Post No9

On Descartes:

I’m reading Descartes’ Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy and I didn’t know that it was mostly a defense of theism! I’m not sure what I was expencting, as I only really knew that he was very influential, but I was surprised that this is the focus of the text. Now, I only recently started the book but because it is so short I’m already about half-way through it and I have some thoughts on it already…

I can’t help but think of all the things we know now that make his arguments harder to accept. For intance, I think that with all the advances in Neuroscience and Articial Intelligence, it has become easier to accept that the mind is simply a result of the brain’s complexity. I mean, now that computers can pass the Turing test and are capable of having conversations with us, it’s not hard to imagine that soon enough we won’t be able to distingish between a real mind and an artificial one.

For this reason and because of my bias against theism I’m struggling to enjoy his work so far unfortunately. But, who knows maybe I’ll end up enjoying the book overall once I finish it! I will give an update in a future post.