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Cartesian Dualism: The Birth of Modern Rationalism
“Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output…. In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butterfly Effect — the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.” -James Gleick
Let me tell you a story that happened 400 years ago and has had a dramatic “butterfly” effect on us modern humans. On the night of November 10–11, 1619, a young French soldier had three consecutive dreams that made him question the nature of reality. In these dreams a 23-year-old René saw ghosts, a church, a dictionary and a book of poems. That one night has set a new course of intellectual pursuit that later transformed scholasticism of the middle ages into exact sciences and philosophical disciplines of modernity.
Though a promising mathematician, René Descartes has become disenchanted with formal education and wanted to educate himself by experiencing the world. Since his earlier days at the Jesuit lycée — the high-school he attended and then quit before completing education — he had marveled at mathematics…
