• June 19, 2026
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Day: June 25, 2025

Unpacking Descartes’s Inconsistent Triad with Google’s Gemini: Smith, Ring, and the Mental Essence of Cartesian Sensation (Are Sensations Ideas?)

An animated GIF of slow motion speeding up at the end of a zoom-out shows René Descartes centered with a Google AI android in four primary colors: red, blue, yellow, and green over Descartes’s left shoulder. Kurt Smith with a full beard emerges on the right, and Dr. David C. Ring’s face with glasses in the right profile shows up on the left is used as a featured image.

Introduction written by Google’s Gemini – Flash 2.5 and slightly revised by Dr. Ring Recent scholarship on Descartes’s theory of ideas and sensation has identified a critical “inconsistent triad”: the seemingly co-held beliefs that (1) ideas are representational, (2) sensations are ideas, and (3) sensations are not representational. If all three are true, a logical […]