Stop Putting Descartes before the Horse

Quick! Think of a horse!

No cheating. First thought only. Think of a horse. Got it?

Okay, raise your hand if you thought of any of the following points: “A horse is a large, domesticated mammal with hooves. For thousands of years, people have used them for transportation, work, and sport. They are herbivores that primarily eat grass and hay, and are known for their speed, strength, and their long-standing partnership with humans.”

No? No takers? I mean, this is copied straight off of Google Gemini Pro v2.5, a large language model AI when I asked it to do the same thing.

Okay, who just pictured a horse like at the picture of this blog article?

If so, then you’ve just demonstrated phenomenologists’ main counterargument against mind-body dualism ala Rene Descartes. For when Descartes wrote “I think, therefore I am,” he was claiming (rather grandiosely) that he can access a space of pure, unbiased reason. Using his method of doubting everything that could be slightly fake, he can break down all of nature down into small, pure bits of reason, all without bias. The thing is, he did not doubt the one thing that he ought to have doubted: the “ego” in “cogito, ergo sum” (It’s Latin. They omit the pronoun.)

I say that because based on one’s experiences and one’s bodily makeup (i.e. how everyone’s organs are slightly different) each human has their own perception of reality. This is how we intuitively conjure up ideas like “horses” without resorting to starting with tiny aspects about horses and then building up to the AI definition of one.

As an example, recall the blue/black white/gold dress internet war from a decade ago. The protein makeup within one’s eyeballs changes one’s perception of something that is thought of as 100% reality-based and agreeable - the naming of a color. If that dress meme existed back in the 1800s, phenomenologists like Marice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl would use this example to explain how our consciousness arises not due to some thought process separated from the body but actually due to the synthesis of our body with a mental space. To achieve Descartes’ level of pure, unbiased logic, we would have to shed our memories and our body’s organs entirely.

In fact, Merleau-Ponty does illustrate this point using a rare medical case of people actually shedding parts of their body. He points out that people who have had limbs amputated feel “as if” their limbs were still attached. Even more distressing, they experience pain in an amputated limb as if it were present, something called “phantom limb pain.” They also tell of experiences where they try to reach out for objects with the lost limb. If we truly were beings of only rational thought, those types of experiences would not happen.

To be clear, the phenomenological idea that perception is our primary mode of experiencing the world is not to say one is always inaccurately perceiving reality. Plenty of times, one can call a spade a spade. The question is how do you know? How do you know for sure what you’re seeing is what someone else is seeing? The infamous dress is but a trifling example. Forget dresses, consider how one perceives the color of another’s skin. When one fully dons the mantle of Descartes’ arrogance and thinks to oneself, “Yeah, I’m thinking this person is _______,” the problem of inaccurate perception of the world starts to have real consequences. 

So quit horsing around, Dr. Ying, we’re not here for an ethics lecture. How is this related to mental health?

Well, second pop quiz. Think about anxiety. Quickly, just the first thing that comes up. Got it? What did you think about?

Given the earlier pop quiz, you may have been primed to consider the phenomenological experience of anxiety. However, I can imagine people answering along the lines of an LLM. Something along the lines of “anxiety is a sensation of fight or flight in the setting of perceived threat” or “a symptom of a disorder” or “fears and worries about some unseen danger.” In any case, I can imagine someone thinking of anxiety like an AI would, by describing it as Descartes would try to describe it in a generalized way: a definition that would be true for all cases.

Truth is, everyone’s experience of anxiety is different. While there are biological processes going on that fuels one’s experience of anxiety, the lived experience of how one handles anxiety, how one identifies anxiety in their head, how one hates or loves or ignores anxiety, how one wrings their hands or feels their feet start to sweat, how one starts to breathe funny, how one starts having disturbing images or thoughts - all of these things are individual to the person. And that gets lost in modern day conversations about subjective experience. We have forgotten as a society how to validate our experiences from a phenomenological perspective, and that is exactly why we are having a mental health crisis in Westernized societies.

A bit of ranting:

First consider what is prioritized in the world. With apps and social media looming in our minds, we end up keeping our attention off our bodily existence. Influencers, games, and memes are constantly drawing out awareness into a space that is intangible (save for a flick of a finger). Our scarcity-driven economy has no space to entertain bodily experiences. I'm not only alluding to sick leave - yes, it's common knowledge that people end up taking less sick leave in more capitalistic countries like the US due to loss of earning potential. I'm also trying to bring up if someone has a positive experience of working - like genuinely enjoying the process of the work - they aren't paid any more or less based on that metric. The capitalist system only responds to that which can be verified from a Cartesian point of view: a number at the bottom line.

Second, the only time that society drives us to think about our bodily experience is through pointing out problems to fix. Much of the time, media like advertisements highlight a feeling of want or lack, social media posts tend to touch on the FOMO nerve. Seriously, when was the last time you heard from someone that wasn't an acquaintance that was reassuring you about how much you already have? Engaging with almost all of the media diet out there, the experience is the same: you are not enough so buy what I am selling.

Which leads me to the third point- facile and complete annihilation of the engineered problem with no survivors allowed. This specific human experience has been exploited to hell and back - dry skin? Lotion. Lack of physical charm? New shoes. Boring and unsophisticated? Watch this show. Thanks to Cartesian dualism, there are only two states of being - wholly valid or in doubt, which means completely invalid. There is not a shade of gray that is acceptable. For everyone who isn't perfect - the person who is only slightly charming or this other person who is 5’ 11” - the net effect is a strong magnetic pull toward “normalcy.” Natural heterogeneity is simply stamped out.

The dichotomy of mental “health” and “illness” is also Cartesian at its core; the field of medicine was founded on the back of scientific inquiry into the doings of the human body, after all. Summarily, I believe the crux of human suffering is due to an experience that does not fit into one’s expectation. This holds true for physical “illnesses” like infections and organic diseases. While doctors can fix those organic problems, the experience of suffering is often left untreated. Mental “illnesses” are especially unrecognized.

End rant.