware of, judge negatively, and cease to act on an appetite is evidence enough that the reasoning capacity can work in concert with something – the emotions – to control the appetites.

Now the details of the physiology Plato gives us as to how this works are not very useful so I’ll bypass them, and happily, his psychological theories are not dependent on the details. He’s not working from the way the organs actually work and building out a psychology that fits on top. Instead he starts from experience and behavior and is looking to see if there’s a plausible way to account for his theories based on human physiology.

It is useful is to note that he was trying to meet the scientific data he had and at the same time answer a difficult problem as honestly and intuitively as possible, with as much explanatory power as possible. His conclusion was a psychology that says mind consists of three “parts” the psyche which is capable of abstract thought and can control the body, the thymos or “spirited” part, which is our emotion center, and the phrenes, which Plato casts as the appetitive part.

Cashing the check

Remember the end point we’re working towards: Plato thinks we can better understand the mind and human behavior if we move beyond the simple views that our minds are our thymos and that all mental activity is like that of the Iladic people or children, a sort of “hot thinking”. He believes that we can gain great explanatory power from looking at human mental capacity as consisting in three physically interconnected “parts” that will account both for hot thinking and cooler thinking, and that based on how human physiology is set up, the how behind the things this theory suggests happen is plausible. Here’s a high-level synopsis:

1. In humans as with other animals, appetites or desires typically run on their own. All things being equal, when an appetite strikes, humans, like other animals, ‘mindlessly’ pursue it. This much covers how any animal conscious being comes to feel pleasure and pain, and how they affect action. But Plato also wants to explain how humans are not only animal conscious but self conscious and how the two are related.

2. Sometimes, instead, in humans the emotion center (thymos, or superior body-psyche) communicates to the appetites what our reasoning part wants done about a situation, such as whether or not to pursue satisfaction as well as how better to do so.

3. Whatever the communication between these parts is done with, it must be a way that is ‘understandable’ for the appetites. It appears to be a physical messaging system that uses various bodily fluids to affect the vital organs such that the body can be put into various states such as pain and nausea, which have a very strong influence on the will or the desire to pursue a course of action. In fact, these states are strong enough to undermine the otherwise very strong urge to satisfy a currently active desire and replace it with another one supplied by reason.

4. The reasoning part of the mind, in conjunction with the emotions, is able to manipulate the proper physical changes in the body, thus sending the proper message of pleasure or pain to silence (or strengthen) the basic pangs that are messages of appetite. Of course these appetite messages can also be very strong and overpower the inclination to do things that require intelligent thought. These messages go back and forth between the body and the brain, with varying degrees of success. (Going forward we’ll refer to this process as duplex communication).

5. For example, let’s say you have the desire to do something you think is awful, like kicking a puppy that’s been yapping for too long. You kick it and realize the poor thing was just looking for attention and now you’ve seriously hurt it and as you get a sick ‘guilty’ feeling in your stomach, the anger you felt about the yapping disappears, along with the desire to punish the animal, you feel sorry and promise to yourself never to needlessly attack a defenseless animal again.

To strengthen this idea of duplex communication, Plato argues that its clear that bodily conditions can cause illnesses in the brain-psyche, thus stopping it from working as it often can to control our behavior:

1. "Mindlessness": Either ignorance or madness. In the first case, your physical need to eat or to go to the bathroom can become so strong that you are no longer aware of your surroundings. In the second, you literally lose touch with reality due to things such as lack of sleep or syphilis.

2. "Excessive pleasure or pain": too much of either leads to an inappropriate level of exertion, which undermines the ability to hear anything correctly. Think of an addict, of drugs, sex, video games, attention or whatever. They like the thing too much, such that they focus way too much energy on obtaining it and they can’t ‘hear’ things such as the demands of their body, their boss, spouse, friends, etc.

In the next post I’ll give a more detailed discussion of these three parts of the mind, and further explain the benefits of the view for understanding the connection between the emotions and morality.