The idea is there that, sure, we live in this world where everything around us is perceived as physical, as material, but we are something else.
We have a spiritual element to us that makes us distinct. Now, this distinction is really relevant in the scientific context for the following reason.
Things that are physical, things that are material, we assume that the
interactions, the behaviors those things show must follow what we call natural
laws. And in fact, science is the pursuit of those natural laws.
The idea that through careful observation and systematic manipulation, we can
figure out what those laws are. Things like gravity, you know, and, and
various other laws. and that in so doing, we'll gain a really good understanding of this physical world around us.
And so, we studied Physics, we studied Chemistry, we studied Biology Astronomy, etc. all of those are studies of the physical world around us.
But, of course, if we do not perceive ourselves as physical beings, if we
perceive ourselves as spiritual beings, then what we're implying there is that
our behavior does not follow such constrained natural laws.
And if it doesn't, well then, it doesn't makes sense to study it scientifically.
So really, psychology would never be born unless we started to think of ourselves
in different ways and that process really began with Rene Descartes and here's a
story of Rene Descartes that I really like. the idea is that he was walking through a park in, in, in France, and as a typical French park, it had statues and it had
flowers.
Up ahead he saw a statue of, of Diana, goddess of the hunt, beautiful statue.
So, he started to approach to get a better look at her, but as he came closer
out from behind the bushes came Neptune, barring a trident and blocking his path.
A statue of Neptune, I should say, and that's what was, you know, really so
impressive, the statue moved as if with intention. Now, how did it move?
Well, this was the time when hydraulics was just being understood and used.
And so, literally, Rene Descartes had stepped on a pressure plate which forced
some sort of liquid through a tube and ultimately that force was used to move
the statue on some relatively, relatively frictionless set of, you know, rails or
something like that. That's how the motion actually happened.
But in Rene's mind, it was a really profound experience for the following
reason. He knew that statue was inanimate, he knew it was made of material, you know, physical material, and yet it behaved as though it was alive.
That is, it was animate and had intentions.
It looked like the statue was trying to block his path.
So, Rene suddenly started looking at other things, like animals and humans,
and asking whether maybe their behavior was analogous to that statue.
Maybe they you really were physical beings as well and may be their behavior
did reflect something like hydro, hydraulics, some physical process that
made them look animate.
Ultimately, Rene concluded that that was the case for animals, he felt they were
fully machine-like, fully mechanical. But humans, he thought were a little
different. Humans, he thought, had a dual nature. And we now call this notion, Cartesian Dualism.
So, he thought, yes, humans are partly machine.
HpS - AGTSP paoho. We had to do some editing to make the article inteligible and even still there is re-redundancy of certain words. Why is that??? Yet, is very interesting. Thank you, very interesting! We will look for Descartes biography on Britannica. More!