It’s literally like this:
Materialists/Physicalists: “The thoughts in your head come from your conditions and are ultimately the result of your organs and nervous system. Your consciousness is linked to your brain activity and other parts of your body interacting with the physical real world.”
Dualists: “Ok but what if there were an imaginary zombie that has the same organs and molecular structure as a living person but somehow isn’t alive on some metaphysical level. If this zombie is conceivable, that means it must be metaphysically true somehow.”
Materialists: “That’s circular and imaginary, isn’t it?”
Other dualists: “Ok but what if I were in a swamp and lightning strikes a tree and magically creates a copy of me but it’s not actually me because it doesn’t have my soul.”
Am I reading this stuff wrong or are these actually the best arguments for mind-body dualism
A lot of dualist arguments are tedious BS thrown up to try to debatebro save Christian conceptions of the soul. That said the just-so Physicalist model is smug and shallow. We’re a collective system of conscious language-using subjects creating a model that we map onto our experiences. Reality fundamentally consists of both the observer(s) and the material reality, you literally can’t have one without the other. The Physicalist construction of a material world without consciousness, or consciousness as an illusion is every bit as flimsy as ideas of philosophical zombies, maybe worse. The reason dualists end up creating such ridiculous thought experiments is because they’re trying to smuggle in free will or some kind of metaphysical soul concept, and so they latch onto what is one of these inescapable gotchas of philosophy. The model is not reality, but it is all we have access to, and so we’re stuck as unhappy Platonists. The best we can do is complain it’s all a non-sequitur and a waste of time. It reminds me of reading Plotinus drone on about “the One” and how it was all a clever, inexhaustible trick of reason that just worked. There’s no true philosophy, it’s just a matter of where you do your hand-waiving to hide the fact that we’re fundamentally limited in our ability to construct a coherent, self-consistent model of the world. It’s like Quantum Physics, people would rather fantasize about implications that can allow them to believe in free will and souls than accept the fact that there’s a hard wall preventing us from understanding reality at a certain level.
What did Wittgenstein mean by this?
dualists and mechanistic materialists alike need to read up on emergence / emergent phenomena
complex arrangements of simple things can produce new mechanisms that are greater and more novel than their parts. consciousness is a great example of this. just because it’s currently too complex to fully define and pinpoint doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, or exists separate from the body that it emerges from.
That’s where I stand but it’s hard to even talk about that when most discussions on the topic wind up being hog wrestling in the reductionistic mud of “love is just chemicals” :reddit-logo: takes. :sadness:
Disclaimer: Love is technically chemicals if we must go there but the implication that it somehow makes love not real or invalid is pure :reddit-logo: :brainworms:
Love is just chemicals the same way a child is just carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous and hydrogen. The “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting and it’s pointlessly reductive.
I’ve sometimes used a puppy as a metaphor: “yes a puppy is a bunch of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, and hydrogen, and is worth less than a dollar of those chemicals in their most elemental forms. Or it’s a puppy.”
It gets the point across to all but the most :reddit-logo: brained smuglords who will continue to focus on the former as a sort of emotional stake in being as supposedly unemotional as possible, anyway. :very-intelligent:
yeah that’s where I’m at, I don’t think consciousness has a good explanation yet, but the very direct dualist explanation of it somehow being something non-physical that’s riding along with a body just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Non-physical things have never been observed, so how would it fit into any explanation of anything?
Non-physical things have never been observed
This is kind of an interesting statement, because if something is directly observable, is it not, by definition, a physical thing?
There’s a bit of ambiguity in some cases between what is and isn’t physically existant. Do nation-states physically exist? In a sense, yes, we can say the United States exists, we can go there and point to the land and say, “See, it’s right there!” But in another sense, it’s made up, it’s a social construct, if everyone in the world decided that that land area was not the United States and there’s no such country, then I think we’d all agree that it doesn’t exist any more. So if the United States is a social and mental construct, then does that mean it doesn’t physically exist? But we can observe physical effects on people living in the US, we can see how life expectancy fell when the government botched the COVID response, surely that’s evidence that the US is real, right? The model of the US existing is a useful tool for being able to predict physical events.
Is this the same or different from, say, a chair? Well, a chair is a collection of atoms (mostly empty space), but what determines which atoms we designate as being part of the chair? It’s based on what’s useful, isn’t it? If a leg breaks off of the chair, we might still say that it’s part of the chair, perhaps because it could be reattached, but if the leg was ground up into sawdust, we’d probably instead say that it used to be part of a chair. We can see then that a chair is really just a grouping of atoms that forms a useful mental construct for humans. If there were no humans, the atoms would still exist in the same arrangement, but would it still be a chair? I think that depends on what thing is observing it and whether it finds it useful to group those atoms in the same way. Chairs are a social construct, don’t @ me.
So rather than interpreting dualism as some sort of semi-physical ghost riding around with a body, isn’t it possible to interpret it as consciousness being a useful enough construct that it can be said to exist as a separate thing? And while yes, we can observe how changes in the physical world (like hunger) lead to changes in consciousness, we can also see how changes in the mental world can influence the physical (changes in blood pressure based on what you’re thinking about for example).
Futhermore, we can argue that consciousness emerges from the physical world, but we could also argue that the physical world emerges from consciousness. Our understanding of the physical world is fundamentally rooted in our senses, and if we were cut off from our senses, then we would have no means of understanding or interacting with it. It could be said that the world we interact with is really more of a world of concepts, and our bodies can be observed to alter what we sense to make more sense to use before we actually experience it, the difference between sensation and perception. And so what even is the physical world? The world of atoms? But aren’t atoms just models that help us to navigate and understand the world that we actually interact with? Earlier, I said that when we refer to a chair, we are grouping together a certain arrangement of atoms, creating a concept out of the physical. But in reality, don’t we start with the chair, and then study it’s properties to learn more about the concept that we already created? I don’t know that there’s an objective answer to that, of which is more “real” and what “emerges” from what - it seems like it’s a matter of perspective.
I don’t necessarily agree with dualism and idk if my line of thinking is compatible with it or not but I’m not sure that a strict physicalist approach is objectively compelling.
Non-physical things have never been observed, so how would it fit into any explanation of anything?
Well if you can entertain the idea that non-physical things might exist then you’re observing a non-physical thing at every point of your existence, your own consciousness. What better candidate for the non-physical than consciousness itself?
If you’re talking about Rene “uh ackually, the immaterial soul steers the material body through the pituitary gland despite being immaterial” Descartes dualism, yeah it’s pretty much garbage. They can never explain how something immaterial can not only interact but dominate something material. The idea of the immaterial dominating the material has insidious implications. This is why settlers constantly paint Indigenous people and Asians to a lesser extend as noble savages “close to nature.” Being close to nature is to say they’re more bestial and lower in the great chain of being compared with the cerebral European whose closer proximity to God means they are more distant from nature. Their alleged distance from God means the God given rights of life, liberty, and most importantly, property did not apply to them, giving settlers ideological carte blanche to steal land from the Indigenous and genocide Indigenous peoples in the same way you get rid of termites eating your house.
“Everything is possible with sheer infinite willpower” takes are also the basis of sigma grindset :brainworms: and lots of :libertarian-approaching: delusions in general.
the point of those thought experiments is to illustrate that the experiential components of a living beings existence (known to philosophy nerds as Qualia) are not necessary to explain the biological/physical phenomenon of life. a computer can process information too but it doesnt experience it as far as we can tell. even phenomenon like the weather can be considered an information processing system but we don’t typically attribute consciousness or internal experience to it. hypothetically you could therefore have had humans or other life that behave in all the same ways and do the same information processing tasks but without an internal experience of their existence, and the fact that we dont have that but we have us instead may mean consciousness is more than just information processing or illusion. its not strictly an argument for dualism, but as part of the discourse against a physicalist materialist conception of consciousness as illusion, or information processing. personally i think consciousness is somehow fundamental to existence in ways we dont understand, like space, time, or matter, and even phenomena from subatomic particles to stars might have an incomprehensible-to-humans internal experience of some kind.
dan dennett is not a dualist, but a physicalist
dan dennett is the most annoying person on the planet
it’s not likely that the most annoying person on the planet has a correct theory of mind
physicalism is likely not true
qed
“If it turns out that our species is wiped out by atomic weapons, that makes the field of nuclear physics false” -Dan Dennett, basically
“The first thing conscious beings experience before they can so much as observe tangible scientific instruments, consciousness itself, is an illusion. You can totally trust everything after that illusion though, bro. Trust me bro.” :morshupls:
Also he flew with :epstein:
Got em
death to america
mind-body duelists? what are they gonna do, send me to the shadow realm?
A copy of you would be like a biological sibling. Same genes but not you because of slightly or largely different experiences
The way dualists explain it is what if there was a magical copy of you that also can’t think. It would go about its existence behaving like you through contrivance, but since it can’t think, it’s actually just a biological coincidence of random molecules appearing to be you and acting like you.
This is supposed to disprove the materialist conception of consciousness, because the claim is that if materialism were true, there would be no distinction between you and a coincidental copy that’s exactly like you except for your mental states
I feel like a thought experiment that begins from the premise that physical systems don’t actually work or do anything so through random chance a pile of dead wood with no actual biomechanical systems could produce an ongoing perfect mimicry of a person is basically just saying “oh yeah, but what if there was literal magic and physics didn’t actually do anything, what about that huh? What if we’re just squishy meat ghosts instead, and logs can walk and talk if imagine at them hard enough?”
One can arrive at any conclusion one desires by just presupposing a world where a hand picked set of rules are true (that’s what neoclassical economists do, for example) but that doesn’t make those imagined rules true or in any way support their conclusion. Like yes, if magic were real and you could separate out the core of someone’s being and allow it to exist and operate independent of their flesh, then you would be existing in a world where you could do that, but seeing as you cannot the only reasonable conclusion is that the condition of “literal magic” is not present.
You’re saying it perfectly. I don’t know why I’m offering even a little respect to these premises they came up with. I was told they were the best things dualists have, and they are just magical fantasy scenarios. And yet philosophers like David Chalmers and John Searle are considered geniuses in their field. How do these people have careers if their entire philosophy boils down to belief in literal otherworldly magic?
I mean the only relevant critique is the Hard Problem of Consciousness , which doesn’t really contradict materialism as such, just its crudest forms (i.e. feelings of love are just chemicals in the brain durrr hurrrr)
From the SEP
The How question thus subdivides into a diverse family of more specific questions depending upon the specific sort or feature of consciousness one aims to explain, the specific restrictions one places on the range of the explanans and the criterion one uses to define explanatory success. Some of the resulting variants seem easier to answer than others. Progress may seem likely on some of the so called “easy problems” of consciousness, such as explaining the dynamics of access consciousness in terms of the functional or computational organization of the brain (Baars 1988). Others may seem less tractable, especially the so-called “hard problem” (Chalmers 1995) which is more or less that of giving an intelligible account that lets us see in an intuitively satisfying way how phenomenal or “what it’s like” consciousness might arise from physical or neural processes in the brain.
This seems more sensible if I’m reading it right. It’s saying that “hard science” types of things about consciousness are simple to explain because they have a source, like neurons and parts of the brain. But more difficult would be the more ephemeral parts of what consciousness is like from the point of view of a conscious person? Or am I confused
That’s exactly how I understand it. We can get the “scientific” explanation of how visual stimuli arrive at the brain. But the question of how visual stimuli are perceived and felt - what it means to see a flower in a phenomenal sense rather than a scientific sense - is far harder to “prove” or ground in a material conception of consciousness. Basically, how does my feeling of hunger come about from the stimuli that are causing hunger (which are material and scientific)
this line of questions actually tickles my interest and I’m gonna look into it more
:stalin-feels-good:
I’ll admit my reading might be wrong btw. The way I see it tho is that it’s really the question of how the scientific neural stimuli we understand as key to our experience of the world become “consciousness” as we understand it - and there’s no clear answer to it.
Granted I’m very influenced by people like Andy Clark and the idea of “extended mind” (i.e. our minds aren’t merely the meat in our brains), so I’m a bit ideosyncratic
Personally I don’t think it makes any sense.
But what I think is just a hallucination caused by the matter and the energy imparted upon that matter when everything came into existence, which we’re just seeing unfold in exactly the way that it always would have :edgeworth-shrug:
Determinism is just Calvinism for nihilists
Determinism is just Calvinism for nihilists
In everyday practice, especially when it’s brought up in an unsolicited way, yeah pretty much. It’s related to the “love is just chemicals, relationships are all transactions” crowd and has a lot of overlap of being abrasive and smug and reductionistic.
I’d argue with capital-D Determinists, but there’s no point because the outcome of the argument is ostensibly predetermined anyway, even though acting and behaving like it’s predetermined also changes the outcome and in general people are happier and better off not humoring determinism in their everyday lives to begin with. :the-more-you-know:
which we’re just seeing unfold in exactly the way that it always would have
For now, I subscribe to the notion that the uncertainty in physical theories of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics is not a mere consequence of our mathematical models but a feature of the underlying reality. Maybe someone will find a better theory that unmasks what I think modern physics considers to be intrinsically random process in QM as epistemic (i.e., our model is flawed). That kind of development would be world-changing and might really upset Penrose lol.
Cartesianism and its consequences have been a disaster for philosophy
Full agree, but I’ll raise you one more that it’s Platonism that really started the trash fire.
Desecrates does have a special evil though :france-cool:
Desecrates
:yes-hahaha-yes-l:
:anarchist-occult:
“Descartes” is disposal in Portuguese, so a pile of trash can be called pilha de descartes. Descartes is therefore trash, QED.
