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Posts tagged with substance dualism

Jun 5, 2012

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Ghostbusters of the Mind Part 2

In the first part of my look at dualism I explained how an apt use of Bayesian reasoning offers a knock-down argument against belief in dualism but simple careful reasoning shows us why the conversation about probabilities needn’t be had. There are fundamental problems with attributing consciousness to a non-physical substance.

There are two common objections to substance dualism in principle. The first is it’s not clear what the alternative to physical entities is supposed to be as saying “non-physical substance” is a bit like saying “non-wet liquid.” The second, and likely intractable, problem is called the mind-body problem which asks how a non-physical substance and a physical substance are supposed to interact. However these two issues are merely a side-effects of accepting a broken framework.

Substance dualism is not an explanation for consciousness at all, and couldn’t hope to be one, but instead has all of the familiar properties of nonexplanations. It posits an ineffable entity, the non-physical substance (whatever that is!), which claims to account for a complex phenomenon, consciousness, but leaves that phenomenon still completely in mystery. Indeed many dualists cherish this mystery, mistaking our current ignorance for mystery being an inherent property of consciousness. This wallowing in ignorance combined with an ineffable substance which is supposed to account for some mysterious biological trait has has a strong historical parallel, it’s called vitalism. Just as vitalism tried to account for the “property of life” by appealing to the mysterious elan vital, dualism attempts to account for consciousness by appealing to the mysterious non-physical substance.

Neither account has the possibility of progress because they declared their respective phenomena as inherently mysterious. More importantly neither vitalism nor dualism predicts anything testable at all and offers only a proper name in place of a predictive model. While this may offer the illusion of an explanation, with no predictive power behind the theories they amount to being able to explain any outcome which means they really explain nothing. Most simply if we can’t test or even observe the “non-physical substance” said to be the seat of consciousness this is no different from saying “consciousness is magic.” Of course anyone who openly argued consciousness can’t be due to physical processes because consciousness is magic would rightly be laughed at. Whether dualists realize it or not, it seems to me this is indeed what is being proposed.

May 28, 2012

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Ghostbusters of the Mind Part 1

For as long as there has been philosophy there have been arguments about whether everything was ultimately physical or whether human minds may be an exception to this rule. In the time of Plato or even Descartes this could have been a reasonable debate but we don’t live in that age anymore. Since then we have put these ideas to the test. Every time we have found the brain to play a role for some aspect of mental life, whether that be in sensory experience or memory, we have gained reason to believe minds are physical.

Indeed there have been thousands (if not millions) of independent data points and every one of them has fit the physical mind model and every new fact that fits this model is not only makes physicalism more likely it makes the theory that minds have some nonphysical competent less likely. Sure there are things we still don’t understand about the brain and of course one could now argue that the kind of dualism is true just happens to be the variety in which only some portion of the subset of mental life we haven’t yet correlated with the brain is due to the soul. The question is if that’s rational to do? Rational or not, many dualist philosophers have done just that arguing, for example, that they can imagine a “philosophical zombie” who has all the physical and behavioral traits of a human but is not conscious. Whether or not you can imagine such a creature, it should make essentially no difference to our conclusion. That is unless you are to claim that such possibility of imagination is the millions-to-one argument in favor of dualism which would be needed to rescue it from being extremely unlikely.

As Dan Dennett rightly pointed out who would be persuaded in the least by someone who claimed they could imagine a dog with all of it’s biological components functioning but which wasn’t really alive? No one would believe that was a good reason to accept vitalism, the belief in a mysterious life force, and similarly we should dismiss claims of being able to imagine a person with a fully functioning brain but not conscious as equally pitiful. In the face of the overwhelming evidence that has come in exclusively on the side of physical minds we’ve long surpassed the point where belief in dualism is reasonable. In fact this rule applies not just to dualism but beliefs in chakras, qi and a host of other pseudoscientific ideas which still subsist in alternative medicine but which science based medicine has rightfully abandoned.

This is one reason why though I’ve recently addressed several arguments for dualism, the era in which there was still a debate to be had has long since gone. Even if you believe dualism is coherent, which as I’ll explain in the second part of this look at dualism that you shouldn’t, we must consider dualism very unlikely just by considering the evidence neuroscience has gathered over the past few centuries.