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
mind-body duelists? what are they gonna do, send me to the shadow realm?
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
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:
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.
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.
this is the mechanistic materialist position phrased slightly differently.
This is the main framing I’ve seen of physicalism. What’s the “normal” account?
I don’t think anybody really knows. There’s like 10 strains of physicalism and they all use slightly different words to say the same thing. The only one that says something slightly different is physicalist panpsychism that states consciousness is stored in the balls atoms.
In my reading mechanistic materialism connotes ignoring the dialectical nature of something, in this case consciousness. I’m claiming that consciousness arises out of simpler material forces, but as a complex entity with properties that are new and distinct from its parts, and is then able to plug back in and act upon the material.
But it’s very possible I’m using the wrong words or have a limited understanding of the concept.
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 what I’m drawing a distinction between, people give the word “just” a lot of reductive power. Love might be made of chemicals, but those chemicals gain new characteristics when organized in specific ways, to the degree that a new referent/entity comes into existence. Love or consciousness are neither “just” concepts nor “just” the building blocks that comprise them, nor are they essences that exist in some realm alien from the material world they arise from.
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?
“Emergentism” is just a rephrasing of mechanistic materialism, you still claim consciousness exists wholly due to the machinations of the base material reality. Whether you say that consciousness emerges from or literally is base material reality is irrelevant, you’re saying the same thing.
Also “novelty” doesn’t exist in the material world, it exists only in your mind, the thing judging what mechanism is novel or greater than the other is your and other people’s minds so “emergentism” is strictly speaking a property of consciousness, not material reality, you just attribute it to material reality because you’re still fundamentally a vulgar materialist.
How do you personally separate and define things? In my reading and talking with people, there’s a useful distinction between vulgar/mechanistic materialism (which in this context I’m using to signify the “love is just chemicals, free will doesn’t exist since we’re just reactions” concept) and an emergence model of consciousness that sees it as growing from simple material but gaining new properties that the fundamental building blocks didn’t have. One of which is being able to plug back into and influence the material dialectically, or what one might call “free will” or agency.
It’s the idea that consciousness exists as a complex object that can act upon the material, but isn’t separate or alien from the material that it arises from.
It’s the idea that consciousness exists as a complex object that can act upon the material, but isn’t separate or alien from the material that it arises from.
It isn’t though, your idea fundamentally does not differ from vulgar materialism if you don’t give consciousness by itself any agency. You mention “gaining new properties that the fundamental building blocks do not have” but this doesn’t really make sense to me, all the properties gained by the new system are in your mind, the qualitative leap from “nothing has emerged” to “something new emerged” happens within your mind, not in physical reality, in physical reality it’s just the same old atoms. So for that reason to me saying “consciousness is emergent” isn’t really all that different from for example Daniel Dennet’s reductive physicalism where he claims consciousness is illusory, you’re still left with this gaping huge explanatory gap between our quantitative models of the physical world and the qualitative worlds of our minds.
One of which is being able to plug back into and influence the material dialectically, or what one might call “free will” or agency.
But it doesn’t, you’re still claiming material reality is the only causal agent in whole of existence, saying that certain material systems cause emergence of consciousness is just a semantical trick where you gave certain kinds of physical processes a new name, you’re saying the same thing as the vulgar materialists.
To further drive my point: How would you as an emergentist approach researching consciousness differently than a classical vulgar materialist? You’d still probably be gathering a bunch of neural correlates and then try to concoct a mathematical model of the whole thing, no? That’s what people like Daniel Dennett are doing to.
