This is a transcript of episode #028 on Descartes pt. 1.

Rene Descartes is one of these people whose reputation precedes him so much
that to dive right into the episode and start talking about his life would be a little
cavalier for me. He's one of those names from philosophy that even people that have
little to no experience trudging miserably through philosophical treatises, pretty much
everybody has a little bit of an idea of who he was. Most people I've directly spoken to
typically can identify him as the guy that said "I think, therefore I am". Maybe you're
listening to this trying to figure out what that even means. But Descartes is much more
than just this single sentence. He is often credited as being the FATHER OF MODERN
PHILOSOPHY.

To truly understand why he is so influential, I think it is important to talk about

his life and the time period he was living through. When you just take the sentence at
face value "I think, therefore I am." What is that even saying? It sounds like the most
painfully obvious statement in the world to a modern layperson. I mean, this is how
dumb they were back then? It took them thousands of years just to figure out that they were
thinking? Well, no. Not exactly.

I suppose the best way to begin is to say something that we've touched on many
times before in this podcast: The world today is very different than the world back then.
People were lost and confused. It's pretty easy to understand why; just think about
what they've been through recently. Things weren't always this chaotic for these people.
They used to know everything. For a long time, Humanity was the smartest guy he
knew. There were a lot of things that EVERYBODY thought they knew FOR
CERTAIN but then that came crashing down in a big way.

In multiple different ways. We've seen the Protestant Reformation where the
implementation of the religion of an entire millennium came crashing down. People
were told this stuff was the word of God; the way the church did things was endorsed
by God; the rituals you performed earned you favor with God. For a thousand years
these people were told that this stuff was infallible. And it better be, considering that
your eternal fate is at stake. I mean, if you believed that an omniscient, omnipotent God
laid out a set of behavioral restrictions for you to follow centuries ago in a language you
can't speak, then you need to be pretty certain about what's expected of you because it's
not exactly easy for you to get the guy on the phone and ask for some clarifications on
all this stuff.

The one path, the one correct set of behaviors that actually earned you a place in
God's kingdom instead of etching your name into the charred walls of the damned,
these behaviors changed drastically with the protestant reformation. And as an average
person living at the time was there anything else you needed to be MORE SURE
about than that? Alright so just imagine living back then. How terrified would you be?
How can you know for certain that you are going to heaven? What if the way these
people told you was the way to earn your salvation, what if this whole time you had been
doing it wrong.

You've thought this whole time that you and God are on pretty good terms, but
what if you've been doing it wrong all along? What if this is the reason why bad stuff is
still happening to you? What if this is the reason you got that flat tire the other day?
And then once you decide that the church authority has been misrepresenting this stuff,
how can you be confident in what replaces it? How do you know THAT stuff is the
correct way to earn your spot in the club? Can we ever interpret the words of God
written down by the select few chosen people and arrive at a system that we KNOW is
accurate? With COMPLETE certainty. Can we?

I want you to remember this question. There were other entire areas of thought
that were being called into question at the time. For example, Scholasticism, the
dialectical method of reasoning and education that was dominant throughout the entire
Middle Ages that was slowly being overthrown by the new Humanistic way of looking
at things which really wasn't that new because it was a hearkening back to classical
antiquity. People had started to question the role of government in the individual’s life.
Was this feudal system that we had used for so long where a large peasant class lives a
symbiotic lifestyle with overlords the best way to do things, or should we revolt and try
to overthrow this outdated system?

Concepts that were older than the New Testament itself were being shattered.
The Ptolemic model of the universe (Geocentric) with the earth at the center and the
sun and the rest of the celestial bodies revolving around us; it was becoming very clear
that it wasn't true. Copernicus came out with On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres,
Galileo was working on a mathematical approach to physics. That was thrown out the
window.

For the longest time, Humans thought they were the smartest guy at the party.
They thought they had everything figured out. But much like that guy at the party that
talks really loud and is overconfident and thinks he knows everything, it just takes
someone with a marginal amount of critical thinking to ask him the right questions to
make him realize that he might not know as much as he thought. Socrates comes in and
asks him a question and his voice gets a little softer and he's a little less confident. Then
he figures out something else is completely wrong and he gets a little more timid. Well
eventually humanity became Michael Cera.

This stuff we thought we were SO CERTAIN about for SO LONG is garbage.

What do we do now? Alright, let's start over, let's try to figure everything out again, but
this time let's try to base our knowledge on something a whole lot more substantive
than we did last time. There are all different kinds of people emerging on the scene
now. There's a group of people that say, like the question people asked about religion
truth, CAN WE KNOW ANYTHING FOR CERTAIN?

Maybe we can't! But then on the other hand there's this group of people out there
like Francis Bacon that think not only CAN we arrive at certain knowledge, but it is the
savior of humanity! It's gonna solve all of humanity's problems! We will be living in a
utopia! There are other people out there that think maybe it won’t solve all of
humanities problems, but it seems possible to find a SINGLE method that can unite all
of the different sciences into one. A single method to arrive at scientific truths, which
would obviously speed things up drastically. What we see emerging in the scientific
approaches of Thomas Hobbes and Francis Bacon is this search. But nobody is satisfied
with what they have found yet. What emerges from these people is one of the most
famous divides in the history of philosophy and the man that started it...the man that
put his stake in the ground for people to oppose was Rene Descartes.

This famous rivalry of thinkers poised on different sides of a single issue brought
us so many brilliant ideas and insights that it is what we are going to be talking about
for a while. I'm talking about the famous divide between the CONTINENTAL
RATIONALISTS and the BRITISH EMPIRICISTS. We know what rationalism and
empiricism are.

Rationalism is the idea that knowledge can be arrived at through the use of
reason.

Empiricism which is that knowledge has to be arrived at through sense

experience.

These can be seen as the two premises from which people argued in this age of
confusion to try to arrive at knowledge that is more trustworthy than what we had
before. This famous divide in thinking goes like this, although some people make slight
adjustments:

The three big BRITISH EMPIRICISTS were

1. John Locke
2. George Berkeley
3. David Hume

the three big CONTINENTAL RATIONALISTS were

1. Descartes
2. Spinoza
3. Leibniz
 But there were some other thinkers thrown in there as well that we are certainly
going to talk about. Some people lump Immanuel Kant into the rationalists, some
people say he was the guy who managed to fuse together the two approaches, either way
he is the climax of this famous divide between the continental rationalists and the
British empiricists. But Descartes started it all. It's funny. The best way to understand
where Descartes was coming from is to think of this guy...this guy that throughout their
life has been conditioned to have the most extreme, oversimplified viewpoints you have
ever met. But I'm not talking about Descartes when I say that, I am talking about who
Descartes is responding to in his work...this guy with the oversimplified viewpoints
represents the entire human race. This is the reason I got into philosophy in the first
place. I noticed that I was scared and so was everybody else around me. And really,
who can blame them?

There is no user’s manual for living as a human being on this planet! There's no
community college class you can go to that teaches you the way everything truly is. In
fact, you can go to school for 10 years and learn about one subject and AT BEST you are
an expert in one tiny little sliver of this incredibly diverse, complicated world. And when
things are diverse and complicated they can easily become overwhelming to people.
When things are overwhelming, we try to simplify them.

As a young whippersnapper, I recognized I was young and stupid. I looked

around me and saw that pretty much everyone I had ever met has some black and
white way of looking at certain issues that may help them FEEL like they are an expert
in the field, but really they're just as confused as I was. They just were willing to mask
their uncertainty with complacency. I mean, you see it all the time: This particular race
of people are ruining the world. Religion is ruining the world, Democrats are ruining
the world. And this is just one form of it. You ask most people what their most firmly
held conviction is... what is the thing that you believe in the most and it doesn't take
many questions for them to see that it might not be that simple. Francis Bacon has a
quote from during this time period where he said "Nothing is so firmly believed as that
which we least know." The world is not black and white. There is black and white, but
then there are about a million different shades of grey in between them where reality
always lies and the last thing I wanted to do as a young adult is fall into this trap simply
because it was easy for me to do it. For some reason I was willing to admit to myself
that I was a dumb kid. I was willing to admit that I didn't know anything.

Well in this example, Descartes represents this way of thinking and the
conditioned beliefs of humanity during his time period are represented by this over-the-
top extremely oversimplified guy talking really loud at a party. Just imagine a guy that
was born into a really strange household. His parents are good parents, they engage
him a lot and try to educate him about the world the best they can, but they have a
really oversimplified, unrealistic view of the world. Through years and years of
conditioning, this guy becomes this cocktail of black and white views. You can insert
your favorite ones here: He's a racist, doomsday prepper, probably believes in some
sort of reptilian shape shifters at the head of our government...take your pick.

Well once that guy is that far off the rails with oversimplified views, once that
guy has a criterion of truth that is THAT easily met, let’s say we had to prescribe some
method for him to be brought back to reality, what would he have to do? Well this is
the problem Descartes was faced with back in his time. Thinking lazy is what got us into
trouble in the first place. Europe got so far off the rails with all the things we THOUGHT
we knew so well because it had a criterion of truth that was shaky. Descartes thought
that in order for us to arrive at certain knowledge that was trustworthy enough to base
our future knowledge on and could transform humanity as we know it, in order for us
to get there, we needed to start over. We needed to establish first principles, things
that are absolutely true, so true they are self-evident and then through reason arrive
at further conclusions.

The way he did this is through a RIGOROUS METHOD OF DOUBT, one

comparable to PYHRRO in ancient Greece. "I must once, for all, seriously undertake to rid
myself of all the opinions which I had previously accepted and commence to build anew from the
foundation, if I wanted to establish anything firm and lasting in the
sciences."(METHODOLOGICAL SKEPTICISM). Remember, one group of people he
was fighting against was the RADICAL SKEPTICS, people that thought there was no
way to EVER know anything for certain. And to be fair, nobody knew if there was. In
many ways, people still don't know if there is. Descartes decided that in order to refute
these radical skeptics he had to prove to them that some things CAN be known for
certain and that THOSE things should be known as FIRST PRINCIPLES that we can
then use to reason and find further knowledge.

But he had to be certain. He couldn't just sit down and come up with a couple
dozen things he knows for certain and then expect the skeptics to take his word for it.
They would ruthlessly tear anything he said apart. If there was ANY room for doubt, he
would fail.

"[Since] reason already persuades me that I ought no less carefully withhold my assent
from matters which are not entirely certain and indubitable than from those which appear to me
manifestly to be false, if I am able to find in each one some reason to doubt, this will suffice to
justify my rejecting the whole. "

The only way he could be certain that his knowledge would hold up to the
radical skeptic scrutiny is if Descartes himself made sure to argue against his own
thoughts just as well as the greatest skeptics certainly would. This method of doubting
absolutely everything in order to eventually arrive at first principles to base future
philosophy on is really what he is best known for. Let me explain how Descartes did it
and then we can see how it applies to our loud, naive friend at the party that we've been
talking about. Descartes starts by asking the easy questions.

We'd probably ask questions like: Is this Job REALLY the best job for me? Is this
spouse of mine REALLY the love of my life? But then he goes deeper into doubt. He
starts asking, what is it exactly that I am? And then deeper into doubt. He goes so deep
that he questions whether the world around us is actually real. I mean, couldn't it be
true? He says haven't our senses fooled all of us at some point in time? A mirage in the
desert? You look at an optical illusion, your eyes play tricks on you? Descartes says that
when he is dreaming, at least when he is inside of the dream, he thinks he is awake. He
doesn't know until after he wakes up with the sheets sticking to his body that he was
actually dreaming. How can we know for certain that we aren't dreaming right here,
right now?

This is kind of embarrassing that I am using this example because it is so widely

used, but there is so much ninja philosophy sprinkled around in the Matrix trilogy that
it becomes a very useful tool when trying to explain these things. Morpheus asks Neo at
a certain point in the first movie, how would you be able to tell the difference between
the dream world and the real world? Descartes asks, centuries before the Wachowski
brothers did LSD for the first time, how can we be CERTAIN this world that we
perceive is real? "I see so manifestly that there are no certain indications by which we may
clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep."

But wait! Descartes says that sure, our senses may always be at least potentially
deceiving us, but certain things must be true even if we can't use our senses to
accurately measure them. The things that make up the framework of the universe,
things that are ALWAYS true, things like 2+2=4 and the parallel postulate. We may not
be able to use our senses to arrive at truth, BUT WE CAN USE REASON TO ARRIVE
AT THESE CONSTANTS OF THE UNIVERSE. But wait, there's more! Descartes goes
even further! He says that even these things that are seemingly constant might not be
true BECAUSE THERE COULD BE AN ENTITY WHOSE WHOLE EXISTENCE IS
DEDICATED TO DECEIVING US.

How do we know that isn't the case?

"I shall then suppose . . . some evil genius not less powerful than deceitful, has employed
his whole energies in deceiving me; I shall consider that . . . all . . . external things are but
illusions and dreams of which this genius has availed himself to lay traps for my credulity."

Descartes asks, how can I be certain that there isn't some evil demon assigned to
me and my life that spends every second of every day trying to deceive me into
believing the world exists. Kind of like in Monsters Inc. when there is a monster
assigned to every child in the world...how do we know that we don't have Sully
assigned to our senses and he spends all day every day trying to convince us that cars
exist, that food exists, that other people exist. How can we be CERTAIN that is not the
case? Descartes says, we can't.

But we can be certain about one thing. THAT WE ARE THINKING.

Because even if the demon feeds us a thought that is intended to be deceptive, we

are still thinking.

A DECEPTIVE THOUGHT IS STILL A THOUGHT, SO THEREFORE WE

MUST BE THINKING THINGS. Descartes then reasons that simply by arriving at the
self-evident point that we are thinking, we thereby exist. To him, we have to be in order
to be thinking. I think, therefore I am (Cogito ergo sum). Descartes talks a lot about this
method of rigorous doubt. He himself says that each individual person shouldn't apply
this method to everything in their life as he did. That would be pointless. What possible
benefit could we really get from doubting whether a hairdryer really exists? But what
he does mention briefly is that this method of doubt is one that we must apply to our
own critical beliefs. We should hold them up to the most intense skeptical scrutiny
because like us pretending to know that that hair dryer exists, we can be conditioned to
believe other things are the case. Things that can cause us harm. Things that prevent us
from living life fully.

We shouldn't apply this method to ALL of our beliefs. There are definitely beliefs
that we all hold that are useful, but should we vilify entire groups of people or put
needless obstacles in front of us in our personal lives simply because we want the world
to be simpler than it actually is? Let's go back to our racist friend at the party. He's got
this whole elaborate system of oversimplified beliefs that he's been spoon fed and
conditioned to believe by his parents and now he lives his life as though they are the
gospel truth. Think of how much more centered and based in reality his thoughts
would be if he applied the method of doubt that Descartes outlines. What would
happen if he put his racist views under the microscope? What if this guy was forced to
ask himself, "Is it possible that this single race of people, this group of people whose
ancestors hailed from this small proximity with more or less sunlight, is it possible that
they are not the downfall of the human species?" Is it possible that the true cause is
really much more complex based on historical events, trends and forces, government
inefficiency, whatever it is?

Descartes would say that if there is even a shadow of a doubt that you should
throw that belief out and start over again. How would a philosopher think about this?
Just think of how much of a positive change abolishing that one oversimplification could
make in this guy’s life. Now that he isn't denouncing an entire race of people, he frees
up a lot of things that used to be impossible. Now that he isn't denouncing this race of
people he has a lot more people he could potentially be friends with. This one change
yields more meaningful relationships in his life. Now he doesn't have to walk around in
a public place scowling at certain people based on their ethnicity, he doesn't have to
have all the negative thoughts racing through his head when he sees them. "There they
go, walking through the Farmers Market, RUINING THE WORLD AS USUAL." Think
of how much that benefits him. One byproduct of this change in his thoughts might be
that he has more influence in the world than he initially thought! I mean, if this guy
thinks the world is being brought down by a single race of people, he must also feel a
certain amount of helplessness. How can he nurture the positive growth of the world
when the simple PRESENCE of these people brings it down in his head? By thinking
that the problems in the world are caused by societal forces, maybe he would feel a
sense of empowerment, like he could actually make a change if he dedicated his time
wisely! And think of what every Greek Philosopher would say about the satisfaction he
stands to gain simply from the intellectual pursuit. Learning about all of the different
opinions from anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and maybe one day arriving
at the greatest gift to a mind imaginable: the understanding of truth. What criterion of
truth is ample enough as a basis to marginalize entire groups of people?

Descartes talks a lot about these conditioned biased thoughts. He actually gives a
really great metaphor about apples. When you have a barrel of apples and you know
that somewhere in that barrel are some bad apples that might spoil the whole bunch,
what do you do? You can't go sifting through trying to delicately pick out the bad ones,
what if you miss one? That one bad apple could ruin all of the rest of the good ones!
Instead, you should dump all of the apples out and start over that way you are certain
that you got all of them. One biased thought arrived at based on conditioning is
enough to spoil the whole barrel so to speak. Now next time on the show we're going to
go further into Descartes life, the relationships that shaped his thought and more about
how his Metaphysics shaped the famous divide between the continental rationalists and
the British empiricists. Whenever you were forced to graph something on a Cartesian
plane in mathematics, you can thank Descartes for making it possible. Before Descartes
came along math was clearly separated into two parts: Geometry and Algebra. They
were seen as two completely different areas of study. There weren't any algebraic
equations to explain aspects of geometrical shapes and the people of the time period
saw no reason to draw visual aids when practicing algebra. Descartes changed all of
this. Although he never drew a second axis, he used the same tactics. He developed a
way to show points in a uniform, evenly segmented plane around two perpendicular
lines. By doing this, he not only connected the two practices but revolutionized
mathematics by creating the foundations for analytic geometry.

This is a transcript of episode #029 on Descartes pt. 2.

Have you ever met one of those annoying people that always holds the opposite
opinion of whatever the popular consensus is? No matter what it is, your life is a
Shakespearean play and this guy is the contrarion to everything that everybody says.
You could say I love the movie UP! by Pixar, what an incredible job they did at merging
the elements of a film that both kids and adults like. This guy would go: yeah, no, I just
couldn't get into it because...Balloons on a house? I just don't think that's very realistic.
You could say: You know what I love? Fresh tuna. Directly from the ocean Fisherman
catches it, takes it to the dock, somebody buys it and cooks it within hours. Doesn't get
much better than that does it contrarian friend? Yeah, no My thing is I really like it from
the can. Yeah, I really like it when it gets to sit at room temperature for 6-8 months and
THEN I get to eat it. That's my thing. There are a million examples of how this
conversation may go and with some of them you just want to say, "No." You're dead
wrong.

There's nothing you can ever say that would make you right. Some things are
just inherently BETTER. There is NO POSSIBLE WAY canned tuna is better than one
freshly caught out of the ocean! We're talking about the beginning of this famous divide
in philosophy between the continental rationalists and the British empiricists and this
argument is not that far from what these philosophers were feeling.

The reason this contrarian friend of yours is so annoying is because you can't
prove that you are right. It seems so obvious. What sane person chooses canned tuna
over fresh tuna? But every single preference we have, from the taste of this hamburger
vs that hamburger or the color of these curtains over those curtains, all of these
preferences are based on our own individually flawed sense organs and their map of
the world.

See, if you talked to this annoying friend of yours and told them that you think
2+2=4, they couldn't argue with you. Nobody is saying, maybe 2+2=4 to YOU, but to
ME it equals 17 and you need to be respectful of that. No, these are MATHEMATICAL
CERTAINTIES (Exact Science); there is no room for interpretation. Now if you were
living during a time when the collective goal of Europe and the task that you've
dedicated your life to was trying to find a foundation on which truth can be arrived at,
what gauge do you use to decide what "facts" are up to the standards? Are you content
with basing all future knowledge on Disney/Pixar's UP! is a very good movie? Or
would you feel more comfortable basing it on 2+2=4.This is how Descartes viewed the
world.

The collective goal was to find what Descartes labeled and envisioned as a
Mathesis Universialis. Or a sort of universal language that relies heavily on mathematics
to try to arrive at scientific truths and hopefully combine all these different areas of
study into one comprehensive one. See, there was thinking at the time that all of these
different areas that we're dedicating our thought to, all of these different natural
sciences physics, chemistry, biology and then other things like algebra, geometry, there
was a thinking that all of these things were needlessly fragmented. Maybe ALL of these
different areas had a cohesiveness that has eluded us until now. Maybe there was a
logic that applied to all of them. Maybe there was a single method we could apply to all
of these seemingly different areas of study that could lead to progress in all of them.
You know, by the time of Descartes, we had been working on geometry for quite some
time, but compared to geometry we were neanderthals when it came to algebra.
Descartes and others thought that maybe the universe was so well ordered that the
connections that we've made in a field like geometry, the relationships between
different advancements, maybe that would be compatible to other fields as well. Maybe
we could find an overall outline and then put some tissue paper over it and trace it out
for other fields as well.Yeah, sounds pretty straight forward doesn't it? Well, Descartes
thought he could do it. If someone told you they were going to try to undergo a task
like that in today's world, you would probably look at them like they were straining,
red-faced trying to push their car down the road with the E-brake on. Times have
changed! To even understand ONE of these fields you'd have to go to school for a
decade of your life, probably more! How are you going to A) learn enough about all of
these fields to be able to be considered an expert and B) actually find the similarities?
Well, back in the time of Descartes and this famous divide, we didn't know as much in
all of these fields. It was a perfectly reasonable ambition to think that a single man with
no life and an inferiority complex could find a universal approach to these things.This is
fascinating to me and if you love a good mystery, you have to be interested in this time
period. Nobody knew whether science was possible, how to get there or even what sort
of benefits it would bring to human life if we ever found it. But just the possibility that
it was out there sparked all of these different people we've been talking about to search
for it. It was like the Apollo Program for the advent of science. It was like JFK stood up
there and said I believe we can have a scientific method by the end of the decade, and
these were the people that blindly dedicated their life to a task that may have been
impossible. What sort of person does that take? What sort of person does it take to be a
visionary challenger of the status quo? To take an idea that may not even be possible
from their imagination and to not only execute it, but to change the course of human
history with it? I've been watching a lot of these Game changers things on Netflix about
people like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and it's really interesting to see the
common personality traits that these people have with Rene Descartes.So let's make
today's episode a little like one of those episodes on Netflix. The way it typically works
is you learn about the life and story of one of these Game changers and then you learn
how they actually changed the game, you learn a little about how they think and you
typically come away with a few nuggets of wisdom. So lets learn about Descartes' life
and then we can talk about how if he lived today his personality would make him a
good candidate to be one of these people like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg.Descartes
had one of the most meandering, oddly-employed lives I have ever read about. If you
were the hiring manager for a modern day company and looked at Descartes resume
and gave him an interview, by the end of the interview you might think he was the
WORST employee that has ever existed. If you asked him if he could wake up at 6am
and work the day shift, he would say no: he slept in until noon almost everyday of his
life without exception. If you asked him what his five year plan was and if he had the
ability to settle down, take one vacation a year and be a loyal servant of corporatism, he
would say no: he traveled almost constantly throughout his life and wouldn't think of
sitting still. But despite these personality traits that make him a horrible employee for
any modern company, if you were bad enough at hiring people to give him a shot he
would be the most brilliant thinker you have ever encountered.He was born on March
31, 1596 in France. He had three older siblings and his mother died very shortly after he
was born while trying to give birth to what would have been his younger brother. With
his mother gone, his father needed to step up and spend double time with all of his kids
to try to make up for it, but he had a job as a judge which required him to be absent for
many months at a time. Because of this, Descartes spent most of his childhood
completely alone. But that wasn't all! He also was notoriously sick as a youth. He talks
frequently about the predispositions he had to different ailments, and being left alone to
wallow in his thoughts about all of the constant health problems ended up turning him
into a severe hypochondriac throughout adulthood. After getting his education from
the Jesuit College Royale, the only thing he really learned from it all was how inaccurate
he thought it all was. He compared his education to the world of fiction, he talks about
how as a rational person it is difficult for him to read fiction when he sees all of the
apparent contradictions of the story and reality. But he saw the same contradictions
when being taught all of these CERTAINTIES in school. This supposedly led him to ask
the question, Can we know anything for certain? He didn't think he knew anything for
certain, and all of these teachers yelling at people at the Jesuit College seemed to be just
as confused as he was.His dad wanted him to follow in his footsteps, you know get a
real job in law, like him. After studying it for a few years he decided he didn't like it and
ran off to Paris. He basically sat around all day, learned about stuff and wrote treatises
on that stuff. This life seems like absolute paradise for a philosopher, but he didn't
know that he was a philosopher yet, so he got tired of that too. Too many people
polluting his thoughts, coming around doing terrible terrible things to him, like trying
to talk and hang out with him. So he moved away and lived in solitude. But then he got
tired of SOLITUDE, so he did the most logical next step imaginable, he signed up for
the army as a volunteer officer. Now you'd think, that when you're in the army that the
last thing you are going to be allowed to do is wake up at noon and live like a transient,
but apparently it wasn't a problem until one day when Descartes even got bored of the
army! But then he finally found it. He finally found something that he could be
passionate about and when he tells the story you can't help but think of that famous
scene from the movie Good Will Hunting when the professor posts the unsolvable math
equation on the wall and then Matt Damon solves it when he's taking a break from
scrubbing the toilets of the university. One day Descartes was wandering down the
road and came across a posting on the wall that showed a very difficult to solve math
problem and challenged anyone and everyone to try to solve it. But there was one
problem. Descartes was in Holland at the time and he didn't speak any Dutch, so he
didn't know exactly what the instructions were for solving the problem. So he turns to
his right and asks the guy next to him to translate it for him, the guy says "I'm only
going to translate it for you if you try to solve it.", and then the next day Descartes
shows up at the guy's house with the problem perfectly solved. This is the first time
Descartes spoke to Isaac Beeckman. Beeckman was the friend and mentor that got
Descartes focused. He was so turned off from mathematical pursuits from his time in
school that he forgot how good he was at it. He forgot how much he loved it. Beeckman
helped him rekindle this love.The next big event in Descartes life may have been
facilitated by the weather. There was a historically cold winter one year where he was
living. So cold, that he claims he couldn't take it anymore and decided to live in a stove.
Some people think he was joking when he said "stove", some people think he was
speaking figuratively and just meant a really warm, heated room; but even if he spent
his days curled up inside of a stove nothing could be more bizarre than what happened
to him during this cold, desolate winter.Descartes says that one of these days as he was
sitting inside of his stove thinking about stuff, he had a vision. There are a lot of
different interpretations of exactly what he saw or what happened, but what seems to
be clear is that he saw something that made him certain that the universe was ordered
in such a way that some undiscovered mathematical system could be used to fully
understand it. Then, that very same night as he drifted off into his 12 hours of sleep, he
had a series of vivid dreams that underscored everything that he had a vision of while
sitting in the stove. In the first dream he was walking down the street trying to get to
his church, but there was a MONSTROUS wind pushing him back. He was fighting
against it as hard as he could, he looked like a small market weatherman trying to make
a name for himself, going out standing in the middle of a hurricane being hurled
around by the wind. Then somebody randomly says to him that somebody wants to
give him a melon. In the second dream he is sitting in a room that is pitch black and a
terrified and then a giant crashing sound happens and sparks start flying all around the
room. The last dream is up for debate. Some people don't even think he had a third
dream, but the important part is after this series of visions that he had, his view of the
universe and his place within it was changed forever. This is the moment when he
leveled up from transient genius to effective visionary genius.This is what fascinates me
the most about Descartes and people like Descartes. I am absolutely convinced that
Descartes is the Steve Jobs of his generation. If nothing else, he definitely represents this
extraordinary type of person that is needed to progress the human species. Descartes
was a sickly child and a hypochondriac as an adult. He could've accepted that he was a
sick person and just spent his life trying to be as healthy as possible. Descartes didn't
need to do any of what he did, so why did he? There are two very distinct approaches
to adversity in life that probably are opposite ends of a giant spectrum and how many
of each of these types of people exist really depends on your individual world view. On
one end of the spectrum you have a type of person, we've all met somebody like this
before, it is the type of person who approaches life as a tourist. Life is about enjoying
yourself as much as possible. When this guy's walking down the path of his life and
there is a fork in the road and a boulder drops in front of him and is blocking the path
he wants to go down, well it's not immediately enjoyable to exert yourself to climb over
the boulder. It's not fun to try to find a solution to the problem, so this guy meets
adversity with resistance. In the metaphor he kind of shrugs his shoulders and walks
down the other path saying to everyone, "Well, this obstacle was in my way, so I had to
go down this path." This guy is not a bad person, but he does live his life circumventing
adversity and as a victim of circumstance. Things HAPPEN to this guy, he doesn't make
things happen.On the other end of the spectrum there's this person like Descartes or
Steve Jobs. It's this type of person that when that boulder drops down in front of them
and is blocking their path, they don't see it as an annoying obstacle. They see it as an
opportunity for growth. This is the type of person that embraces adversity. This is the
type of person that can visualize a future where that boulder no longer exists, where
future people walking down the path can just walk by where this giant boulder used to
sit and these people find a way to make it happen. Keep in mind, Descartes didn't need
to adopt this approach to adversity. Like we talked about last time, the main problem
that he faced, the main problem that many thinkers faced during his time, was
uncertainty. Was knowledge even possible? What is science? Let's say we can find a
method to understand the natural world, what benefits are we really going to gain from
all that? To us in modern times, it's very easy to look back and wonder how anyone
could doubt the possibility of science and the ability of science to drastically improve
the lives of human beings everywhere but it wasn't clear back then. Just how Steve Jobs
visualized a world where a functional, practical, all-in-one device existed that most
people could afford; Descartes visualized a world where a functional, practical, all-in-
one mathematical system existed that could help up understand the world.Let's not just
gloss over that word "system". This is a big part of who Descartes was. I think by
talking about the systematic way Descartes approaches thought in general, we can learn
something about ourselves. Systematic thinking is a hallmark of this type of effective
person who embraces adversity and removes these obstacles from their path. You
know, we talked in the episode covering Aristotelean Ethics about achieving a
"mastery" of life. Whenever you master any sort of activity, really what you are doing is
developing a substantive reason for WHY you are doing each and every individual
thing you do. Even something as simple as cooking eggs I was doing horrendously bad.
I used to just crack the eggs into a pan, keep the heat low, when it turns white you
scramble it up, put a little seasoning on it and you're good to go. But after watching
Gordon Ramsey cook eggs, after listening to a true master talk about all of the different
considerations he makes and contingency plans I realized that I hadn't the faintest idea
how to make eggs properly. I want everybody to think right now of the thing that you
are the best at. If somebody compiled a world rankings for every activity in the world,
which activity would you be ranked the highest in? Now think back to the first time
you ever did it. You were probably doing it the same way I was cooking eggs. But
through hundreds of hours of practice, conducting little personal experiments, creating
decision trees in your mind, developing contingency plans, eventually by doing all of
these things you developed a system for doing it.Descartes was essentially trying to
create a system for the universe. The catalyst that he thought would make that possible
was mathematics. This guy was not just wandering throughout life complaining about
all of the bad things that happened to him. He grabbed the helm of the ship and
navigated the waters. You can't help but notice when you read him talk about the way
he used to go about his everyday life that he applied this systematic approach to almost
every object of his thought. In fact, late in his life he worked on a philosophical treatise
that he never actually finished that was titled Rules for the Direction of the Mind. He
lays out 12 rules that we should use to ensure that we are thinking about things in an
appropriate way for science or philosophy, and he does a fine job. But what he also
does is give us a realistic and systematic way of approaching any adversity we face in
our lives...ANY BOULDER that is blocking our path. The hardest part of handling
adversity in our personal lives is uncertainty. Very similar to the uncertainty Descartes
dedicated his life to destroying. Descartes understood that committing to a solution and
moving forward with it would be much easier if we could identify with certainty what
the problem actually was. Once we knew what the problem was, if we used a
systematic approach and understood how the problem related to everything else in our
life, we would be in a much better place to solve it.He talks about this level of efficiency
throughout most of his works, and really it was what he was all about. Developing
certainty.He says:"Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary
to resolve it."Rule nine in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind says:"We ought to give
the whole of our attention to the most insignificant and most easily mastered facts, and
remain a long time in contemplation of them until we are accustomed to behold the
truth clearly and distinctly."What he's saying is that when you have a problem, be it
scientific, philosophical or in your everyday life, if you're having trouble trying to solve
it, break it down into the smallest pieces you possibly can and then behold the truth.
The thinking is, these smaller pieces are much less complex, much easier for our minds
to manage, so with less moving parts involved there is less opportunity for error. Much
more opportunity for us to see truth clearly and distinctly.Rule number three of his
Rules for the Direction of the Mind is:"As regards any subject we propose to investigate,
we must inquire not what other people have thought, or what we ourselves conjecture,
but what we can clearly and manifestly perceive by intuition or deduce with certainty.
For there is no other way of acquiring knowledge."On that same note he said:"So blind
is the curiosity by which mortals are possessed, that they often conduct their minds
along unexplored routes, having no reason to hope for success, but merely being willing
to risk the experiment of finding whether the truth they seek lies there."What he's
warning against is the tendency for humans to have a preconceived idea in their head of
what they want the truth to be and then allowing that preconceived notion to shade the
way that they view reality or the way they interpret the results of experiments. This is
something we see ALL THE TIME in modern "science". (and I put that in quotation
marks because it is not science). You have people that conduct surveys or scientific
experiments, and before they even take the first sample they already have in their
minds what they want the outcome of the experiment to be. So either because of their
own human biases or because they are paid to, they look for every possible thing to
reinforce what they WANT the outcome to be. Just watch any presidential debate in the
last few election cycles and you'll have both people citing studies and surveys that came
to conclusions that were DIAMETRIC opposites of each other. So there is definitely a
scientific application for this rule, but it also applies to us in our personal lives. For
example, let's say that you have a strong suspicion that your wife is cheating on you.
You watch her sneak out of bed late at night and have a "mysterious" phone call. You
walk in the room she hangs up the phone quickly. You notice she gets needlessly
dressed up one morning and then you call her work at lunch time and left work early so
you race home to catch her in the act and you storm in through the front door and she's
setting up a surprise party for you.Let's not conduct experiments or gather evidence
with too much confidence about what the outcome is going to be. It's fine to have a
hypothesis, but at a certain point you may be misreading what is actually happening.
It's hard sometimes because we all think that the experiments that we've conducted up
until this point in our lives is the greatest collection of scientific research ever
undertaken. We all think we are looking at the world through a more accurate lens than
everyone else around us, even if we acknowledge that we make more mistakes that
others.Descartes said:"Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world,
for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to
satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already
have."This quote is hilarious to me, and absolutely true. People ask for a LOT of stuff.
They tell other people about all kinds of stuff that they're lacking that they need, but
one thing you never hear even the lowliest street beggar ask for is common sense. He
thinks he's got it all figured out. There's a great quote by Abraham Lincoln: Common
sense is the collection of prejudices we acquire from birth until the age of 18.Anyway,
next episode we are going to be talking about Descartes' proof of God's existence. This
is one of the most widely studied proofs and naturally one of the most commented on.
Get ready for a spirited debate between Descartes and some of the greatest minds who
ever lived. I'll talk to you guys next time.