Fuck Descartes

Mar 07, 2011 17:33

I think Descartes's rejection of the senses is really just secular Western philosophy's way of accommodating the European cultural bias toward body shame inherited from the Catholic Church's doctrines of original sin. He simply replaces an infallible God with infallible Thought. While I have deep respect for the power of abstract rational thought, divorcing that from the experience of the body has led our cultural development in directions ill suited to the bodies through which we are bound to experience our lives.

While having the choice to jack into a machine that would directly take over my brain's experience could be cool, I don't want to give up the rest of my neurons and other cells to have it. While the question of humanity's spiritual nature is debatable, disputing our physical nature is stupid.

(I mean, really: Descartes's willing to imagine a demon that could mess with his senses and make him believe he saw, heard, felt, etc. things that weren't real, but then can't imagine another demon that could mess with his thoughts?)

vision

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