Windex Philosophy and the "Tyranny of Or"


What do the lightbulb in your garage and your brain have in common? They both operate on about 60 watts of power. This is a problem for two reasons: first, your garage tends to be under-lit, and second, your brain doesn't have enough processing power to deal with today's environment. The human brain blueprint was built 40,000 years ago and hasn't had any serious upgrades since. (Steve Jobs would be rolling over in his grave, if he hadn't been cremated.)

Rene Descartes, 17th century mathematician and father of western philosophy (apparently nobody remembers the mother; let's just call her Jane Doe), focused on a different problem: the mind-body one. In his discourse Passions of the Soul and The Description of the Human Body, he suggests that the body is like a machine, built of material properties, and the mind consists of non-corporeal properties. So how then do these two entities interact, you ask? Descartes asked that, too. His solution was the brain's pineal gland.

Peering into the skull through the lens of 17th century science, Descartes noticed that while most parts of the brain had a symmetrical twin on the other side, this tiny pinecone-shaped gland sat alone in the middle, at a prime spot to link up the brain with the body. He called it "the principal seat of the soul", a bridge linking the land of the mental with the land of the physical. The pineal gland for Descartes was like Windex, a really nice all-purpose product that works on just about anything.

In the end, it was nothing more than a clever slight of hand, failing to truly explain anything. As a philosophical argument, it had some holes, as Spinoza could've told you. And now that we're starting to learn more about the brain, we see that the relationship between your grey matter and the rest of you is far more complicated, and more interesting.

So much for a handy all-purpose theory. Maybe we shouldn't be surprised, though. After all, Windex doesn't really work too well on warts.

Neuroscientists, on the other hand, argue that the mind is what the body does. Your thinking and actions are the heavy lifting done by the billions of neural pathways that have been triggered in your brain. What appears to be some ethereal process is those electrical/chemical connections grinding away in the bunker of your skull. Change the electrical pathway, and you change your thinking. Change the chemicals, and you change your personality.

The problem with the mind-body problem is right there in the name. By assuming that the brain and the body were separate countries, Descartes doomed himself to a faulty understanding. It's all in the framing of the question. It's the same thing with the old "Are you still beating your wife?" line. No matter how you answer it, you either indict yourself as a former or current wife beater––a.k.a. the "tyranny of or."

Is President Obama a post-colonial communist warrior with the nefarious agenda of destroying mom and apple pie or is Mitt Romney really Old Man Potter who won't be satisfied until every child is driven into a Dickensian poorhouse (a poorhouse that will receive no funds from the US government)?

Framing causes a lot of problems. Maybe it's time to move beyond the two party system that guarantees a pitched battle between the left and right. Maybe it's time to replace the old bulb in your garage with something to better illuminate the dusty lawn mower in the corner.  And maybe it's finally time for our collection of caveman brains to ignore our pineal glands, throw aside the Windex, and walk out of the cave into the light.

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