Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
Lecture 70: Reason, the Brain, and the Immateriality of the Soul

Transcript
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In the case of the touching, do they have one boundary? No, no. But their limits are what? Together. Okay? Okay? In the case of the next, in order to be next, do you have to be touching? No. No. No. And, you know, the stock example is always that of houses, right? My next-door neighbor, right? Mm-hmm. Okay? But my house is not, doesn't share any wall with the house next door. Like the wall in, you might have a wall in the house in a way that's shared by two rooms, right? You see? And, you know, in Quebec, you know, you have these houses. In Europe, too, I suppose, but Quebec, I'm very confident with it. But the houses seem to be, what, right together. I don't know whether they really share a wall or the two walls are touching. But where I live, in Shrewsbury, there, the houses are not, what, touching even, right? But you would speak of the next house, right? Mm-hmm. Okay? But the next house, in your house, between them, there is no what? Whatever. Yeah. Yeah. And are thoughts more alike, you know, in the strict sense, like the continuous and the touching, or they're more like the next? If you have a syllogism here, like every mother is a woman, huh? No man is a woman. Is there a next thought that comes to mind? Huh? Yeah, put two and two together, as we say, the next thought is going to be, no man is a, what? Mother. Mother, yeah. Yeah. But are these thoughts touching each other? They have a boundary, right? Mm-hmm. Do they touch at a point, or a line, or a surface? And maybe if they're not touching, or continuous, maybe the thoughts are not really, what, in a body. Well, because a body is something that seems as continuous, huh? And, of course, even the syllogisms and even the definitions of continuous things don't seem to be continuous. So, like, you take the definition of square as an equilateral and right-angled quadrilateral. Does the genus there quadrilateral and the differences equilateral and right-angled? Do they meet a common boundary at a point, a line? No. So, the definition seems to be not continuous, right? And yet, it's a definition making known a continuous thing. And this is a sign, therefore, that our reason, by definition, universal reason, right, is knowing a continuous thing in a way that is not continuous. And it's knowing it most perfectly in the form of a definition, right? And now you say, well, why should reason know a continuous thing in a non-continuous way? Is that because of the thing being known? No, the thing being known, in this case, is continuous, right? So, that doesn't explain why reason knows a continuous thing in an uncontinuous way, does it? The thing known? No. But, therefore, it must be due to the knower, right? But the knower itself is not a, what, continuous thing. So, whatever is received, as they say, is received in the receiver, according to the condition of the receiver. It's good to know that as a teacher, you know, you give a lecture to 30 students, whatever it is, you know, and then you give them an exam or something, right, and they've all heard the same thing, you know, but some have received more and some have received it in a mixed-up way, you know. It's amazing how they do twist things, you know, how their imagination is a jumble, you know. That's why you have to pray for the angels to straighten our images, right, to look in their images. That's part of what they do for us, according to Thomas, and that's why I put that in that little prayer. But, so, when a continuous thing is received fully into my reason, in the form of a definition, it's received in an uncontinuous way, right? And so, if what is received is received according to the condition of the receiver, and you're receiving a continuous thing, right, in an uncontinuous way, then your reason is not a continuous thing. And if a body is something continuous, then you can syllogize there in the second figure, right, that reason is not a, what, a body, right, huh? Okay. Okay. But sometimes, you know, someone says, well, yeah, but a blow in the brain interferes with what? Thinking, right? The alcohol going to the brain. Another substance says, interferes with thinking, right? So, isn't then the brain the organ of thought? Necessarily. At least, you need the brain to think. It shows some connection between the brain and thinking, right, huh? But to show that the argument there is not necessarily so, that because a blow in the brain, let's say, interferes with thinking, therefore the brain's organ of thought, right? Like a blow in the eye interferes with seeing, right? In fact, if I see you guys double, if I start pushing this, if I push it too much, I wouldn't see you at all. So it seems that the eye is the organ, or something is the organ for sight, right, huh? Okay. But, um, you have an example I always take for this? What? Yeah. So suppose you and I were in a room with no windows, right? And the only light was a little light bulb in the center of the room, and the light bulb was on, right? We could see each other, right? And then, wha, I whacked the light bulb, and it refers to my seeing you, doesn't it? Okay? Therefore the light bulb is, what, the organ of sight, right? No. See? So, there's two ways interfering with my seeing you, right? What's the difference between these two ways, huh? If you leave the room right now, huh, you're going to interfere with my seeing you, right? Not because my organ has been hurt, but it's on the sight of the object, right? See? And the light bulb there, I mean, light has something to do with the object of sight, huh? So when you say that a blow in the brain interferes with thinking, is it interfering with the organ, right? Or with the object in some way, right? And in, ah, the fact that it doesn't interfere with it doesn't tell you which it is, does it? Hmm. Now, if by separate argument, like the one I was giving you from the continuous, right, you can prove that the reason is not a body, then the brain cannot be the organ of universal thought, therefore it must somehow be on the side of the, what, object, right? And when Aristotle was studying the proper object of our reason, he says it's the what it is of something you can sense or imagine, right? And of course, the what it is of something sensed or imagined, like what is a glass or what is a man or what is a triangle or what is a square, is something universal, right? Um, and he, ah, makes a comparison there, right? And he says, um, just as the object of my eye is the color of something out there, right? So the object of my reason is that what it is of something I sensed or imagined, huh? Okay? And so if you interfere with the external... object, right? Then, I'm not going to see the color of you if you take away you, right? Or take away the light, huh? Okay? And so if you take away the image, right? Then our reason, at least we're in the body, huh? Doesn't understand that, right? I have to picture, you might say, a triangle to think about what a triangle is. Okay? But nevertheless, by thinking about what a triangle is, is not in the image, is it? Any more than I seeing the color of your clothes there is in your clothes, right? That's on the side of the object, not on the side of the power that is seeing, right? Seeing is here, right? Okay? So Aristotle understands what the object of reason is. He can see why we don't think without an image, right? Okay? And, you know, in Bweth is what he's talking about there in the Dei Tritati, how do we know God, right? In his divine nature. Well, there's no image of God in his divine nature, right? And so the objection, you know, says we can't think then about him because there's no image of him, right? But that's why we think of God, what? Negatively, right? He's incorporeal, he's not a body, right? He's simple, meaning he has no parts, no composition, right? He's the unmoved mover, right? So, and even if you think about the angels, right, to say they're the immaterial substance. The philosophers usually call them a separated substance, right? But meaning separated from matter. So, in thinking negatively, by way of negation, you have an image, right? If I think that God is not a body, right? I have an image of a body, but I'm negating it and talking about God and saying he's not a body, right? Yeah. Reasoning. What would be? The reasoning is an instrument. Well, I say it's basically on the side of the object, right? Okay. But you have to understand, you know, it partly through that analogy that I was giving you, right? See? I can see the black of your clothes, right? Okay. And the black of your clothes is in your clothing, right? Okay. But my seeing the black of your clothing, right? That seeing is not in your clothing, is it? It's in my eye, in my power of seeing, right? Well, as the exterior thing is to the eye, right? Whose color is being seen or whose sound or whose smell or taste, right? Is being sensed, right? So is the, what, thing sensed or imagined, right? In a way to the reason, because the reason is understanding the what it is of something, what, sensed or imagined, huh? Just as the eye is seeing the color of something out there. So just as I don't see the color of something out there without that thing being there, right? So I don't understand that what it is of something imagined without imagining something, okay? But by the understanding of what it is, in the form of a definition, as we do most perfectly, of something imagined, that understanding and that definition are not in the body, see? Just as my eye and my seeing are not in your, what? Yeah, the thing out there, whose color I'm seeing. See? So it's very subtle, right? So see, many people, I remember having a strep for a student in class, you know, years ago teaching the three books about the soul, and he was convinced that the brains are in a thought, but everybody says that, kind of, you know? I mean, you pick up the news magazine, and they have an article on the brain, and they'll talk about the brain, and that's where you think, you know? I mean, it's a common thing, right? And so I was giving him, you know, the argument that, you know, a blow in the eye interferes with seeing, therefore the eye is the organ of sight. A blow in the brain interferes with thinking, therefore the brain is kind of stating his argument for him, right? He's, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I gave him this light bulb thing, right? And you realize, right, that that's not the only way, right? You can, what? Interfere with, what? A powers act, right, huh? Okay? Okay. Now notice, if you put that down, you know, kind of logically in a sense, you could say that if the brain is the organ of thought, then a blow on the brain interferes with thought, okay? That seems to make sense, doesn't it, huh? Okay? Now notice, in if-then statements, you're not saying that something is in fact so, right? Or that something is not in fact so, you're merely saying, if this is so, that is so, right? Just like if the eye is the organ of the sight, right? Then a blow on the eye would interfere with what? Seeing, right? Okay? Now, but a blow on the brain does interfere with thought, okay? Therefore, the brain is the organ of thought. Now, is that a good syllogism? It's a good argument. See, I think most people hearing that say, oh yeah, that makes sense. Is that a good one? No. What's wrong with that? It's the same type that scientists come up with all the time with their theories. Okay. Okay. You're arguing the for here, right? If A is so, then B is so, and from the what? Affirmation of the consequent, right? Okay? And we saw when we studied logic that doesn't follow necessarily that what? A is so, right? Okay? And we can show that, isn't always the case, but at least two kinds of examples, right? When A is something, for example, less universal than B, right? If I am a dog, then I am an animal, right? I am an animal. Well, if I prove, right? Therefore, if I am a dog, right? See? Or when you have an effect that could follow for more than one cause, right? You know, my standard example of classes of Verquist dropped dead last night, he will be absent from class, right? He's absent from class, therefore he dropped dead. Well, my absence from class could have many clauses, right? The student can see that, right? So even though being absent from class is a true consequence, let's say I'm a dog being dead last night, you can't infer from my being absent in class that that is, in fact, the cause of my doing that, right? They tell them it's wishful thinking. But it's not logical thinking. You've got to get to be logical thinking, you know, not wishful thinking. I know it's not that the matter here, you know, and it's still just we can distinguish between the matter and the form, right? And you talk about the form, you're asking, does the conclusion follow what? Necessarily, right? See? You talk about the matter, you're asking, are the premises, right? True or false, or are they necessary or powerful and so on, right? Okay? So here you can say that the form is, what, defective, right? Even if the matter is okay, you don't have to embody to examine the matter. But the point is, if the matter is good, right, then the student is going to be apt to think, right? Then follow some, okay? Now, if you give a student something like this, if a man... I should take it, that's going to be the form, I don't believe that, okay. Now, if you want to turn this around, and argue this way, right? Turn around and say, if a glow on the brain interferes with thinking, then the brain is the organ, but, same sequence here, but a glow on the brain does interfere with thought or with thinking, okay? Now, is anything thought necessary for those two premises? If a glow on the brain interferes with thinking, then the brain is the organ of thought. But a glow on the brain does interfere with thought or thinking, you see, therefore the brain is the organ of thought. What are you syllogizing in this form here? You're saying, if a is so, then b is so, a is so, does it follow then that b is so? Here, the form is good, right? Now, is the matter good, right? Well, we admitted that a glow on the brain interferes with thought, right? Both of these, right? But, is this if-then statement necessarily true? Is the only way to interfere, even with a powers act, a power that has an organ, right? Is the only way to interfere with it, to what? Interferer with the organ. If I step around the corner here, it would interfere with your seeing, right? It would interfere with your eye, if-then statement, right? So, either the form is good, but the matter is not good, in the if-then statement, right? Or else the, what? The matter is good, but the form is no good. Okay? Not as bad as the Moresis there were, that the matter is not good, and the form is not good either. Then you're really in trouble, right? That either one of the things would be great. You see what I mean? So, sometimes, you know, I scout out for students, you know, I'll put both these on the board, right? And you say, well, there's a defect in both of these speeches, huh? But in the one case, it's a defect in the form, in the other case, there's a defect in the matter. And you have to avoid both of those, huh? Just like in calculating, huh? When you add, subtract, multiply, or divide, right? If you have a wrong number, then the result is not going to be good, right? Or if you have the right number that you didn't add correctly, either one would have a problem. Same with statements, huh? If you don't add up to anything, you're after what you didn't add up to. Notice how we borrowed the words from calculating, like, add up, right? So what does that add up to, right? How do you figure that? The figure first meant, you know, calculating, right? And I've always told the students, you know, put two and two together, right? It's a little harder to put two together, right? But it shows that calculating, it seems to me, are more known to us, huh? Than defining and reasoning, I borrowed some of that. In fact, the Greek word syllogism, you know, comes to the calculator, huh? In that sense, huh? I reckon that's so. Can Hiboli talk like that? Because Aristotle talks like Hiboli, right? So, we'll come back to this when you go to the first and the third book on the soul. But you don't understand the continuous well, right? You can't understand, you know, well, all the reasons we have for thinking that reason is not a, what, body, right? Okay. And it's through seeing that reason is not a body, through seeing that our soul has some power that is not in the body, that it does something not in the body, that you realize that the existence of the soul is not entirely, what, immersed in the body. It's not tied to the body. If the soul had existence only in the body, right? It would only do what it does only in the body, huh? You know, when Descartes says, you know, I think, therefore I am, right? Okay. Well, notice, huh? You have to be before you can do something, right? Okay. And, but notice, you're going from his doing something to his being, in this case, right? It makes sense, doesn't it? In the second sense of before, right? My being is before my doing. I can be without doing something, but I still can't do something without being, huh? You know, I still remarks in the ninth book of wisdom how people will say about something that doesn't exist that they wanted, or they think about something that doesn't exist, right? But they don't say that what doesn't exist moves around, do they? That's the first meaning kind of reality, that things move, right, huh? But the fact that they move, they do something in a way, right, makes it clear to us that they are, right, huh? Okay. But notice, in the discourse of reason, the third sense of before, we might go from something doing something to its being, right? But in the second sense of before, in being, being is before what? Doing, right? The second sense of before was in being, right? One can be without two, but two cannot be without one, right? Okay. I can be without doing something, but I can't do something without being, right? So if I'm doing something, I must be, right? Okay, but reason in a sense is going backwards, right? As far as we don't think. So the being, the existence of the soul is less known to us than what the soul does, huh? And so we have to reason backwards, as Chacon says, right? Okay. But it's because, huh, you have to be before you can do something, that if you have being or existence only in the body, right? Or as Thomas, you know, as we're expressing that, if your being or existence was immersed in the body, right? Like something that's underwater, it's got a nice image here, right? If your being or existence was only in the body, then what you do would only be in the body and through the body, you see? But then when you find out that understanding... Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The universal, understanding what a triangle is, right, understanding what a square is, is not in a body, that the definition itself is not in a body, and one way you see that is basically the definition is not continuous, right? Then you realize that not everything our soul does is in our body, okay? And therefore, since you must be before you can do something, right, the soul's being or existence is not entirely, what, in the body, right, see? It has an existence, in other words, that the body doesn't fully, what, share in, okay? But you have to reason, as it were, backwards, as far as reality is concerned, from the fact that it does something, understanding the universal, not in the body. Interesting, and Bob O'Gro was telling me about, you know, some of the, I don't know, he's one of the Canadian brain people, you know, on the curse. One thing they do is try to map the brain, right? Uh-huh. And they stimulate with a wire or something or some of the different parts of the brain, and then they say, you know, what are you experiencing now, right? Saying, you know, I'm experiencing anger, you know, or chocolate or something, you know, or something, you know, and so they start to, you know, map the brain, see, this way, trying to, you know, see what different areas of the brain, you know, it's very hard to do. I mean, you know, they always seem to be unable to really pinpoint these things. Now, obviously, if you stimulate a part of the brain and you have an image of a triangle, right, you might start thinking about a triangle, right? Okay. So, it gives you the impression that you're thinking about a triangle, therefore, in that part of the brain, right? But you're actually, what, imagining a triangle, right, in that part of the brain, huh? See, but that's not actually thinking there, see, but because they're so closely tied, right, and it seems like, oh, yeah, when I stimulated that part of the brain, I thought about what a triangle is, right? Okay. But what he could never find was a place of the brain he stimulated where the guy says, I just made a choice. So, he concluded that the will is not, what, in the brain, right? And it's supposed to be something immaterial, right? Okay. Of course, he wouldn't have a will unless he had a reason, right? But it's kind of interesting, just that kind of exterior way of approaching these things, huh? That they come to the conclusion that the will is immaterial before they see that the reason is immaterial. Sort of interesting, huh? Well, by not just understanding the universal, but understanding anything is a process that's really immaterial, right? So, to understand something, that's an immaterial activity. So, we see that the senses and the imagination know only the singular, right? Correct. And so you don't really see the immateriality of the reason clearly until you see that it knows the universal. Then you see its immaterial character. But a reason doesn't really know the singular, universal reason doesn't know the singular directly, right? It has to come back to the image, huh? To know it, huh? You never stop. Let's think about that as kind of a, you know, coming back to the origin of its own thinking, right? Going back to the image. But it doesn't know it as a word directly. But the senses and the imagination know directly the singular, huh? But by saying, okay, understanding the universal, right, that's immaterial. And since it's immaterial, therefore, it can't be in the body. Therefore, it's taking place outside the body. Therefore, it shows that our understanding, at least in the sense of the universal, there's something separate from the body there. Yeah. Then, I guess it can exist separate from the body. Or since it can, since it acts separate from the body. Yeah, yeah. The point is that you're not understanding universal in the body, right? Mm-hmm. Okay. But how do we know that, see? Well, one way will be by seeing that the definition is not continuous, right? Mm-hmm. There are other ways of seeing that, too, to see that the, that you have to understand what, um, is necessary to have many individuals, right, of the same universal kind, huh? You know, how can I have, how can I have, you know, two circles, right? Exactly the same size, right? Okay. Well, like I was mentioning on the first theorem of a nucleic, right, huh? You make two circles, right? That's your thing. But one circle is here, and the other circle is there, right? But that involves part outside of what? Part, right? Mm-hmm. And it actually involves, actually, the continuous, huh? And it's kind of, that's one aspect of continuous, huh? You say the continuous is that who's approximated at a common boundary, right? Like in, say, the circle there, the two semicircles, right? Or, like in the case of a parallelogram, we're always, you know, pointing out that the diagonal divides into equal parts and so on, right? Mm-hmm. But you say they have a common boundary, you mean they're both kind of what? Outside of that, right? They're outside of each other, I should say, right? Mm-hmm. If this is a boundary there, it's the end of this that's the end of the beginning of that, well, then this part is outside of that part, right? Mm-hmm. See? But you're really starting to think, again, the continuous, we think of part outside of part, then. So God or an angel or even the soul that's separate from the body, right, the soul in itself doesn't have part outside of part, then. It's not a continuous, so. So there's something about knowing the singular, right, and what's involved in that part outside of part, and that sort of thing, the continuous, right? So that you don't see that from the understanding that it knows the singular in some way, you wouldn't know that it's immaterial from that so much. And that's why the senses and the imagination, you know, the singular directly, right? But the universal reason separates what's common to the mini-singulars, right? And so it's leaving aside what individualizes this circle as opposed to that circle. The fact that one is here and the other is there. But it's abstracting from that continuous character, right? Although it's understanding what it is in a general way, right? Okay. So we'll come back there when we talk about the soul. I'm just kind of putting your appetite a bit here, right? To show the importance of this, ultimately for understanding, right, negatively, as you have to, the immateriality of our soul, but, you know, the immateriality of the angels or of God himself, right? All of all this, yeah. Well, if this is true about understanding the universal, in that form, it's understanding in an immaterial way, does that mean then there's a type of understanding that takes place within us that is immaterial? I mean, evidently... No, I don't want to call that understanding. I want to call that sensing of some sort, yeah. So if I were just to think of a particular circle in my mind right now, you know, basically, I can, you know, form an image of it. Yeah, that's in your imagination, yeah. So that's not understanding. No, no, no, no. You see, but people generally tend to confuse what we would call the inward senses, like the imagination there, with reason, right? When you get to the third book of the soul, when Aristotle starts to go, he talks about the senses in the second book. But in the third book, he starts to approach reason, right? That's where the third book begins, where it does. But he's going from the outward senses to the inward senses, and then he wants to, what? Distinguish reason from not only the senses, which is fairly obvious, but they separate reason from the imagination. Now, you read these English philosophers, like John Locke and so on, or just listen to people in general, and they use the word idea, right? You know? And I get an idea. And idea is kind of diffusing thought and image, right?