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

  • Cunigulus [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.