Cartesian Panic — and its consequences

In November 1619, for reasons that may or may not have been purely scientific, a 23-year-old Frenchman secluded himself in a heated room in the Swabian town of Ulm. The epiphany he experienced there has arguably set the agenda for all the psychological sciences since then. Specifically, his stated fear that an evil spirit could deceive him about everything except his experience of a core of subjectivity has had massive consequences. It has cleaved body and mind; self and other; person and physical environment. The violence with which all outside the self became merely res extensa gives pause. Can it be the case that Descartes, totally alone in Germany, had a panic attack that we are still recovering from?

The mental exercises that comprise the Cartesian meditations have had massive consequences. The crisis that Descartes went through, and its resolution, defines much of our self-image to this day. There are at least the following phenomena to be unpacked in any such set of exercises; the will, consciousness, and selfhood unpacked, in turn, into at least the following categories; the epistemological subject, who knows things; Can it be the case that Descartes, totally alone in Germany, had a panic attack that we are still recovering from? the citizen, a recipient of civic rights and duties with appropriate emotional connotations, all of which vary wildly between cultures; the socius, or rather multitude of socia, which we present to various people and interest groups. Underpinning all of this, and in most cases providing at least a pseudo-unification , is a narration in the left hemisphere that “interprets” all one’s experience and action; the voice in one’s head that just won’t stop. The interpreter, famously, is often wildly inaccurate in attributing the authorship of one’s actions to oneself, when their causal factors were well outside one’s control. Post-hypnotic confabulation is the reductio ad absurdum of this. In the classical case, a subject was told under hypnosis to stamp his foot when the hypnotist clicked his fingers. Post-trance, he did just that. When asked why, he claimed erroneously that there was a stone in his shoe.

Conversely, dissociation and a psychotic interlude can occur if the interpreter fails to keep up with events, including the loss of control in self-initiated action thereby possible. Finally, it is possible that such dissociation is salutary for those on that type of journey of personal development conventionally called a spiritual quest, provided that the environment includes nets as well as tight wires.

The Neuroscience thereof, at a best guess, is as follows; consciousness is an inevitable consequence of computational events in certain parts of the brain. The autonomic nervous system will remain forever out of consciousness for most of us; however, living in any human society requires that we become conscious of an action about to happen when action potentials are reached in a large part of the motor cortex. (It is perhaps the most remote achievement of human beings, and the best evidence for dualism, that we are capable of suppressing such consciousness if the occasion demands it, as in skilled performance like driving and playing musical instruments that demand a great deal of automaticity). The anterior cingulate gyrus of the frontal lobe contains subsystems that can inhibit motor response. Likewise, as claimed by Damasio, the cingulate cortex is involved in the moment to moment recreation of sense of self, which, in true multiagent fashion, occurs for each object one is dealing with. We are a different self from moment to moment; however, non-autistic people settle on a relatively coarse granularity of self that allows them communicate with each other. It may be the case that autistic people are insensitive to some crucial aspect of intersubjectivity like rhythm.

Orthogonal to this are unconscious processes, both of the subterranean type that Freud envisaged and the computational type that comprise at least 99% of what the brain does. The problem of consciousness is complicated by the urge many researchers seem to have to solve problems involving objective relations in the external world by translating them to the theatre of consciousness, and ignoring the relatively minor role consciousness has in the brain. To continue; there does seem to be some intricate circuitry involving the basal ganglia, the anterior cingulate gyrus, and the motor cortex which is crucial to us performing actions in a manner consistent with our self-image, and as a member of one’s society.

What all these various phenomena of selfhood have in common is precisely a process of identification; I am this, as opposed to that. The myriad forces that impinge on one due to familial relations and obligations, professional engagements, what one can only vaguely term “societal forces” and so on, evoke what are in effect subselves, each with its own memory and functionality to deal with them. Linguists speak, for exemplification of this point, of different registers that one can adopt as a speaker; that of parent, of child, or whatever. The AI notion of multiagent systems is a further amplification. We are legion; but this is an efficiency decision the brain has made, and the interpreter provides a pseudo-unification at least.

Let us return to Descartes and the evil spirit who can deceive him about everything, except the fact that he believes that he exists; rendered more accurately into English, Descartes’ reply is “I am thinking, therefore I am”. It was inevitable that the Cartesian response, the subject against which this object is defined, is a disincarnate good spirit who can control thought. To push matters a tad further, the very narration in the left hemisphere which rescued We are a different self from moment to moment Descartes’ sanity by preserving the distinction between him and the external world was then appropriated to the res cogitans; we now have no such solace, and must ground ourselves elsewhere. Remarkably, Descartes’ own contemporaries, like Lichtenberg and (a little later) Hume, were already calling foul, and positing a process more akin to “it thinks in me”. Let us hence to the viewpoint here. What all the processes above share is roots in a process of identification; the core of a notion of self is that I am this, rather than that. In these terms, what Descartes did was take the socius, and endow it with truly fantastical attributes including a spiritual nature, and infinite computing power. The point of view here is that any core of subjectivity is independent of the wiles of the interpreter, and cognisant of the incessant identification with objects and processes that the brain does. Whether the search for this core really requires the mediaeval ascesis of Cistercian and Buddhist monks is a moot point. As a parting shot, perhaps Descartes degrading of matter was fully as dreadful a mistake as his fantastical overestimation of the power of the conscious self.

Notwithstanding the knowledge we have gleaned about the role of the frontal lobes in voluntary action, we are likely to look just as absurd in four centuries’ time if we construe ourselves along lines suggested by current neuroscience. It seems that our fundamental self-definition will always be more salutary if we eschew our contemporary science popularisers and find some more trustworthy foundations for our self-definition. Failing that, the alternatives seem to be psychosis or the kind of alienation identified long ago by Durkheim and which may well be connected to our destruction of the physical environment as we panic and try to make something outside ourselves tell us what we really are.

© 2003 S. O’Nuallain

Author Information

Sean O’Nuallain
Visiting Scholar, Stanford University
Head of Nous Research