Descartes' use of images to capture the brain mechanisms of visual perception

What is it about?

Images make the natural mechanisms of the body easier to understand. Descartes knew this. His scientific works contained over one hundred images. But his important work on human physiology, The Treatise on Man, was published only after Descartes died and was originally lacking its images. The illustrators, Gerard van Gutschoven and Louis de La Forge, had to use Descartes' descriptions of bodily mechanisms to create images. The images they created had to conform to Descartes' textual descriptions, but they also provided an independent interpretation of Descartes' texts. Especially intriguing are the images that portray the brain mechanisms underlying human and animal perception. Descartes was a substance dualist, separating mind from body. But the mechanisms in his Treatise that are calibrated to detect the distances of the objects that we see (how far away they are), and to find the distances without mental calculation.

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Photo by Matyi Molnár-Sáska on Unsplash

Photo by Matyi Molnár-Sáska on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Descartes is famous for his dualism, his distinction between mind and body. It is then usual to hold that he attributed perception only to the mind. This paper describes how the body has an active role to play in registering the distances to things. An apparently mental function operates as a purely bodily mechanism which then affects the mind to produce an experience of the distances to things (how far away they appear to be).

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