This must be my week for interesting encounters and unlikely conversations. Yesterday, I headed down to McDowell County to do spend the afternoon with some children in a summer program. McDowell is one of the poorest and most economically distressed counties in the nation. The kids were in Keystone, a predominately African-American community which is a pretty marginalized place in a very marginalized county.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I didn't find it. When I got there, there were three other people who planned on meeting with this small group of kids, including a representative of US Senator Joe Manchin, one from Governor Earl Ray Tomblin, and a member of the WV House of Delegates.

For real. How cool was that?

As if that wasn't odd enough, the delegate began his presentation to the kids, one of whom was as young as six, with a Latin quote from philosopher Rene Descartes. You guessed it, "cogito ergo sum." He then discussed the implications of "I think, therefore I am" in ways that Descartes never would have thought of. And they got it.

I don't know about you, but generally speaking I can go for a pretty long time in this state without running into someone, much less an elected official, who brings up 17 century French philosophers.

You just never know.

SUPERSIZE THIS. Fast food workers are on the move for a living wage.

SOLITARY CONFINEMENT. It's bad for the brain and doesn't exactly bring out the best in people.

"LIBERTARIAN POPULISM." According to Michael Lind, it's Ayn Rand in disguise.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Putting Descartes before the horse

Descartes.

The horse.

El Cabrero just finished reading (more accurately, listening to) a fun book, Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason by Russell Shorto.

I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate (does it show?) and remember having to do a report on ole Rene in my first class on modern philosophy. I was a bit surprised at the time that the 1600s counted as modern, but could see even then why Descartes was a new departure.

In an effort to gain certain knowledge, he practiced a method of systematic doubt in which he rejected anything that couldn't be seen as certain in the light of reason. Clear and distinct ideas and all that. As most people who've ever flirted with philosophy know, the bedrock on which he started was the cogito, as in "I think, therefore I am."

(Buddhists and others would be quick to point out that the fact of thinking does not necessarily imply a permanent "I" who is doing the thinking, but that's neither here nor there.)

One legacy that Descartes partly created and partly inherited was mind/body dualism. He tended to view the human body and animals generally as operating under natural and more or less mechanical laws. The human mind/soul however was believed to be somehow immaterial.

For some strange reason, he thought the soul connected with the body via the pineal gland, which raises the obvious question, what need would an immaterial soul have of that?

One unfortunate legacy of his thought was the tendency to view animals as essentially complex machines (which tells me among other things that he was a city boy) devoid of real feelings. In fact, most complex animals probably feel things as intensely as we do, although they don't talk or think about it as much. The parts of the brain associated with human emotions are those we share with other mammals.

Forget about the inner child and the ghost in the machine. I say embrace your inner animal!

HEALTH CARE. Here's a toolkit on health care reform for aimed at religious groups.

JUNK FOOD NATION. Here's another helping.

SPEAKING OF FOOD, WV Governor Joe Manchin declared yesterday to be "Eat Local Day." El Cabrero, a patriotic son of the Mountain State, did his part by eating garlic, tomatoes, eggplant and an egg from the farm.

CASH FOR CLUNKERS. Here's a look at this popular program by the Economic Policy Institute.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

NO DOUBT

Caption: This man is no Cartesian; he didn't think, therefore he swam.

El Cabrero has been musing this week on the nature of scientific knowledge. I haven't got very far, but it is Friday, which should count for something.

There are two influential thinkers of the early modern period who are often credited with getting the ball rolling. One, Francis Bacon, was the subject of yesterday's post. Today's is about his polar opposite, Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who gave us both analytical geometry (to which I have never been formally introduced) and, indirectly, the "Matrix" movies.

As I mentioned yesterday, Bacon believed that empirical induction was the way science needed to proceed. For him, experience was the key. He was mistrustful of deductive reasoning and math was way down on his list.

For Descartes, experience and observation were problems, not solutions, since we could easily be deceived by our senses. He recommended a deductive, mathematical approach to the development of the sciences, with experiment and observation way down on his list.

However, most people remember Descartes for his famous thought experiment of systematically doubting everything in order to arrive at some kind of certainty:

I had long before remarked that, in relation to practice, it is sometimes necessary to adopt, as if above doubt, opinions which we discern to be highly uncertain, as has been already said; but as I then desired to give my attention solely to the search after truth, I thought that a procedure exactly the opposite was called for, and that I ought to reject as absolutely false all opinions in regard to which I could suppose the least ground for doubt, in order to ascertain whether after that there remained aught in my belief that was wholly indubitable.

This included doubting the senses and even the existence of the external world:

Accordingly, seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose that there existed nothing really such as they presented to us; and because some men err in reasoning, and fall into paralogisms, even on the simplest matters of geometry, I, convinced that I was as open to error as any other, rejected as false all the reasonings I had hitherto taken for demonstrations; and finally, when I considered that the very same thoughts (presentations) which we experience when awake may also be experienced when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true, I supposed that all the objects (presentations) that had ever entered into my mind when awake, had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams.

Then he hit what he thought was bedrock:

But immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am (COGITO ERGO SUM), was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search.

All this is from his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences, although he develops these ideas again in a different form in the Meditations on First Philosophy.

It's there that at least one of the inspiration for the Matrix movies came from. In the course of his doubt (from which he extricates himself with a not altogether convincing ontological "proof" of the existence of God), he imagines that

some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me; I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams, by means of which this being has laid snares for my credulity; I will consider myself as without hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or any of the senses, and as falsely believing that I am possessed of these; I will continue resolutely fixed in this belief, and if indeed by this means it be not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of truth, I shall at least do what is in my power, viz, suspend my judgment ], and guard with settled purpose against giving my assent to what is false, and being imposed upon by this deceiver, whatever be his power and artifice.

In modern times, this is known as the Brains in a Vat problem (as in how do we REALLY know that we ain't?), which is one of the main ideas behind the Matrix movies.

All I know is my legs would be a lot less sore if you could just download martial arts like they do in those movies...

WHEN SQUIDS ATTACK...Jumbo squid around 7 feet long and weighing 100 pounds are becoming more common off the coast of California. And they're mean.

STICKER SHOCK. For the latest on the costs of the Iraq war (what we've paid for so far anyway), click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

ANYONE WANT BACON?

It's interesting that two thinkers widely recognized for launching modern scientific thought had opposite ideas on where to proceed.

I'm thinking about Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626). As Steven L. Goldman points out in his Teaching Company lecture series "Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It," the contrast could hardly be sharper.

For Bacon, the mind was the problem. We are all to eager to concoct theories and explanations of reality at the drop of a hat. He wrote some interesting essays on "the idols of the mind." These included

*the idols of the tribe, or common human fallacies;

*the idols of the cave, or our own private hobby-horses;

*the idols of the marketplace, or false conceptions derived from popular phrases and ideas (memes?); and

*the idols of the theatre, or prejudices derived from older philosopical systems and received wisdom.

He advocated instead a disciplined approach based on observation, experience and induction, a slow collection of facts that would lead to sure knowledge.

It sounded good at the time, and was probably a needed antidote to stale scholasticism, but science doesn't seem to work that way now, and didn't at the time, either.

Next time: Descartes and the Matrix.

SPEAKING OF SCIENCE, Pope Benedict XVI is talking sense. He called the creation/evolution clash "an absurdity,"

This clash is an absurdity because on one hand there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such.

He also noted that evolution doesn't answer all questions: “Above all it does not answer the great philosophical question, ‘Where does everything come from?’”

And he once again drew attention to global climate change:

We all see that today man can destroy the foundation of his existence, his Earth... We cannot simply do what we want with this Earth of ours, with what has been entrusted to us.

TO YOUR HEALTH...AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE. These days stating the obvious is pretty important. Here's an item about what's missing in discussions of health:

The public generally believes that poor lifestyle choices, faulty genes and infectious agents are the major factors that give rise to illness. Here's the rest of the story.

Research now tells us that lower socio-economic status may be more harmful to health than risky personal habits...

The rest is worth a look.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: OVER THE TOP