Tip for Men and Women #42: You're Not Gettin' Laid 'Cause You Read Too Much Descartes!

Here's a mystery I've been grappling with lately, both with other bloggers and with people in my actual life: why is it that people who are resistant to the evolutionary biological approach that I take to love, dating, and sex seem never to be able to base their Resistance on anything more robust or evidential than their own phaenomenal experience? Case in point, see blogalina's responses to my comments in ***DATE (S) EXPECTATIONS***; no offence intended to her, but this exemplifies the kind of uninformed and uninquisitive Resistance I've been encountering.

I think what is going on is nothing more remarkable than an unwillingness to give up or to otherwise question one's own folk psychological/biological understanding of the world. So, in the area of love/sex, you're resistant to embrace the idea that your genes have programmed you to act in certain ways because the idea that you CHOOSE to do these things is very closely held.

That's your folk psychology at work: when you see somebody that you like, you choose to pursue them or not. You choose when and why to date or kiss or fuck them, to (or not to) cheat on them, to forgive (or not to forgive) their cheating, to marry (or not marry) them, to have (or not have) kids (and when, why, how many), and so on.

Why? Well, because who would have better access to your emotions, desires, motivations, etc. than you, viz. the person who actually experiences them. You experience love/sex, and that's all the data you need; so, why would you need to listen to these biologists who couldn't score in a million years because they're cooped up in the lab studying monkeys and sperm all day long? You don't need to, so you don't listen.

Sound about right?

That's essentially an expression of the Cartesian Principle, which, roughly speaking, states that a thinking being can, via introspection, gain direct access to her mental states. Basically, introspection is the best (and only) way to access one's thoughts without the indirect, mediated, data-tainting intervention of outside observation. This perhaps seems a very intuitive way of thinking; unfortunately, it's a way of thinking that has been THOROUGHLY and univocally discredited throughout both the sciences and the humanities.*

Here's my point: you can disagree with the conclusions (though not the data) of the science, because like all science, it's just theory. However, disagreement should be principled, which means based on more than just your bare intuitions. Otherwise it's just not interesting. But that's just me...

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*Quoting from Wikipedia's Entry on the Mind-Body Problem (emphasis mine):

Interactionist dualism, or simply interactionism, is the particular form of dualism first espoused by Descartes in the Meditations. . . . It is the view that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, causally interact with physical states.

Descartes' famous argument for this position can be summarized as follows: Seth has a clear and distinct idea of his mind as a thinking thing which has no spatial extension . . . . He also has a clear and distinct idea of his body as something that is spatially extended, subject to quantification and not able to think. It follows that mind and body are not identical because they have radically different properties.

At the same time, however, it is clear that Seth's mental states (desires, beliefs, etc.) have causal effects on his body and vice-versa: A child touches a hot stove (physical event) which causes pain (mental event) and makes him yell (physical event), this in turn provokes a sense of fear and protectiveness in the mother (mental event), and so on.

Descartes' argument crucially depends on the premise that what Seth believes to be "clear and distinct" ideas in his mind are necessarily true. Many contemporary philosophers doubt this. For example, Joseph Agassi believes that several scientific discoveries made since the early 20th century have undermined the idea of privileged access to one's own ideas. Freud has shown that a psychologically-trained observer can understand a person's unconscious motivations better than she does. Duhem has shown that a philosopher of science can know a person's methods of discovery better than he does, while Malinowski has shown that an anthropologist can know a person's customs and habits better than he does. He also asserts that modern psychological experiments that cause people to see things that are not there provide grounds for rejecting Descartes' argument, because scientists can describe a person's perceptions better than he can.