For many who’ve taken philosophy courses at the university level (let alone those who teach philosophy), substance dualism appears to be a theory with, dare I say it, no substance. It’s not a “live option.” But, to extend the pun, I think it’s the dismissal, not the theory, that lacks substance.
In the introduction to this series of posts, I made an analogy between the popularity of students in high school and philosophical theories. Everyone rejects Substance Dualism because, well, isn’t it obvious? He’s a loser. Unlike Physicalism, the coolest kid on the block.
Well, I predict that at the metaphorical 30 year reunion down the road, all the objections and problems with Physicalism will have caught up to him, and he’ll be looking a lot worse for wear. Meanwhile, Substance Dualism will be looking a lot more attractive, his substantial (but apparently hidden) virtues and qualities having brought him surprising success. And people will realize that their dismissal of this “loser” was based on superficial considerations (read: unwarranted presuppositions).
But I’m an idealist, what can I say…Er, I mean, an optimist—an optimist that people will, in fact, realize how their unwarranted presuppositions were propping up physicalism all along.
Perhaps you think me a naïve optimist. Perhaps you would say in reply, “Physicalism has been overwhelmingly voted ‘most likely to succeed,’ and we just need to give him more time.” Well, have a gander at the first few paragraphs of William Lycan’s paper, “Giving Dualism Its Due,” to read a materialist making more or less the same point that I’ve just made. (Or—because I can’t resist—see this study which claims that “cool kids” in school become “losers” as adults. No offense, Physicalism. It was just a joke.)
What are the objections to substance dualism that give the popular crowd so much confidence in dismissing it at present?
The Objection from Neuroscience
One common objection to substance dualism—though much less common among philosophers of mind—is the objection from the success of neuroscience in discovering tight correlations between the functioning of the mind and the functioning of the physical brain. One gets the impression that new neural correlates for mental processes are being discovered almost daily.
But this objection against substance dualism is based on both misunderstanding and mistaken reasoning.
First, the objection misunderstands what substance dualists claim. Contemporary dualists do not deny the correlations between mind and brain. Even Descartes acknowledged such causal correlations, which is why he sought to explain the causal connection in the first place by suggesting the pineal gland as the locus of causal interaction. Even if neural correlates were discovered for every mental process, dualists would have no trouble acknowledging the correlations. The real question to be answered in the debate is, Are mental processes identical with, or supervenient upon, the physical processes of the brain?
Second, once the real question at stake is understood, this objection can be seen to be based on a simple mistake in reasoning: causal correlation is not the same as identity or supervenience. Even though smoke is correlated with fire, smoke and fire are not identical, nor are they supervenient upon each other. Both are clearly separable from the other; that is, both can exist without the other. The debate between physicalists and dualists is not over whether mental processes are correlated with neural processes. The debate is over whether mental processes are identical with, or metaphysically supervenient upon, neural processes.
No matter how close the correlations are between mind and brain, the question of whether they are identical or whether the mind is metaphysically supervenient on the brain (roughly, the mind cannot change independently of the brain) is a question that must be answered by philosophy, not neuroscience.
What do you think? Have I adequately answered this particular objection adequately? Or does the objection from “psychophysical regularities,” as Robert Koons and George Bealer call it in The Waning of Materialism, still stand?
……………………………..
Note: Please remember the purpose of this series of posts: I am not claiming that, because the major objections fail, substance dualism is correct. I am merely trying to demonstrate that the major objections to substance dualism are not adequate reasons to reject substance dualism.
In other words, regarding this specific objection, even though one might count the correlations we observe between neural processes and mental processes as empirical support for physicalism (they are consistent with what one would expect given physicalism), the correlations do not entail physicalism, and they are empirically consistent with dualism (a robust interactionist dualism that causally links mind and brain in both directions).
-Gordon
A Philosopher's Take 
Lage
October 7, 2015
Substance dualism seems to be a dead hypothesis. Since substance dualism is basically physicalism PLUS some non-physical substance (non-physicalism), it requires all the assumptions of physicalism with the addition of a number of ad hoc assumptions stemming from an argument from ignorance. Since the physical world is all we can demonstrably measure and interact with, it goes against Occam’s razor and parsimony to posit the existence of some non-physical stuff or processes. Just like the existence of a God (defined a certain way or assumed to have certain properties) is consistent with the physical world we see, consistency and compatibility aren’t enough to warrant belief. One should always prefer the simplest model with the least ad hoc assumptions, and not believe anything to be the case without good reason for doing so. I have yet to see good reasons for believing in substance dualism, even if the typical arguments against it (as you presented) are indeed not good arguments against it. Rather than looking at arguments against dualism, I’d prefer to look at the arguments for it, since this is a better way to justify belief in it. I concede that any correlation between mental processes and brain configuration states doesn’t negate the possibility of dualism. But what arguments/evidence actually support the existence or validity of dualism? I haven’t seen any that are valid thus far (logically valid and empirically supported). Another way to address this is to ask what exactly would need to be empirically discovered in order to falsify substance dualism? If nothing ever can, then it is unfalsifiable (just like many conceptions of God, the spaghetti monster, fairies, etc.) and is thus pointless to posit or claim.
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Gordon Hawkes
October 8, 2015
Hi Lage,
Thanks for you thoughts.
First off, substance dualism is not a “dead hypothesis” at the very least in the sense that there are plenty of philosophers publishing articles and books defending it. (Whether any of the arguments have merit is of course the all important question.)
Second, I’ll say up front that I’ve learned the hard way that most people who’ve studied philosophy do not take substance dualism seriously–no matter what arguments you present for it–because of the standard objections they’ve been taught (i.e., Ockham’s razor, the interaction problem, neuroscience). They take the standard objections that I’m addressing in this series as defeaters for the theory. Frankly, I’d be happy to jump straight into arguments for dualism, but I need to address the objections first–to show that they are not successful–in order to be taken seriously.
I’ll be addressing Ockham’s razor in my next post, which I hope will address some of your concerns.
That said, I disagree with your claim that substance dualism is just physicalism PLUS a non-physical substance (and that it “requires all the assumptions of physicalism with the addition of a number of ad hoc assumptions stemming from an argument from ignorance”). Physicalism requires 1) the causal closure of the physical domain, and (for realist’s about the mental) 2) either supervenience of the mental on the physical or identity. Interactionist substance dualism rejects both of these assumptions.
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Lage
October 8, 2015
Sure, though technically not a “dead hypothesis” due to active publishing, it is similar to many theologians publishing arguments for God that aren’t taken seriously by most people in the world (certainly not most scientists) and so it is “dead” in the sense that it is more or less a dead end as it doesn’t appear to be falsifiable (and if it is falsifiable, then it is overwhelmingly less supported than monism in any case. On a side note, I look forward to what you have to say about Occam’s razor in the context of dualism.
“That said, I disagree with your claim that substance dualism is just physicalism PLUS a non-physical substance. Physicalism requires 1) the causal closure of the physical domain, and (for realist’s about the mental) 2) either supervenience of the mental on the physical or identity. Interactionist substance dualism rejects both of these assumptions.”
I’ll concede the point as I chose poor words for explaining what I meant by that comment. When I said that substance dualism is just physicalism PLUS a non-physical substance, I shouldn’t have used the term “physicalism”, as what I was driving at was that any tenable form of substance dualism is going to be one that is compatible with all physical/empirical evidence/phenomena. Yet all physical evidence by definition (combined with the fact that nobody has shown that it is even possible to have evidence that isn’t physical) is explicitly supporting the physicalist position. Additionally, if you remove all minds from the universe, we are left with the gross majority of what you started with. So the bulk of all phenomena are ultimately irrelevant and not contingent on any rules that may govern the non-physical substance asserted in substance dualism. So a substance dualist would likely hold that the causal closure asserted in physicalism was the case before the evolution of consciousness took place anywhere in the universe. It is only when minds first appeared that a substance dualist (which also believes that history and the past are real) can assert that the causal closure of the physical domain no longer exists. That the evolution of minds somehow changed the causal closure that existed prior to that evolution.
As for supervenience, substance dualists also likely accept the claim that whatever they call “physical properties” are supervenient on one another (i.e. biological properties are supervenient on chemical properties for example). So dualists do (or in principle can) believe in causal closure of the physical domain (in the past at least, or in the hypothetical case of removing minds from the universe), and they also (or in principle can) believe in the supervenience of the physical properties with one another. They only make ad hoc additions to this physicalist framework by asserting that the causal closure of the physical domain eventually disappeared with the emergence of minds, and that the supervenience asserted by physicalism doesn’t include “mental properties”. Hence, my position that substance dualism is basically just physicalism plus ad hoc assumptions stemming from an argument from ignorance. It’s basically a modified version of physicalism with some special pleading and as such it is given a new categorical label that people refer to as “substance dualism”.
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Gordon Hawkes
October 8, 2015
P.S. Regarding empirical support for and against dualism, check out Peter King’s “One Man’s Meat Is Another Man’s Person” for a brief discussion of this question: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~shil0124/papers/meatperson.pdf
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Lage
October 10, 2015
I think that King’s thought experiment is interesting, but I have a few issues with it. He mentions doing a double half-brain transplant and that if we perform this experiment many times and consistently end up with one person and one vegetable on a life-support machine when the two halves are placed into bodies, and after exhaustive investigation, can’t find any physical difference between the two hemispheres to account for the results, that the most satisfactory answer is that each person is partly composed of a mind whose connections with that person’s brain are intimate and strong. He then says that the act of dividing a person’s brain, based on those results, wouldn’t be equivalent to dividing the person’s mind, since at the time of division it would presumably have attached itself to just one hemisphere.
For starters, and King certainly mentions this in his paper (in terms of a physicalist’s appeal to a gap of knowledge), our not being able to explain the result even after exhaustive investigation to find a physical basis for the difference doesn’t lend itself to support a non-physical substance (i.e. dualism). If we were somehow able to know that we had perfect knowledge of all physical properties and thus possessed the ability to ascertain that no physical difference existed between the two hemispheres to account for the results, then I’d agree that this could be evidence for a non-physical substance/mechanism at play. However, we don’t have perfect knowledge of physical properties nor is it even theoretically possible to obtain a perfect knowledge of the configuration of the two halves of the brain (due to quantum uncertainty principles). Furthermore, even given a lot of knowledge about the brains, transplants, etc., a gap of knowledge about the physical world is always going to be a more likely explanation for the phenomena than that an unprecedented non-physical substance exists to explain it. It doesn’t mean that the latter has a zero probability, but simply that the former will always have a higher prior probability than the latter. Part of this fact stems from the historical precedent that dualism has been presented in a number of ways every time a non-physical substance has been proposed, which is the case every time a supernatural substance has been proposed. Likewise for supernatural explanations and properties, etc. Every time they have been proposed throughout history, even as the best or perhaps only available hypothesis to “explain” a phenomenon at that time, eventually a physical basis for the phenomena was discovered thus falsifying again and again all the dualist hypotheses. So in order to accept dualism on empirical grounds, that is, in order for the consequent probability to outweigh the infinitesimal prior probability, there would have to be not only direct evidence for the non-physical substance rather than merely an indirect inference that it in fact exists, but we’d actually need a high amout of direct evidence. Also, direct evidence, so far as I can tell, would entail physical evidence, which implies physical substances, thus making the dualist position something not empirically falsifiable. If we granted that some form of direct evidence need not be physical, I’m not sure how we would measure it in any detectable way other than through physical means.
I also think that the empirical basis for substance dualism is unfalsifiable because I think it is impossible to distinguish between these two worlds:
1) A world where both “physical” and “mental” distinct substances exist, and
2) A world where only “physical” substances exist, but a subset of those physical substances (or a subset of their properties) instantiated in some configuration (such as a brain) produces phenomena that aren’t able to be explained in the same way that other sorts of configurations of the same physical substances are. A world where the supervenience between certain configurations/properties and these special ones simply isn’t known or isn’t knowable.
If we can’t distinguish between the two worlds, then Occam’s razor and empirical precedents would preferably lead us to option 2. More so, one ontological/metaphysical substance rather than two is perhaps the best possible application of Occam’s razor, since positing one ONTOLOGICAL substance is at the top of the hierarchy of all entities that Occam’s razor is attempting to limit.
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Gordon Hawkes
October 11, 2015
Hi Lage,
I’m going to accuse you of begging the question (ever so subtly), but I am going to try to make the accusation as politely as possible. You write:
“…even given a lot of knowledge about the brains, transplants, etc., a gap of knowledge about the physical world is always going to be a more likely explanation for the phenomena than that an unprecedented non-physical substance exists to explain it.” If this were all you wrote, it would clearly beg the question. But you go on to give a reason for the claim. My summary of your reason: dualistic hypotheses have always been replaced successfully by physicalistic explanations in the past, so why not in the area of the mind as well?
But the human mind is precisely the ground on which dualists are claiming a physical explanation will never do. So to simply assume that physicalism will succeed in that area is to subtly beg the question–a stronger argument is needed.
Also, I want to push back against the popular argument that materialistic explanation has mown down all the tired old dualistic hypotheses in all but a few outlying areas. I think it grossly mischaracterizes the history of science and philosophy. Going back to the beginning of the history of philosophy, there are at least three major areas in which dualistic explanations have traditionally been given: the question of God, the question of abstract objects (e.g., numbers), and the question of the human mind. These three areas are still “living” areas of debate. I’m not making any claim about the truth or falsity of dualism here. I’m just pointing out that you’re begging the question because the reason you provide for dismissing dualism as an explanation is based on ignoring major areas of dispute in philosophy. Are there widely accepted physical explanations for the beginning of physical reality (i.e., space and time), for instance?
Regarding your general outlook on the mind-body problem, you seem to assume a form of empiricism (“direct evidence…would entail physical evidence”). You seem to only allow for what we experience through our physical senses. I’ll ask you the same question I asked of Keith below: Would you claim that our conceptions of mathematical truths or logical principles, or even concepts like a “perfect circle” (which we’ve arguably never seen) are physically based? Would you deny knowledge of a priori truths?
To put the challenge another way, How would you account for our knowledge of the principles of logic in a physical way? Do we observe logical principles (especially those which appear to be necessary truths) in our physical surroundings (which are contingent realities)? Which of your physical senses would you use to observe modus ponens, or the law of noncontradiction? And how could the necessary truths that we have knowledge of be based in contingent physical reality?
This thread could be mined for two or three blog posts. I’ll likely post on some of the things we’ve covered here. But, again, thanks for your thoughts.
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Lage
October 19, 2015
” I’m going to accuse you of begging the question (ever so subtly), but I am going to try to make the accusation as politely as possible. You write:
“…even given a lot of knowledge about the brains, transplants, etc., a gap of knowledge about the physical world is always going to be a more likely explanation for the phenomena than that an unprecedented non-physical substance exists to explain it.” If this were all you wrote, it would clearly beg the question. ”
Even if this was all I wrote, it wouldn’t necessarily beg the question. This claim of mine is only referring to the prior probability of two competing hypotheses: 1) that mental processes can be accounted for by an as yet unknown physical process, OR 2) that a new non-physical “substance” that has never been demonstrated to exist before does indeed exist and explains the phenomena. This is a simple Bayesian claim about the prior probabilities of both competing hypotheses. Until our background knowledge changes markedly with positive evidence for a second substance, it will always be the case that the former hypothesis has a higher prior probability than the latter. Once a person demonstrates that another substance exists to account for a phenomenon, and shows that it can’t be adequately explained by the current exclusive substance known (a physical substance), then that evidence (if logically possible) could at least in principle be strong enough to overcome the low prior probability of the second hypothesis and it would then be the case that the overall consequent probability is higher for dualism than monism in terms of explaining mental processes.
“But you go on to give a reason for the claim. My summary of your reason: dualistic hypotheses have always been replaced successfully by physicalistic explanations in the past, so why not in the area of the mind as well?”
Exactly. I described an important fact in our background knowledge to support my Bayesian prior probability claim about dualism versus physicalism (monism).
“But the human mind is precisely the ground on which dualists are claiming a physical explanation will never do. So to simply assume that physicalism will succeed in that area is to subtly beg the question–a stronger argument is needed.”
Without first demonstrating that a dualist explanation is logically possible, let alone physically possible (if this is even intelligible to say), let alone more likely than a physical explanation, and to then posit that because we don’t know if there is a physical explanation for it, that the undemonstrated dualist explanation is true — that is begging the question. My claim however isn’t begging the question, as there isn’t any assumption needed that physicalism will succeed. Rather, it’s simply the fact that physicalism is the only thing that has been demonstrated to be true in all our background knowledge. Not once has anyone ever demonstrated that a non-physical mechanism (whatever that could mean) exists to explain any phenomena at all, whereas countless times throughout history people have successfully demonstrated that physical mechanisms do account for various phenomena. So, right off the bat, we have to grant that based on our current background knowledge, it is MORE LIKELY that physicalism will also eventually succeed in explaining mental phenomena (even if we don’t currently know what the mechanisms is). The only thing that can change that prior probability is after there have been conclusive demonstrations of non-physical mechanisms for some phenomena. Once that happens, then we can recalculate some new prior probabilities of some phenomenon being better explained by either physical or non-physical substances. However, prior to any demonstration that non-physical substances exist, the prior probability will only continue to be reduced for dualism (as more and more phenomena are demonstrably explained via physicalism).
“Also, I want to push back against the popular argument that materialistic explanation has mown down all the tired old dualistic hypotheses in all but a few outlying areas. I think it grossly mischaracterizes the history of science and philosophy. Going back to the beginning of the history of philosophy, there are at least three major areas in which dualistic explanations have traditionally been given: the question of God, the question of abstract objects (e.g., numbers), and the question of the human mind. These three areas are still “living” areas of debate. I’m not making any claim about the truth or falsity of dualism here. I’m just pointing out that you’re begging the question because the reason you provide for dismissing dualism as an explanation is based on ignoring major areas of dispute in philosophy. Are there widely accepted physical explanations for the beginning of physical reality (i.e., space and time), for instance? ”
I’m not begging the question as I’ve already explained. I’ve only made claims about the prior probability of both hypotheses based on our background knowledge which is logically valid. As for dualistic hypotheses, how many of them have been conclusively demonstrated to be true? Zero. As for the three areas you mentioned, just because they are all “living areas of debate” doesn’t matter. There can be debates about what kinds of properties a God would have and so forth, and yet those debates likely don’t have any bearing on reality because they are mostly debates based on presuppositions within a theological framework of some type, and one which already concedes a God existing (before demonstrating it) at the very least for the sake of argument. Disembodied minds, which are basically what most theologians posit a God needs or is (in some way), don’t have any empirical support either (and yet we do have evidence that counts against disembodied minds, namely every example of a mind we’re aware of has a physical brain correlate). So people can debate about what exactly a disembodied mind is (or would be), but if we don’t have any empirical support for it’s existence (nor any knowledge of how it works), then nobody can make a claim about it’s probabilities in explaining anything. Similarly for abstract objects. That people debate about these topics, doesn’t necessarily lend them credibility in being anything grounded in reality (just as people can debate about the Lord of the Rings). We can use abstractions in our ontology and treat them like discrete entities at times, but they are ultimately just concepts (as is the abstraction of “God” I would argue, nothing more than a concept, a juxtaposition of ad hoc properties rather than an actual being). Concepts/abstractions are a product of the mind and so their ultimate reality is contingent on whether or not minds are the result of physical processes in the brain or not which is the question we’re trying to answer. I don’t need to ignore these areas in philosophy to make a supported prior probability claim, but rather I simply need to look at our background knowledge and compare the number of examples of phenomena that have been demonstrated to result from dualist/non-physicalist processes/substances to the number of phenomena that have been demonstrated to be explained by some physical process/substance (every demonstration so far has been of this latter type).
What we find is that of all the cases we examine that aren’t an open question or unresolved, have all been adequately accounted for by some physical process and substance. Of these cases, many were previously believed to be processes governed by non-physical substances (such as spirits, Gods, etc.), including lightning, earthquakes, etc. So I’m not dismissing dualism per se, but rather I’m explaining why it has such a low prior probability of being true, and thus why so much evidence is needed to get the consequent probability high enough to overcome that low prior. That may happen one day, and I’ll certainly follow the evidence where it leads. But for now, it is simply more likely (as well as more parsimonious) that physical processes account for what we call “mind”, even if we don’t yet know the exact mechanism or details. Similarly, when nuclear decay reactions were first observed long ago, the resulting mass of the products were less than expected. The two competing claims were that there was a violation of mass and energy conservation, or that there was a (then) undetectable particle that was given off in the decay and that this would account for the mass lost. Lo and behold, eventually they found that there was a new particle they didn’t know about given off during this decay which later was called the “neutrino”. The same analogy holds for dualism. We may not yet know the “particle” that accounts for the phenomena (i.e. the body-to-mind mechanism) but it is more likely that the huge precedent of “conservation laws” (i.e. physicalism in this analogy) will be maintained rather than that an exception to the conservation laws being found (i.e. “dualism” being true in this analogy).
“Regarding your general outlook on the mind-body problem, you seem to assume a form of empiricism (“direct evidence…would entail physical evidence”). You seem to only allow for what we experience through our physical senses. I’ll ask you the same question I asked of Keith below: Would you claim that our conceptions of mathematical truths or logical principles, or even concepts like a “perfect circle” (which we’ve arguably never seen) are physically based? Would you deny knowledge of a priori truths?”
Yes, I do believe that conceptions such as mathematical truths and logical principles (the logical absolutes for example) are ultimately physically based, and it is accomplished by how the brain is wired and how the brain processes information. We are not required to “see” or sense these things per se (that is, to actually “sense” a perfect circle with our own two eyes) because we are more or less making mental models composed of these entities and then manipulating those models as we see fit. However, there is a relationship between our mental models of perception and things we have sensed (or can in principle sense). For example the abstraction of the number “1” is a property of any set of things we’ve experienced or observed that only contains one member of the set. So we can “do addition” with actual apples if we want to, or we can replace apples with a symbol that represents the number of generic objects or discrete entities in the set (i.e. an abstraction of the number “1”, “2”, “3”, “100”, etc.) Similarly, once we’ve seen what we then call a “circle” (because it’s pattern lies within a range of rules that we agree to label as a “circle”), we can then create a mental model or abstraction of a “perfect circle” without ever actually seeing one (even without seeing it in our mind while trying to conceptualize it. Just as I can conceive of a 1000-sided equilateral polygon (or a million dollar bills), without actually seeing a picture of either in my mind (I just know that a million dollar bills is a certain number of individual dollar bills). All I have to know is that the concept I’ve come up with there is a shape that has 1000 sides (which actually looks very similar to a circle). I can actually conceptualize a perfect circle by conceiving an equilateral polygon with an infinite number of sides (the mathematical limit of an n-sided equilateral polygon is indeed a circle). Our brain is able to take properties (such as roundness or quantity) based on pattern recognition modules in our brain and idealize them in a mental model or simulation (where I can also simulate that circle with a certain size, color, material, etc.). So the physical basis for all of this would ultimately be the configuration and processes of the physical brain.
“To put the challenge another way, How would you account for our knowledge of the principles of logic in a physical way? Do we observe logical principles (especially those which appear to be necessary truths) in our physical surroundings (which are contingent realities)? Which of your physical senses would you use to observe modus ponens, or the law of noncontradiction? And how could the necessary truths that we have knowledge of be based in contingent physical reality?”
I would account for our knowledge of the principles of logic based on the way the brain processes information and recognizes patterns. If the brain is wired to see dimensions of difference in the world (unique sensory/perceptual patterns that is such as quantity, colors, sounds, tastes, smells, etc.), then it would make sense that the brain can give any particular pattern an identity by having a unique schema of hardware to perceive such a pattern and distinguish it from other patterns. After the brain does this, the patterns are then arguably organized by the logical absolutes. For example, if the hardware scheme or process used to detect a particular pattern “A” and all other patterns we perceive have their own unique identity (i.e. “not-A” or B, C, D, etc.), then the brain would effectively be wired to assume that pattern “A” = pattern “A” (law of identity), any other pattern “not-A” does not equal pattern “A” (non-contradiction), and any pattern must either be “A” or “not-A” (law of excluded middle). So by the brain giving a pattern an identity (i.e. a specific type of hardware configuration in our brain that when activated, represents a detection of one specific pattern), our brains effectively produce the logical absolutes by the way it is wired to distinguish one pattern versus another. Once we’ve done this, we can then carry over that foundation to all of mathematics as well as any abstraction whatsoever. Such that “red” equals “red”, such that “not-red” (i.e. blue, green, etc.) does not equal “red”, and such that the pattern if it is a pattern actually detected, must by nature of how the brain detects patterns be either “red” or “not-red” (i.e. at least one of all other patterns stored in the brain’s memory that are not the pattern “red”). Thus, even “modus ponens” can have the same kind of physical foundation since it also makes use of the logical absolutes, and simply builds off of them.
“This thread could be mined for two or three blog posts. I’ll likely post on some of the things we’ve covered here. But, again, thanks for your thoughts.”
Looking forward to it. Always a pleasure Gordon!
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keithnoback
October 7, 2015
Isn’t the real problem how the mental substance maintains causal efficacy while remaining a separate substance? Perhaps ghosts exist, but if we see them, hear them, feel them or dream about them, then they must participate in the causal scheme, at the very least by being in some place at some time. They may have all sorts of novel and wondrous properties (so does dark matter), but that just makes them strange, not a non-physical substance.
It is, in fact quite difficult to see what ‘non-physical substance’ might mean and how we might claim to know about it.
I eagerly await subsequent posts :).
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Gordon Hawkes
October 8, 2015
I will definitely be addressing the interaction problem. Regarding the definition of “non-physical substance,” I don’t think the dualist faces a unique problem in offering a definition. What is the definition of a “physical” substance? Is a magnetic field a physical substance? Gravity? Quantum vacuums? I’d be curious about your thoughts on this. The definition of “physical” has changed dramatically from the time of Hobbes’ materialism to the time of Daniel Dennett’s.
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keithnoback
October 8, 2015
Um, yeah. Exactly. All the ghosts of physics are tied together by their capacity to bear the stigma of causality. A field is physical because it can accrue an identity…and yeah, that’s it in a nutshell.
Pretty broad, but that is where we’re at, I believe.
Your turn. What is the mental substance? I should think that it must be what we find once the mind is drained of the contents of it’s experience (physically based, the lot) and completely at rest – if mind is not a description of an activity, and elicited, but a ‘stuff’. Is a truly empty, ‘ground state’ mind, conceivable?
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Gordon Hawkes
October 9, 2015
Hi Keith. You wrote: “All the ghosts of physics are tied together by their capacity to bear the stigma of causality. A field is physical because it can accrue an identity…” I have to admit, I’m not sure what the phrases “bear the stigma of causality” or “accrue an identity” mean. But, I’ll likely be posting a positive defense of substance dualism in the future, and I’ll be sure to address this question of definition if I do.
You state that the mind’s “content of experience” is “physically based, the lot.” This strikes me as a strong form of empiricism. Would you claim that our conceptions of mathematical truths or logical principles, or even abstract objects like a “perfect circle” (which we’ve never seen) are physically based? Would you deny knowledge of a priori truths?
Certain philosophical ideas run together in packs. Empiricism usually runs with physicalism. And that, to me, is a problem for physicalism: How could know necessary truths AS necessary truths, let along a priori truths, if our thinking is strictly based on contingent physical events?
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keithnoback
October 10, 2015
Does logic make truth?
Do we experience perfect circles or A = A? Are they truth or representation?
I think we can take Frank Jackson’s thought experiment re: the knowledge argument, and turn it around on this one. All the theoretical stuff that Mary knows about red comes from actual red experiences of her predecessors.
They have gone far afield by the time they reach her, but they still do not create a red experience. She must have a physical interaction, in time, with a red-generating circumstance to understand her predecessors’ representation – further analysis doesn’t cut it. Otherwise, she is not thinking about red, only what they said about red. The object of her intention, in that case, is a metaphorical object derivative of others’ (physical) experiences and we speak of it as an object in shorthand.
We think that her red experience is physical because it occurs at a place and time, and is identifiable by it’s causal role – it is the red experience related to the apple on the nightstand in the first light of morning on 7/2/2000 which began Mary’s red thoughts and experiences, which are forever conditioned by that first view of the apple.
I don’t see how you peel her experience away from the causal relation which allows an explanatory reduction for her experience. And if you can’t do that, then I think you are stuck calling it physical – or you can begin to call quantum vacuums, probability fields, etc. non-physical. I don’t think you escape monism in any case.
I believe physicalism is still leaning against the wall out back, smoking a cigarette, while substance dualism in the boys room trying to straighten out its swirly. But, I am not a philosopher.
BTW, you must be a good typist as well as a quick thinker. This thread contains some pretty extensive responses!
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Gordon Hawkes
October 11, 2015
Hi Keith,
You’ve appropriated my metaphor! I’m offended! But, you’ve got it wrong: Substance dualism is confidently relaxing on the beach while Physicalism is pulling his hair out in the lab. (Some will tell you that this only emphasizes how little work Substance dualism does, but I say it’s because Substance dualism knows that Physicalism will be the author of his own demise, smoking too much because of the stress, smiling for the public but living a lie behind closed doors, constantly faced with his failure ad infinitum to solve any of the core problems of explaining the human mind.)
Regarding the rest of your comment, nothing you’ve written forces a dualist to concede that Mary’s experience is physical. For instance, you write: “We think that her red experience is physical because it occurs at a place and time, and is identifiable by it’s causal role.” First, some dualists (e.g., those who believe the mind is spatially located) would claim that the experience in the non-physical conscious mind occurs at a place and time, and some (e.g., functionalists) would say that the non-physical experience is identifiable by its causal role. (Yes, oddly enough, functionalism is compatible with both physicalism and dualism.)
Second, and more importantly, no dualist that I know of would deny that it is a physical chain of causes that leads to Mary’s experience of red. They simply deny that the experience itself is physical. You also write, “I don’t see how you peel her experience away from the causal relation which allows an explanatory reduction for her experience.” This seems to assume that there is a reductive explanation of her experience. So far as I know, there isn’t. (Please let me know if you know of one.)
Substance Dualism has left the beach to go play some tennis. 😉
P.S. You seemed to ignore my question about empiricism. I don’t see how Jackson’s argument relates to it, but please don’t feel any need to respond at this point. We’ve gotten very far afield of the purpose of this post.
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keithnoback
October 11, 2015
Yes. I am aware of those arguments. I think they beg the question at issue here: How is the proposed mental substance, a substance, rather than a physical phenomenon – which it admittedly acts like.
A distinction without a difference, unless there is something more to the denial of it’s physicality than the denial itself. Privacy doesn’t do it, I think, if you are tempted to that answer.
Quantum events are ‘private’ in much the same way. We know about them upon (statistical) reflection, as we know of our red experiences as red experiences upon reflection.
Mary’s red experience seems to supervene strongly on the circumstances of its occurrence. Otherwise, her exhaustive knowledge of red’s description should leave her no more surprised at the experience of the apple on her nightstand, than she would be if she encountered the statement “A=A” in her logic textbook.
But she doesn’t have such a generic experience, as she might if the circumstances of her experience simply elicited the activity of a mental thing with its own, separate, internal determinants. Rather, the particular photons impinge on cones in her retina, and a cascade of events catches up with her global, neurological, state of affairs at a unique point in it’s evolution which explains her particular, privately discernible as unique, red experience.
Descartes objected that the correlation of neurological deficits with cognitive deficits proved nothing in regards to the mental substance, like a musician trying to express his talent on a broken instrument, he said. You seem to be putting forward a similar argument here. He was right. The problem is in the apparent uniqueness and malleability of qualitative experience on the basis of its physical contents.
To preserve the mental substance, I think you are left with parallelism.
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Gordon Hawkes
October 12, 2015
Keith, tell me if this would be an accurate summary of what you’re getting at in the previous post: “Since qualitative (phemonenal) experience is so closely correlated with the physical story, and since the proposed ‘mental substance’ appears to function just like a physical substance, there needs to be some compelling reason (aside from the failure of correlations to establish identity) to understand the ‘mental substance’ as non-physical. So even though we might not know how the physical mind works, we have no compelling reason to believe that the mind is a causally relevant non-physical substance.”
I know that might be way off the mark of what you’re getting at, but, admittedly, I was having a little difficulty understanding. It seems to me that if we continued this back and forth, we’d eventually end up at a point where I would present 1) a list of essential features of physical substances, and 2) a list of features of the mind that, I would argue, do not share the essential features of the physical. I’m planning on posting arguments in the future that follow such a structure.
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keithnoback
October 14, 2015
I’m suggesting something a little stronger, but not too far off. Rather than get further into the weeds, I’ll wait to see where you are going with this.
Thanks for the conversation, it has made me think about how I formulate my thoughts on this matter and the shape of the substance dualist position.
Very helpful.
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Lage
October 7, 2015
I think it’s worth mentioning that I do think that property dualism is a much more reasonable position to argue for, as stronger arguments can be made that mind and brain at least have distinct properties, even if they are in fact made of the same substance (substance monism). However, one could reject property dualism as well by simply showing that what one is calling “mental properties” are really just a special subset of physical properties anyway. Because they (mental properties or minds) are so unique, complex, and because we are so much more ignorant of the exact physical mechanisms that give rise to these “mental properties” as opposed to all other “physical properties” and objects, many just think we should distinguish the two by creating a new category/label.
I think this is analogous to how scientific conceptions about the physical world changed with the advent of quantum mechanics (QM). For example, the idea of superposition also seems to be “non-physical” in a way since one common physical property of objects are that they have a specific location. The idea of an “object” being in more than one place at the same time, let alone in every place at the same time, seems absurd, and in a sense, sounds a lot more like a non-physical substance that is able to possess some kind of (seemingly supernatural) omnipresence. However, after QM gained wide acceptance, we simply adjusted our category of “physical properties” to accommodate for new properties discovered such as superposition, entanglement, ontological uncertainty, etc. Because we are able to use these properties to describe phenomena in a way that has new and better predictive power and that is compatible with other known physics, we are warranted in doing so. I think the same thing applies to the mind or “mental properties”, where we are really just describing physical properties that are somewhat alien or counter-intuitive, just like properties in QM. Time will tell if we are able to bridge this gap of knowledge with empirical tests to learn more about how to translate or better explain mental properties and how they can be based on a physical substrate. I’m optimistic that we’ll get there someday, just as we did with QM.
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Gordon Hawkes
October 8, 2015
“Time will tell if we are able to bridge this gap of knowledge with empirical tests to learn more about how to translate or better explain mental properties and how they can be based on a physical substrate. I’m optimistic that we’ll get there someday, just as we did with QM.”
The more I think about it, the more it seems that physicalists are guilty of a “God of the gaps” type argument. I take dualists to be arguing from what we DO know, namely, we have 1) intentionality, 2) consciousness, 3) self identity at a time and across time, 4) unity of consciousness, 5) rationality, …and so on–to the conclusion that we are a non-physical substance.
But physicalists seem to be making an argument from what we don’t know (we don’t know how 1) through 5) and onward could be physical) to the conclusion that all of reality is in fact physical.
I’d love to know what you think about this, Lage, but perhaps I should make this a new post and we could discuss it there. Do you think the thought worth a more thorough explanation?
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Lage
October 8, 2015
“The more I think about it, the more it seems that physicalists are guilty of a “God of the gaps” type argument. I take dualists to be arguing from what we DO know, namely, we have 1) intentionality, 2) consciousness, 3) self identity at a time and across time, 4) unity of consciousness, 5) rationality, …and so on–to the conclusion that we are a non-physical substance.”
I wholly disagree. A “God of the gaps” argument is simply an argument from ignorance where one posits that incomplete knowledge of the mechanism of a phenomena somehow supports that magic is responsible, or some black box, or some other substance (such as dualists believe). Physicalists instead simply assert that because there are no good reasons to believe that anything other than the physical world exists with all its internal causal relationships, etc., since all physical evidence supports nothing but a physical world, that there is no good reason to believe that the mind is an exception to this empirically demonstrable precedent.
What dualists argue from is not what we know, but rather what their loaded descriptions produce. There are huge disagreements about how intentionality, consciousness, etc., should be defined, and as such, the way people define these terms often incorporates their dualist presuppositions rather than stemming from evidence and well-defined terms based on that evidence.
“But physicalists seem to be making an argument from what we don’t know (we don’t know how 1) through 5) and onward could be physical) to the conclusion that all of reality is in fact physical.”
What (skeptical) physicalists seem to be doing is saying that they REJECT the claim that there is another substance responsible for 1) through 5) since there are no good reasons or evidence to support the existence of this separate substance (if it is even falsifiable and detectable/measurable in principle, which it may not be). Thus, physicalists assume that everything fits in line with what has been demonstrated sufficiently thus far unless proven otherwise (i.e. the physical causal closure, supervenience, etc.). If they are more skeptical physicalists (such as myself), they’d likely hold that they don’t know that the mind is based on physical properties, but they have no good reason to believe it is based on something else.
“I’d love to know what you think about this, Lage, but perhaps I should make this a new post and we could discuss it there. Do you think the thought worth a more thorough explanation?”
I’d be willing to talk about it more in another post, unless we are able to wrap it up in a couple responses here. Always a pleasure either way…
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Gordon Hawkes
October 9, 2015
I’ll likely take this up in another post. We’ve already gotten very far afield from the original purpose of this post!
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Francis
October 7, 2015
Thank you for this post. Honestly, I partly agree with you. Although I have prefer to have a scientific perspective on most aspects of the universe, I like to think of the mind as something different from the physical world; not necessarily a detached one, or a strictly non-physical one, but more like an intertwined force).
“One common objection to substance dualism—though much less common among philosophers of mind—is the objection from the success of neuroscience in discovering tight correlations between the functioning of the mind and the functioning of the physical brain. One gets the impression that new neural correlates for mental processes are being discovered almost daily. […] The real question to be answered in the debate is, Are mental processes identical with, or supervenient upon, the physical processes of the brain?”
That’s a great question. The fact that neuroscience is developing an understanding of physical processes in the brain does not automatically attribute to these the ability to claim that they’re the nature of the qualitative aspects of consciousness/the mind.
I subscribed to your blog in the meantime; I’m waiting for part 2.
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Gordon Hawkes
October 8, 2015
Hi Francis,
It may interest you to know that there are a wide variety of forms of substance dualism. Thomistic dualists, for example, are sympathetic to your view that “mind” or “soul” is not some radically different or separate substance from the physical body, as in Descartes’ view. They understand it, very roughly speaking, more like how the (Aristotelian) “form” of the chair is not the “material” substance of the chair, but is nonetheless inseparable from the the chair.
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Francis
October 8, 2015
I never heard of Thomistic dualism, and it was very interesting to find that there is a philosophical current that defines my thought quite closely.
Thank you very much for your comment!
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Travis R
October 8, 2015
Gordon,
As a commenter on your introductory post I’m glad to see a follow-up and look forward to future installments.
For this post, I’d like to key in on the distinction you make about separability. At what point do failures to demonstrate separability warrant the presumption of identity? In a prior discussion with a dualist I compared modern dualism to Sagan’s invisible dragon. It seems that no matter what neuroscience finds, the dualist can always retreat to some undetectable characterization that remains compatible with the findings. It has become an unfalsifiable hypothesis. Conversely, dualism could be easily proven if somebody can demonstrate the separation of mind and brain. I’m OK with suspending certainty on just about everything, but if we consistently fail to demonstrate separation then aren’t we justified in saying that non-identity is extremely unlikely?
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Gordon Hawkes
October 8, 2015
Hi Travis,
Glad to see you back for my follow-up post. (It was a long time coming.) Your question is a good one. Two–or rather, too many–thoughts come immediately to mind:
First, conceivability arguments don’t seem to be able to prove positive identity claims. Just because two things can be conceived together, doesn’t mean they are identical. That said, regarding your question at the end, I think we would be justified in claiming identity IF (1) non-identity had not been demonstrated, AND (2) it were plausible that the two things (e.g., mental and physical processes) were identical and we had good reasons to think they are identical.
But, I don’t think it is, in fact, plausible that mental and physical processes are identical, and I don’t think we have good reasons to think they’re identical. Quite the opposite.
If it were in fact the case that dualists have failed over and over to demonstrate that mind and body are distinct, that would be one thing. But as things currently stand, the problem seems to be precisely the opposite: it doesn’t even seem conceivable (at least to me, along with Colin McGinn and many others) how the mind could be a physical process. For example, it doesn’t seem plausible in the least that my brain cells are “about” things, or “true of” things in the world, in the way my thoughts are “about” or “true of” things. Or that separable physical parts of my brain somehow constitute the unified experience of consciousness I have.
If neuroscience were able to demonstrate how consciousness works in a physical way, how physical processes could be intentional, how divisible physical parts could account for my seemingly indivisible unity of consciousness, etc.–well, then, sign me up for physicalism. But I understand many of the arguments for dualism as saying that it is impossible that physicalism EVEN IN PRINCIPLE account for the mental phenomena we observe and experience.
Second, Leibniz’s principle of the indiscernibility of identicals is helpful for establishing that two things are not identical. Dualists often use Leibniz’s principle to argue for dualism. If x=y, then x has all the same properties as y (and vice versa). If my mind is identical to physical processes in my brain, then my mind will share all the same properties as physical processes in my brain. But…(and here’s one such argument)… the contents of my consciousness are accessible only to me from my first-person perspective, but the physical processes of my brain are accessible (assuming adequate technology) to anyone. Therefore, my conscious mind is not the physical processes in my brain.
Third, you were entirely correct, I think, to demur toward a dualism that holds on against all evidence, and that merely tacks on an unnecessary additional entity. For instance, if one explained boiling water as “the result of kinetic energy reaching a level that causes the water molecules to break certain bonds….Oh, and invisible leprechauns blowing through straws into the water”, I think we’re more than reasonable to ignore the leprechauns.
But I don’t think dualism is doing this in the least. In fact, I think it’s physicalism that more often ignores the most salient elements of our mental life. (I will, eventually, write a more formal post defending dualism.)
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Travis R
October 8, 2015
Hi Gordon,
I’ll go ahead and accept your two justification criteria:
For #1, I think we agree that non-identity has not been demonstrated for mind and brain – correct?
For #2, we’ve entered very nebulous territory with terms like “plausibility” and “good reasons”. Regardless, let’s dig in. You say that “it doesn’t seem plausible in the least that my brain cells are “about” things, or “true of” things in the world, in the way my thoughts are “about” or “true of” things.” but wouldn’t this be a moot point if “aboutness” and “true of” are themselves also brain states? Certainly the physicalist is not operating under the assumption that those were platonic entities in themselves.
What does your unified experience of consciousness think about the data from split-brain patients?
Yes, accessibility is quite the limitation. As is the differentiation between our brains due to experiential history. But let’s run a thought-experiment. Suppose we had the technology to record the brain states during a particular subjective experience and then collected the first-person report of that experience. Then we have another magical technology that gives you the same sequence of brain states (while magically retaining your unique personhood) and you give an identical report of the experience. Does this constitute any evidence for identity? If not, what would? If so, would you also agree that neuroscience has trended in a direction consistent with the results of that thought-experiment?
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Gordon Hawkes
October 9, 2015
Regarding #1 and #2: If I denied the non-identity between apples and oranges, how would you convince me that they are not identical? I assume you’d simply point and say, “Look. They’re two distinct things.” I think the non-identity between mind and body is as obvious and self-evident as that. “Look. That neural firing we’re watching in Hannibal Lecter’s victim’s brain… that’s not the fear that the Ray Liotta character is feeling.”
But, I’m open to being convinced otherwise. Can you give me a good reason that I should believe that the conscious, rational mind is, in fact, identical with physical processes in the brain? (A reason other than an objection to substance dualism, and other than the assumption that physicalism will come through in the end [e.g., “It’s always succeeded in the past!”)
Regarding your thought experiment, I think that it only illustrates all the more clearly that there is no identity between the brain states and the subjective experience. Notice that in your own construction of the experiment, you have to take the recorded brain states (which you have 3rd person access to) and create those brain states in your own brain in order to have the subjective experience (which you only have 1st person access to). But if the experience and the brain states were identical, then they would both have the same properties. Again, if one has properties that the other does not have, then they must not be identical. You made it clear that the brain states could be recorded, you have access to them, but the experience–that is something that you only have first-person access to. Are those not distinct properties?
Perhaps we are talking at cross purposes, but please let me know if you concede or deny that the EXPERIENCE and the BRAIN STATES have distinct properties from each other (e.g., first-person access vs. third-person access).
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Travis R
October 10, 2015
Gordon,
I think that the 1st person \ 3rd person question is the key. But let me work up to that by addressing your other questions:
This analogy doesn’t work for me because apples and oranges are both experienced from outside the system. The perceptual framework for making the distinction is consistent and so we can know that our ability to assess the properties is the same for both. This really makes it difficult to come up with a sufficient analogy for defending either identity or non-identity for the mind \ brain question.
I can’t offer anything except correlation. But I think it is a pretty strong correlation. And as best I can tell, correlation is the only kind of reason we ever have to make identity claims about anything. And this brings us to the big question:
I concede that they have distinct properties, but I deny that this defeats identity. The problem is that in order for the distinction to be a defeater for claims of identity, we have to have access to all properties from all perspectives. With apples and oranges there is only one perspective and so we can do this. With consciousness, however, there are two mutually-exclusive perspectives – the view from within the system and the view from outside the system. If both views are incomplete than it might appear that they are viewing different things. Granted, you can also use that distinction to assert that they actually are different things, but I think that position has a much harder time dealing with the other concerns of correlation, interaction, origin of consciousness, prospects of artificial intelligence and, ultimately as a result of the ad hoc assumptions needed to explain all these things – Ockham’s razor.
For reasons I can’t really explain, I have no problem with the prospect that the view from within the system is going to look very different from the view from outside. Can you explain why this is flawed? Why should I think that there aren’t just two perspectives on the same thing. To further inform that question, I encourage you to consider the case of the rabbit-duck illusion. We can switch between recognizing one or the other – sometimes very quickly – but we never see both at the same time. Does this mean it is not just one picture?
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Gordon Hawkes
October 11, 2015
Hi Travis,
You write: “I concede that they have distinct properties, but I deny that this defeats identity. The problem is that in order for the distinction to be a defeater for claims of identity, we have to have access to all properties from all perspectives.” You seem to be making either two contradictory claims or a perfectly reasonable claim.
Interpreted as a reasonable claim, you are saying that they only SEEM to have distinct properties, but they really don’t. They are in fact the same, numerically identical thing. They SEEM to have distinct properties because we are looking at the same thing from two different perspectives.
Why is this notion of a “view from within” and the “view from outside” a problem?
For a simple reason: You are subtly appealing to a dualist notion of a non-physical self that has no place in physicalism. There is no “inside” or “within the system.” There is no YOU that is “in” there looking out. What is the implied perceiver that has “two…perspectives”? The system is merely a collection of physical bits, a complex arrangement of atoms, and these bits are directly observable. But, as you’ve described it, the “experience from the inside” is both unobservable, and is had by something other than the parts themselves.
You acknowledge the striking dissimilarity between the “experience from the inside” and the “view from outside” looking at the experiencer’s physical parts when you insist on the “two mutually-exclusive perspectives”. This only serves to emphasize my point: we seem to be discussing two radically different sorts of things. Why insist they are the same thing when they seem so radically different?
Again, I don’t think you or anyone else has given a good reason that I should believe the physical bits and their physical relations just are the conscious experience, or just are the Self that “I” am. And I think Leibniz’s principle establishes non-identity between the mind and body. (But allow me to post a more formal argument and we can carry on the current discussion there.)
I’m glad you referenced Ockham’s razor. I’ll be posting my response to that objection to substance dualism next.
Lastly, regarding the rabbit and duck illustration, the first thought that occurs to me is that we aren’t switching between distinct visual experiences of the same thing. All of the dimensions, colours, etc., will remain constant when we “switch” between duck and rabbit in our mind. In other words, none of the properties of the physical thing we see change; rather, it’s what is represented that changes. The lines on the page MEAN something different when we take it to represent a duck instead of a rabbit. Here is a parallel case: looking at the Baskin Robbins logo and “switching” between seeing “B R” and “31”. Visually you are stimulated by the same image, but you are switching in your mind between two different interpretations, two distinct meanings, of the symbols. An audio example would be misheard lyrics. My personal favourite: Rolling Stones, “Start Me Up” heard as saying, “In Yugoslavia…In Yugoslavia you’ll never starve.” What is being heard is (for sake of argument) the same in every hearer’s ears, but the mind can interpret the sensations as symbols, and the interpretations can vary. I remember fellow students in grade six French saying “seal” in French, because any English speaker would immediately interpret it as a certain swear word.
Since I take the interpretation of meaning (intentionality) to be a function of the non-physical mind, this fits with my view. The physical image stays the same. The interpretation in the mind “switches” back and forth. That is to say, the physical image of the duck and and the physical image of the rabbit are numerically identical, but the two distinct meanings or representations in the (non-physical) mind are not.
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Travis R
October 11, 2015
Gordon,
I’m not appealing to a ghost in the machine who is having the experience from the inside. You seem to have completely ignored the possibility of self-reference. Contrary to what you think I was describing, the experience from the inside actually is had by the parts themselves. And since that is what consciousness is, it is also the vehicle by which the view from outside is experienced, as delivered by sense stimuli. The view from outside is dependent on and concurrent with the view from inside. It was a mistake for me to say that they are mutually-exclusive, but that’s rather irrelevant to the point.
As noted in the previous comment, I prefer the “two views” identity hypothesis over dualism because I think it does a better job of explaining “correlation, interaction, origin of consciousness, prospects of artificial intelligence and, ultimately as a result of the ad hoc assumptions needed to explain all these things – Ockham’s razor”. I know you intend to deal with those in subsequent posts, so my intent here was to focus on correlation (i.e., neuroscience) which really boils down to Ockham’s razor: if we see strong correlation between the physical and the experiential, and we agree that the physical exists and have a theory which doesn’t posit an additional substance (which I think the “two views hypothesis” does), then that is preferable to a theory which posits an additional substance. The other extreme would of course be idealism, which ushers in other problems but appears to fare better than dualism on these particular criteria in that it eliminates the concerns from correlation and interaction.
I did not intend for the rabbit-duck to be a complete analogy. As suggested in the previous comment, I actually doubt that we can offer a sufficient analogy to argue either for or against identity in the mind \ brain question because all of our analogies will ultimately rely on a singular third-person perspective. Regardless, the goal there was to cast doubt on the supposition that to experience something in two distinct ways requires non-identity.
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Gordon Hawkes
October 11, 2015
Hi Travis, these comments are helpful to me. They clarify for me your view of the “two perspectives.” I’m looking forward to hopefully hearing what you think of my response to the Ockham’s razor objection.
I think our two distinct perspectives–that is, your perspective and mine–come down to whether or not we think physicalism can possibly account for the mind. If it were the case that all things were equal between physicalism and dualism, I would agree with you. Hopefully I’ll see you on the next post!
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Travis R
October 12, 2015
Gordon,
It’s Travis, not Keith, but I’ll forgive it since you have several conversations going at once. I’m glad we at least appear to have reached an understanding. Looking forward to the next installment.
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Gordon Hawkes
October 12, 2015
I had to edit it out of embarrassment!
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