Freddie the Cat Devours Chicken Bites Treats on a Warm Winter Day
In reality, it's Descartes' certainty that bugs me
It’s a warm winter day. A Monday, to be exact. Freddie the cat soaks in the sun as he dreams about his chicken bites treat he’s going to be devouring in a few hours. He’s certain that he’s going to be getting some. Why? Because cats rule the world. We just haven’t realized that out yet.
We think that we are aware and self-aware, conscious and self-conscious, reflective and self-reflective. We are aware of death. We are being towards death, as philosopher Martin Heidegger would put it.
But all this is just a very elaborate plot by felines to make us think that we are kings and queens of the world when in reality everything we do is to keep them and ensure they’re happy.
Mind you, you might think it’s dogs who rule the world. But that’s also part of the plot.
Call me a conspiracy theorist. I don’t mind. But I’m certain that this is the case. I have collected the data. Ran some models, and concluded that the Freddies of the world are conspiring against us.
The glitch in the system happened when we decided to lock ourselves in for too long. Some cat-coder messed the source code up, and here we are.
French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) thought that animals had no souls. They don’t have that special thing that humans have: soul or mind, whatever you want to call it; that thing that makes us a thinking thing.
Descartes argues that, unlike animals, humans do not simply observe things but think about them, come to conclusions, then make actionable decisions based on some sort of right/wrong benchmark.
For example when someone tweets something you don’t like and disagree with, not only do you think it for yourself, but you come up with an elaborate counter-argument in order to prove that person wrong. For some, it’s an automatic block because they always know better. But we’ll get to that shortly.
It doesn’t end there, though. According to Descartes, what makes humans even more special is that we can also articulate our thoughts and ideas.
We communicate our stream of thought to others. In theory, meaningful exchanges take place between us because we make ourselves understood. We engage in dialogues, reflect, think, create, communicate, etc., until one is sentenced to death like in the case of Socrates on charges of corrupting the youth and creating new gods.
That is not something animals could do according to Descartes. In addition, going back to the cat example, Descartes went as far as attempting to throw a cat out the window in order to prove that they are just like machines: a non-thinking thing. Is this anecdote true? How would I know? I read it somewhere. But if you’re looking for facts, check out my previous article here.
Based on this argument, all sorts of things can be justified. It becomes easy for one to, for example, take things to extremes, like torturing an animal just because. I won’t dwell much on this because I’m interested in the argument as a segue to something else.
Descartes was ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN about his stance. It was rational. It made sense. It derived from self-evident axioms he had laid out in his seminal works where he was sure and certain that he existed as a thinking thing, that God existed as a benevolent being who wouldn’t deceive him about his knowledge of the external world, and that human beings are special because they’re thinking things, and have the capacity to create languages of their own and to articulate their thoughts.
Descartes’ arguments were certain, demonstrative, deductive. So certain were the proofs that you could quickly fall into the trap of jumping to conclusions about how we OUGHT to behave and treat each other, or animals. For Descartes, as I said, animals are just machines, and so ethically speaking we can do whatever to them.
But you see, I’m not sure where the problem actually is if there is one at all. Is it the certainty about our stances that make us confident enough to treat others in a certain way?
Why do we somehow assume our position is correct because we know how things are, to then proceed to argue how we and others ought to do things based on our ‘rational’ conclusions? Where does this confidence in the relationship between is and ought come from? I don’t know.
Mind you, this is not something I came up with, for the sake of name-dropping check out what David Hume had to say on this issue.
No matter how I think about it, it seems that it boils down to certainty. We are all too-very-much-extremely-dogmatically-absolutely certain about our arguments, our ethical principles, about what others think, how others behave, how everyone ought to behave, think, go about doing things, and what their intentions and motives are.
It is this certainty that bugs me: not whether or not there’s an external world, whether or not cats rule the world, whether or not we’ll make it to Mars, whether or not we live in a simulation.
It is the certainty that our arguments, which more often than not are probabilistic, are true, and that therefore we ought to impose on others how they ought to think about things, what is right or wrong, etc.
There seems to be a huge gap between facts and deriving political & ethical practices from them, yet people act like they know what the right thing to do (always) is.
Maybe when you've tasted the sweet certainty of math proofs, it's very hard to accept uncertainty. Descartes obsessed over this his entire life. Hume, on the other hand, learned how to live with his skepticism, and lived his life accordingly.
Descartes was certain that cats had no souls. I’m not so sure cats rule the world. But Freddie is absolutely certain he’s getting his treat as soon as I’m done writing this article.
Here’s a pic of Freddie soaking in the Monday sun on a warm February winter day.
If you want to explore certainty in more depth, join us in March.