I think this question is related to how people are responding in Eduardo X's thread. See the poll. Thoughts?
I suspect this is because I don't really understand how Dualism is defensible. Or maybe I am confused about the question. So, I wrote the answers in a way that tried to be cheeky. But I'd honestly like to hear thoughts on the issue, particularly those that differ from my own.
The answers in the poll are: 1 - The mind (and consciousness, by implication) is simply an aspect of the body's function. 2 - The mind is separate but affected by the body. Also, preemptive attack of logical fallacies. 3 - Shitbonerz is a traditional Qt3 poll answer which encompasses "Your poll sucks", "I cannot be bothered to think of which answer I agree with", and "I prevent pregnancies by only having anal sex".
I've quoted the Unfortunate Dualist before. Dualism is one of those things that doesn't make sense if you examine it logically. Forget the supernatural aspects of it, there's a contradiction built in to the premise. If there's some sort of immaterial soul, either it interacts with physical matter or it doesn't. If it does, it's not really immaterial, it's a physical phenomenon, and something we can observe through its interactions with the brain. If it doesn't, how exactly is it supposed to affect our actions? As for its origins, that's easy enough to see. Most people don't like death. I know I don't. As Woody Allen said, I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to do it by not dying. So wishful thinking invents something that lives on after death, and since the physical body so clearly rots away to nothing, we invent something immaterial that can't be seen or touched. Most defenses of dualism boil down to defending wishful thinking with the argument from ignorance. We don't understand the fine details of how minds work, so it must be magic. Thinking we're "just" a bag of neurons is too hard to grasp. Personally, I don't have too much trouble with it due to my programming background. I'm not saying we're software in the procedural language sense. Rather, I'm used to the idea of patterns of data being more important than the substrate, and that very, very complex patterns can take on a life of their own. Ergo the idea that our minds are a combination of the electrical and chemical states in our brains doesn't seem so outlandish to me. Mainly because the numbers are very large, and hence the number of possible states is huge, and we're semi-analog, which makes it worse.
Don't forget that not only is state able to store information, but flux can dynamically store even more information. Brains are crazy-awesome!
Gus has eloquently explained a position that is identical to my own. I would very much like to hear from someone who disagrees.
I haven't listened to it yet, so it could be rubbish, but I have this podcast queued up: Is Our Mind More Than Matter? Keith Ward vs David Papineau - Unbelievable? As a physicalist and atheist myself I don't have a great deal of hope for the religious opposition, but you never know. It's an interesting topic, not so much because the dualist position has much going for it, but because we currently know so little about how the brain works in relation to consciousness.
I used to be in the hella-reductionist camp. I was totally convinced that "mind" was simply an emergent phenomenon w/r/t neurology and ultimately explainable with biology. As a psychologist, this was, in retrospect, pretty dumb of me. Then an absolutely wonderful philosophy professor that, appropriately, went by Batty, introduced me properly to the big scary topic of philosophy of mind and specifically, to Nagel. Y'all should read him too. http://organizations.utep.edu/Portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf Basically, physicalism/materialism fails to adequately explain qualia and cannot account for the what-it-is-to-be of individual consciousnesses, aka the subjective character of experience. I'm unconvinced that there will ever be tools available to physicalists to do so, either. So at the very least, a more nuanced stance on the dualistic nature of body and consciousness seems prudent. This isn't necessarily mystical or religious either, and it's important to avoid conflating the idea of dualism with mysticism or the supernatural.
I think it's a necessarily mystical position, as long as it rejects the physical nature of mental phenomena and labels them as "something else" that we have no idea how to even define in a scientific or logically coherent way. Then there is the problem of interaction between the physical world - the brain - and that "something else" . Either they don't interact at all (which not only is wrong on its face - we can alter the what-it-is-to-be-x by modifying x's physical brain - but leaves me wondering why we should even bother to introduce a variable that by definition can not have explanatory power about any physical phenomenon) or they do interact. But if they interact we can (at least indirectly) observe this "something else", precisely by measuring how it interacts with the rest of the physical world. At this point, while it might well be a phenomenon or substance or whatever that we never previously encountered, it's unclear why we should put it in a special, magical "something else" category.
That was interesting reading, but the leap he makes is completely unjustified. He rightly points out that experience is subjective, and it's reasonable to believe that some things about a mind can never be completely understood by another mind. In effect, he's lightly touching on Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. However, he then jumps from this to the conclusion that this is somehow incompatible with a purely physical mind, and his reasoning as to why this is so is specious. Going from "the physical operation of the brain is objectively observable" to "the mind supported by those operations must be objective as well" is not only poorly reasoned, it directly contradicts the arguments he used to arrive at the subjective nature of consciousness. In talking about bats, he argues strongly that we cannot directly experience what it is to be a bat, and he does so purely on the physical nature of their senses and the physical differences in neurology. In other words, after demonstrating that he understands why differing structures would inescapably lead to differing minds, he claims that he doesn't see how physicalism can explain this difference. To claim that a physical model of the mind has no room for qualia is to inadequately understand physical models of the mind. It is, in effect, a variation of what I said before: the argument from ignorance, claiming that "I don't understand it" is equivalent to "it is not true." In fairness to Nagel, he understands that he has not in fact eliminated physicalism, and he acknowledges that all he has done is show that we don't have an adequate physical understanding of the brain at present, which shouldn't be news to anyone. The problem here is that you're implicitly redefining what "dualism" means. Dualism claims the mind is not part of the material world. This is the classical definition of supernatural, something that is not part of the natural, observable world. "Supernatural" itself has distracting connotations, but the fact remains that Dualism, by definition, posits something like the aether that was popular to explain how light travels before the notion was disproved by the Michelson-Morley experiment. I don't know precisely what you believe, but it's possible that what you label "dualism" is what I label "patterns" or software. The electrical state of a computer contains a great deal of information that is in no way inherent in its physical makeup, even if that state is constrained by the physical design of the computer. Patterns are after all not material things, and yet are not supernatural. They are expressed as things like electrical charges, but the relationships between those charges matter. However, this is not the proper definition of dualism, and it's misleading to label something "dualism" if it omits the supernatural. It's akin to the two definitions of "faith." It's misleading to conflate "unthinking acceptance of certain ideas" with "confidence or trust," yet people do it all the time, just because the two concepts happen to be represented by the same word. By the same token, if you have a belief in a model of the mind that does not involve a supernatural aether, you really need another term for it, and a good reason why it doesn't fall under physicalism.
Strictly in regards to the other thread that you referenced, I think you are confused about the question. The issue was not whether or not the mind is physical, but whether or not particular behaviors are hereditary.
I don't see why that should be the case. The human brain is an enormously complex organ, and everything we think and feel and do is driven by the chemicals and electricity inside of it. There's a lot of what it does that we don't understand yet, but I don't think it follows that we should assume there's something non-physical at play. How is it not? If you're saying that there's a large portion of our conciousness that is not controlled by the physical organ that is the brain, what is it being controlled by if not some mystic force?
No, that's not the point. Nagel - at least implicitly - admits that what-it's-like-to-be-a-bat is dependent on the physical hardware of the bat. In his argument the very reason we can't comprehend the bat's subjective experiences is that its hardware is so different from ours.
Here's my thinking -- whether being gay is genetic or related to events that occur in the womb or events that occur later in life seems utterly irrelevant to the question of what respect a gay individual should receive and the question of whether a gay person should have equal opportunities for employment and marriage. For the person to whom those issues matter, by acting as if they are relevant, he or she is betraying a worldview in which there is some separation between the events that caused a person to come into existence and the events that shape a person's life as he or she lives through it. And it seems a bit strange to me that people think that way. This may be more about a belief in some notion of free will that I don't share, and not dualism, exactly, but it seems to me those things are related, even if not precisely the same thing.
I agree. The conversation had gone off on a tangent at that point, but my feeling on that matter mirrors that of the original poster. Which is to say, the question of whether one is born gay or chooses to be gay has no bearing on whether or not gay people deserve to be treated with fairness and respect.
Hey Ben -- I'm not trying to call you out specifically, and I don't know what your thoughts on dualism or free will or anything are. But if you want to jump in to this thread, that would be awesome.
I'm always all over the fence with this argument, because the rational person in me glumly accepts that magic is not real and when my brain dies I will probably die with it, while the irrational person lives in pale terror of that kind of death and also likes to yell "Hey, what do you mean I don't exist, I am sitting right here." It's hard to square my sense of personal reality, the fact that I exist, with the idea that it is all determined by physical causes. If it's all just physics and chemistry, then I shouldn't be any more self-aware than a rock or a fire - I mean, I might behave as if I had an identity, because it's a evolutionary advantage, but there'd be nobody in here. To an outside observer, of course, there's utterly no difference - but to the inside observer (hi) it becomes kind of important. The argument that "you cannot explain it, therefore it is not real" is troublesome for me, because while I can't explain it, it's still here. This troublesome observer. Also there was that time I died and it was pretty okay, but the jury is still out on what the fuck that was about, and will probably remain so until it happens again in a more permanent fashion.
Why not? You aren't made of the same chemicals in the same proportions and configuration as a rock or a fire, after all. You're different from a rock or a fire in countless other ways. Did this really happen? Sounds like a job for the "too close for comfort" thread if so.
Yeah, that inside observer, that subjective experience of self, that's the most powerful argument in favor of dualism to me. That's my Kryptonite when I'm wearing my Captain Reductionism suit, if you will. To my mind (hah), the work of David Chalmers is most effective at refuting my position. I was hoping someone would bring up the Mary's room thought experiment. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary's_room ) I'd like to talk about it with someone who finds it convincing, because it is mostly just baffling to me that people find it to be an effective argument. This might be because I don't really understand the point.
I hadn't heard of that before now, but I don't find it very convincing. Experiencing something firsthand is different from just understanding it academically. Um... ok? Really profound point there, genius.
I think that, just like with free will, it is highly evolutionarily advantageous for us to deep down secretly believe in dualism/life after death as a way to stave off nihilism and depressive lethargy. What young person wants to contemplate the cold hard reality of their physical death and subsequent oblivion? Or the same happening to a loved one or loved pet? I mean it is the truth, but most of the time I'd rather pretend it wasn't, at least until they discover a way to make cats immortal.
I lack the wisdom to get across what I really mean here, but to clarify: I am only different from those things in terms of complexity. At which point does the organization of atoms or their interactions become complicated enough to give rise to, as apost8 just called it, the "subjective experience of self"? A physical model explains why I behave as if I exist, but it doesn't explain the fact that I actually do. And then I get a headache because the only path from here starts to sound like wizardry. Maybe. Like I said, the jury is out. It doesn't make a good story because nothing exciting happens; I just stop at a street corner, and my heart stops, and the world empties. Maybe my heart didn't actually stop - I'm not a doctor. I wasn't even 20 at the time. Maybe it was all just a really weird coincidence. It was just a strange thing that made the world make a little less sense, but seem a little less cruel. Which is possibly the cornerstone of superstition, right there. Anyway, the story where I nearly Phantom Of The Opera myself with a jar of chemicals is much more entertaining.
Why? I don't really understand why "there must be something supernatural" follows from "I have a sense of self." If the issue is that pattern supported by a physical medium having a sense of self-awareness is difficult for you, then positing an aetherial mind just pushes the question back to "why can the aether support a sense of self?" What's special about being nonmaterial? I mean, aside from assigning arbitrary magical abilities to it since we don't have any observable evidence of it.
Somewhere substantially more complicated than a rock or a fire and somewhat--possibly quite a bit, as we're finding out more and more about other animals' conciousness all the time--less complicated than a human brain. This line neatly encapsulates my feelings on the subject: that it's a simple instance of wishful thinking and human exceptionalism. I mean, think about it: "you" (using the word the way you used "I"; that is to say, your conciousness or "self") exist as a result of the chemical interactions going on inside your head. You say that the physical model explains why you behave as though you exist, but what's the difference between that and actual existence?
Because it's not clear to me that any particular configuration of matter, regardless of the complexity and intricacy therein, could produce a subjective experience of self. It's a tricky thing to talk about, because there is no evidence of this experience that I speak of. I would behave exactly the same if I didn't have it. But, all I can do is assure you that I experience it, and I suspect you do as well. (Man, Gus, look what you've done! You've got me arguing the pro-dualism position! For shame.)
On the other hand, the subjective experience of self could be just this delusional meme that for some reason our brains are an environment which is well suited for incubation and propagation. I'm, in effect, lying to myself and you that I am experiencing this thing. That's also a point of view that I'm sympathetic to. If this is the case, however, one's own sense of reality can't be trusted. Which is, you know, disturbing to a lot of people.
I went through this, since it's tough to reconcile as an atheist. But what has helped me is considering the very poetic nature of creation and death of the universe... that we are all stardust, and at some point everything around us was part of the same pile. That, and Dawkins saying something along the lines of "I had no problem being dead for 13 billion years."
The ontological argument is fallacious. It's a "petitio principii" that proposes, based on nothing, that all physical knowledge is a priori knowledge. In the premise, Mary is assumed to have all physical knowledge of color because she has all a priori knowledge of color. Then she acquires a piece of empirical knowledge (the experience of color), and because it is not a priori knowledge, the argument wants us to conclude that it is not physical knowledge. But that hasn't been proven at all--it's just assumed in the premise. The argument does not account for the fact that it may not be possible for Mary to have all physical knowledge of color if she has only a priori knowledge. To see why this argument falls apart, you can examine some of the other arguments that can be made based on their reasoning... 1. All physical knowledge is a priori. 2. No a priori knowledge is empirical. 3. No empirical knowledge is physical. When you look at it that way, it's a bit easier to see why it's a flawed argument.
My thoughts on mind/body dualism in general are very close to Bleaktea's. Which saves me some typing! ;)
Nobody's really lining up "I am aware of my own existence" with "and therefore unicorns". We are observing a phenomenon for which we cannot find a convincing explanation. The failure to find an explanation does not mean the observation is false. Of course, it also doesn't mean a wizard did it. The notion of an incredibly complicated mind supported on the excellent hardware of the brain is not difficult, but it only explains decision-making and behaviour, not the subjective experience of the internal observer. Basically: I am meat, doing meat things, as the meat software dictates; because the universe is all physical, my behaviour is predetermined - wind the system back as much as you like, with the same input it will always produce the same output. There's no reason for an observer to be in here watching this happen and imagining it has free will, because it doesn't. This is no more significant than a rock moving through space, merely more complicated. Yet here I am. So WTF is going on? Nothing except subjective awareness. Like I said, to an outside observer, there is no difference - it is only the guy on the inside insisting he exists that is different, and only I can experience him. And that can't be an illusion, because if it were, I wouldn't be here to be fooled.
And this is also why qualia remains a problem and why you hear philosophers talking about p-zombies, the goddamn nerds. Also, I must point out that siding with dualism does not necessarily mean you are asserting the existence of an intrinsic soul or mind independent of the body that houses it and that will go on after you die. I believe most modern systems of dualism acknowledge a more interactional model of mind and body. Nor does it mean that the concept of personhood is necessarily housed completely in one or the other; rather it is possible to view the individual person as a collection of aggregate conditions and phenomena. I find this perspective useful myself.
Well, in a sense, yes, Dualism does just that. It says there's a magical, nonmaterial ether that holds consciousness, an aether that cannot be observed in any way, yet somehow controls our actions. It's the proverbial invisible unicorn which cannot be disproved because it cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. What both you and apost8 (in Devil's Advocate mode) are doing is arguing about whether consciousness exists, but neither of you are addressing the point I raised, which is what is so special about this hypothetical aether? What exactly does it buy us, logically, over a physical model? Any argument that the physical model is hard to understand, inexplicable, unlikely, etc. applies equally well to the aether. All dualism does is push the unknown element back a layer. This is, again, the argument from ignorance. "I don't know what it is," followed by a completely unwarranted, untestable hypothesis. Why? What is special about self-awareness that it cannot be explained physically? You're rather assuming your conclusion as a premise. Let me take another tack. Take all the ways your thinking can be physically impaired: intoxication, brain damage, sleep deprivation, and what have you. We've all experienced this to some degree or another. If our minds were supernatural, none of these things should affect them. Yet they do. Our experience in each case is consistent with the physical model, and inconsistent with dualism. These affect not only decision making, but the self-awareness that you believe is a special case. This rather begs the question of "what is free will, really?" Suppose we have supernatural minds. To match your hypothetical, suppose we not only rewind everything physical about an event, we erase the supernatural mind's memory of everything leading up to the event. Why wouldn't the supernatural mind make the same decision every time, given the same input and the same memories? If it makes a different decision, with exactly the same memories and the same ideas to consider, is that really free will? It just looks random to me, and randomness isn't particularly satisfying as a definition of "free will." I put it to you that what we think of as "free will" in either model is our ability to weigh everything we know, sense, and remember, and arrive at a decision. It is this process that is important in our sense of "free will," not whether the outcome is theoretically deterministic, because we think of all these variables as being internal to us, rather than separate from us. In any case, it's not really all that deterministic in the usual, everyday sense. When we think of something as being "determined," we mean predictable. In the physical model, the mind is a chaotic system of unbelievable complexity, and prediction is not really feasible. You need enormous computing power, and absolutely perfect knowledge down to a subatomic level. In fact, nothing is ever completely knowable, that sort of simple Newtonian view of the world went out with the introduction of quantum uncertainty in the early 20th century. Not that I want to invoke randomness at the quantum level as a defense of free will, since randomness is a very unsatisfying definition of free will. Ooop, dinner calls. More later. Probably.
This is what, as far as I can tell, most or all dualism arguments boil down to. Chalmers' philosophical zombies are the classic example of it: Zombies are people exactly like us behaviourally, except they lack consciousness. All of their brain processes produce actions indistinguishable from us, but there's no subjective experience for them. Because this is a coherent concept, according to Chalmers - we can imagine such a being existing - that means logically dualism must be true, because if such a being can exist consciousness cannot be entirely physical. To me this is deeply unconvincing for two reasons. One, just because we can't currently give a complete account of consciousness as a physical phenomenon (big deal, we can't give an account of much of the brain) doesn't give us licence to trust our imaginations when it comes to zombies. How can we know what we conceive of as possible is actually possible when we don't sufficiently understand the physical processes? Two, the thought experiment cannot logically prove dualism to be true without begging the question. It might be the case that it is literally impossible to separate given physical brain processes from consciousness, because they are one in the same (just as you can't separate water molecules from the wave they make up). If that's true, and we can't rule it out, then zombies would be logically impossible.
That's just the thing: there is no definitive proof for physicalism as things currently stand. It simply cannot account for consciousness, qualia, all of that shit. It is just as question begging to jump from where we are to "physicalism must be true and dualism must be false." Particularly when there is more evidence for the latter than the former. I'm curious how you all would respond to the Mary's Room thought experiment. It's pretty classic. Mary lives her entire life in a room devoid of color—she has never directly experienced colour in her entire life, though she is capable of it. Through black-and-white books and other media, she is educated on neuroscience to the point where she becomes an expert on the subject. Mary learns everything there is to know about the perception of color in the brain, as well as the physical facts about how light works in order to create the different color wavelengths. It can be said that Mary is aware of all physical facts about color and color perception. After Mary's studies on color perception in the brain are complete, she exits the room and is given a red rose. Recalling that she has all of the physical facts about color perception, has she actually learned something new?
Er, much as I hate to take a strawman away from someone when they're having fun with it, at no point have I suggested a hypothesis, untestable or otherwise, and all this stuff about "the aetheric mind" is entirely your creation. All I have suggested is the entirely subjective existence of an observer, to whom I have ascribed no powers, who persists as a point of view and of whom I am aware. I am merely confused by my own existence and find the suggestion that I am a very complicated thinking machine to be an unsatisfactory explanation for why I am here. And I'm too hungry to finish here for now, BBL.
We've already been discussing it, just a few posts above yours. Unless nothing is real and I imagined it all, which is a distinct possibility in a thread like this... ;)
