In an op-ed, Satya Benson ’26 critiques responses to recently published opinion pieces in the Record.

Way back in 1641, René Descartes dropped Meditations on First Philosophy, in which he famously claimed he was certain that he existed. But towards the end of his little book, he also made some pretty influential claims about the nature of the mind, saying it was totally separate from material substance. I think his arguments for this are bullshit, and I want to try to explain why.

While browsing geminispace, I came across this article by negatethis. Below is the text of the email I sent in reply, lightly edited. This is by no means a complete explanation of my thoughts on the subject; for example, I spend little to no time on the ethics of animal domestication.

Judgements of good and bad are always, as far as I can tell, made on the basis of aesthetics, which are subjective but have some universality rooted in biology. Living the best life therefore can be said to mean living the most aesthetically pleasing life. Thus, there are countless possible "best" lives and no objective comparisons, just some obviously better and worse lives, as there are better and worse songs.