And here's another fine mess Descartes' got us into . . .
From Descartes' Bones comes another example an old philosophical problem that dogs us to this day: the debate over whether mind and brain are one entity or two. Generally the religious hold for two, the non-religious for one, altho Descartes', a devout Catholic, was the first to put forward the materialist (now days called physicalist) belief that the mind does not exist apart from the brain.
This excerpt goes into some modern argument for the inadequacy of physicalism:
For, as many current thinkers have pointed out, there are basic problems with the physicalist view. What it leaves out, to state it briefly and bluntly, is me. The present-day philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it this way:
"For many philosophers the exemplary case of reality is the world described by physics, the science in which we have achieved our greatest detachment from a specifically human perspective on the world. But for precisely that reason physics is bound to leave undescribed the irreducibly subjective character of conscious mental processes, whatever may be their intimate relation to the physical operation of the brain. The subjectivity of consciousness is an irreducible feature of reality -- without which we couldn't do physics or anything else -- and it must occupy as fundamental a place in any credible world view as matter, energy, space, time and numbers."
That is to say, human consciousness is the well from which we derive much that is most meaningful to us, so any theory of knowledge that does not take it seriously into account -- along with all of the stuff that goes with human consciousness: mourning the dead, petting kittens, bowing to Mecca, cherishing faded love letters, risking your life to save someone else's, subconsciously loathing your mother or consciously hating your boss, is flawed.
I don't know that I can agree with this, tho I'm not convinced entirely by a strict physicalist view either. Altho I've no idea how animals feel about their mothers, or Mecca, the more I read about them the more I learn about their mourning their dead, petting kittens (remember Koko?), cherishing loved ones and certainly risking their lives for others, including, often enough, for humans. I think it would be easier to find examples of animals risking their lives for loved humans than the other way around tho I hardly deny those examples exist as well.
I am very open to the idea that we are not the only animals with minds, but I wonder what Nagel and Shorto think of it? And if the qualities of cherishing, mourning and all the rest are held to be indicative of a mind, which the other animals do not have, are philosophers then mistaken about what a mind is? Or if one is truly required for love and grief?