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 Second Cartesian Error: Inability to bridge the gap between physical and mental

Descartes’ basic position in the Passions of the Soul is that the emotions are cognitive because they are activities of the soul or mind. One of his problems is distinguishing between other abilities or activities that could seem cognitive, like sensations and perceptions, which to him are not cognitive because they are activities of the body; they are always either focused on the body or objects outside the body.

After all, he thinks, any time you sense something, it’s either your body you sense, or some other object in the world. But you don’t sense your mind or your thoughts. He thinks the same goes for perceptions. In fact, in his earlier book, Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes said perception was ‘non cognitive’, because it provided little more than basic ‘shapes’ for the soul to interpret. However, he does change this in view in quite important ways in Passions of the Soul, and it will seriously affect his conclusions regarding the emotions.

The physical aspect

On Descartes’ account emotions happen in the soul, and therefore are “psychic events”. However, he also explains that they have a physical basis. Though the details of his physical account are now hopelessly wrong, the general idea was pretty interesting and we need to have an idea of how it works to see how he gets in trouble reconciling the physical and mental aspects of emotion.

Descartes explains that emotions are caused and continued by chemicals, which he calls spirits, coursing through the body. These spirits can literally cause the soul to move by flowing to and moving the pineal gland, where he thinks the soul sits in the body. The soul feels the pineal gland move, and these chemicals and movements are also how the soul is presented with images and ‘shapes’, for example, of a bear. If the souldetermines a particular shape or set of shapes to be frightful, it excites the soul into a state of apprehension. This is not itself an emotion, such as fear, but the soul needs to be in apprehension for it to develop an emotion.

The soul will develop an actual emotion based on three factors, any one of which can be the determining factor in what specific emotion develops:

1. The natural temperament of the specific body (your body, mine, Descartes’, etc)
2. The strength of the soul (how naturally strong your mind is)
3. Previous success in dealing with the thing, or similar things, by defense or flight. (learning from memory)

The cognitive aspect

Descartes explains that similar to perceptions, which are not actions of the soul or willed by the soul, emotions are thoughts that happen to the soul. Only what the soul itself wills, what it does, is full on thinking. Knowledge only comes from the soul acting, not being acted upon. Basically, an act of willing, what he calls a volition, isdirectly caused by the soul itself, whereas the proximate cause of the emotions is a specific agitation of chemicals. At the same time, just because passions are received into the soul just like perceptions and sensations doesn’t make them perceptions and sensations; emotions are way stronger. In fact, he argues that nothing can excite the soul as much as the emotions. Given this dual physical and mental aspect of emotions, Descartes sails into some choppy waters trying to explain what sort of psychic events emotions are, and his theory sinks

The problem

You’ll remember that the fundamental thesis Descartes wants to defend was the emotions are of the soul, but in the way he sets about explaining how they are accounted for physically, he’s inadvertently – inescapably – set it up so that they can be completely physically explained. This is a disaster and will take another post to fully explain, but let’s get started on the basics.

In the ‘physical aspect’ section above, we learned that experience can predispose the brain so that chemicals hitting the pineal gland flow directly into one or more of three parts of the body such that in every emotion, some particular movement of the proper chemicals in the brain is the principal cause of that emotion. These chemicals do not contain any ‘mental content’ such as thoughts or judgements, instead they simply make the soul to feel. And as we’ll see next time, the system as he describes can totally bypass the soul and create emotions of all kinds based simply on memory, perception and natural born tendencies in you.

To escape this conclusion, Descartes has to commit the Second Cartesian Error. He must insist that these coordinated actions are not really emotions, but emotion-like behavior. An immediate problem is that the behaviors we’re talking about, for example feeling a cold sweat, your stomach in knots, turning and running, etc are more complicated than other clearly non-mental activities such as breathing, swallowing, blinking, or even absentmindedly walking about. 


If we can be show that these behaviors do have mental content above the ‘shapes’ of simple perception, Descartes would seem forced to accept that in some sense the soul is involved in them. The thing is, because of how he’s defined things, he only has two choices for what to call the behaviors, volitions or emotion. Since the soul does not choose to do these physiological things, they can’t be volitions. That only leaves emotions. But then the soul isn’t really involved in emotions.


To avoid this result, he has to accept that these behaviors caused ‘merely’ by memory, perception and natural born tendencies are emotions. Even if they have nothing really to do with the soul. But then, on his theory, they can’t have any ‘mental content’ or ‘thoughts’. The only other option is to admit a contradiction, which of course is no good either, so he needs to find some way out of the dilemma.


 In short, his great interest in mind-body dualism says emotions must be mental, must be of the soul. Yet he created a mechanism to explain the physiology of what happens to us in emotional states that makes this unnecessary. We’ll finish this up next time.

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.

Moving on from Homer

Recapping up the discussion of Iladic people

Let’s recap on what the mental lives of the Iladic people were like. These people didn’t distinguish well at all between ‘thinking’ and ‘emoting’, and used the concept of the physical ‘thymos’ to characterize both. The thymos, you’ll recall, did the things we now take to be done by the brain and CNS; it was effectively the ‘mind’ and its various functions, and was literally thought to be a mixture of breath and blood located in the lungs (phrenes).

We also saw that based on this understanding of mind, Onians explained that learning was as literally “taking into the mind” and forgetting was literally “letting escape”. In addition, the state of a person’s thymos was thought to determine the “fierceness, energy and courage of a person” and the emotions were physical events or things that “enter into” the thymos as a liquid enters a cup.

Finally, let’s recall that we said that for Iladic people, perception or cognition was automatically associated with an emotion, and immediately followed by some degree of a tendency to action. By contrast, we today, and even Greeks of the classical era, exhibit the ability to seemingly “think in cold blood”. We’ve attained more discrimination about what’s going on in our minds, we’ve identified and defined various aspects and phases of mental activity rather than understanding mental activity as all of a piece.

To our credit, over the centuries we’ve managed to use language and abstract thinking, as well as philosophical and scientific examination, to slice and dice what our bodies do when we think and emote, and we’ve clearly become “outwardly more restrained” and even “inwardly calmer” in our actions than the Iladics are represented to have been. Much of this is to the good. Yet at the core of our advancement was a turning away from the core premise that all human mental life is physically based.

Quite some time ago we began forgetting, ignoring, or rejecting the basic starting point that emotions and thinking were coming from the same place, and in our efforts to locate more exactly what was the source of our mental lives, we made emoting and thinking functions of different parts of our anatomy, while at the same time coming to think of these different parts of our anatomy as fundamentally different. And even though most people today working on issues in and around cognition do accept that all thinking and emotional activity is physically based, you may be surprised to find out that old biases have calcified and we’re left with a big mess. At the core of the mess, as Joan Wynn Reeves put it, is the typical modern psychological view that there are “sharp distinctions between thought and feeling”.

More on that in the future, now let’s meet Plato.

Plato, or The Source

My argument is that if you look at Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius with a charitable, reasonable eye to what they were trying to address in psychology with the information on physiology they had, we can uncover a conception of mind and emotion that rivals any we have available today. This “P-A-L” account shows us that while a visceral view such as that of the Iladic people is useful, strict adherence to such a view is simply not robust enough. The account also provides a foundation on which to build a theory robust enough to handle the actual complexity of the relationships between mind, thought, emotion and morality. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long after Plato and Aristotle that theories about the emotions started off on two quite debilitating forks from this promising path.

I spent much of my discussion of Homer and the Iladic people focusing on thymos because that is overwhelmingly the concept their psychology depends on. However, there were other concepts and terms used for ‘mind’. The most recognizable of them is ‘psyche’, which you’ll recognize as the root of the English word ‘psychology’. In Homer, by and large it refers to “life-soul”, usually identified with spinal fluid or seminal fluid, which the ancients though literally gave life to a being. Through the ages between Homer and Plato the concept of thymos evolved and changed and distinctions were made that moved the “psyche” from this sort of spinal-seminal fluid to the immortal soul and the “seat of rationality”. For example, the poet Pindar (or II) is said to have developed the meaning of psyche into something “divine” and in some sense “concerned in the feelings of ordinary waking life” but at the same time “asleep when the limbs are active”. Plato, while he accepts the basic Iladic position that thinking and emotions come from the same physical system, significantly develops all of these concepts.

One thing I want to point out that is consistently overlooked is that Plato thinks the physicality of cognition is invaluable. People point to his theology (II) and metaphysics and overstate Plato’s wish for dissolution of the bonds between mind and body. As far as his psychology is concerned, it’s simply not important. We’ll see that what is crucially important is his creation of the conceptual space, the theoretical framework, for excluding some mental activity, sometimes, from the intrusive, inevitable and even overwhelming forces acting in and on the human body.

The Basics on Plato’s Adjustments

Plato starts from the view that in early childhood development (II), we are all like the Iladic people: everything takes a back seat to our immediate desires and our actions are based on the immediate information we have available. Our body is the conduit of information about both internal physical states (e.g. grumbling stomach, pain in leg) and external events that cause changes in our internal physical states (e.g. being hit by an object, a parent’s voice). Our responses to these states are limited to hardwired reactions. We slowly move beyond inborn or built-in responses to these states up to basic intelligence through experience and increasing body control.

Plato notes that we only perceive a limited amount of the information given us; some thing, some mechanism, filters the constant flow of stimuli. Its hard to overstate the importance of this move by Plato. It allows for a psychology that can distinguish between the center of registration and the center of perception. The center of registration is effectively the living body of any being and the center of perception, of consciousness, is a living body with a working psyche. The center of registration is the more basic system, it underlies all thinking and self consciousness.

After making this crucial move, Plato realized that if we could determine how the living body of a being registers stimuli, it would go a long way in understanding how the more intelligent system, the perceptive consciousness of a human, works, because they are causally connected. As I’ll highlight as we go along, this realization by Plato is of the utmost importance and the failure of later thinkers to make it is the cause of many problems for later theories of the emotions.

I’ll wrap it up for this post by noting that we only get more abstract thinking ability if we are properly educated. But once we begin learning to use abstract concepts we begin to develop judgment and our actions go from being more or less predictable or determined reactions, like an animal’s, to being actually willful (chosen, intended) acts.