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WillowOne's Positions

Mind-body dualism

My Positions

  1. Mind and consciousness are emergent.
    Mental states are emergent properties: they arise from complex physical systems that have certain characteristics (for example the brain).
  2. The mind depends on the brain.
    The mind cannot exist without a physical substrate, and in every case we know of that substrate is a brain. There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. (That the substrate must be physical does not mean it must be biological; see Substrate Independence.)
  3. Conscious experience is brain-state dependent.
    Conscious experiences correspond to, and change with, changes in brain states.
  4. I therefore reject substance dualism, the view associated with René Descartes that mind and matter are two distinct kinds of thing.

Notes

  1. Early life probably reacted to stimuli without experiencing or thinking about them. Later, organisms developed systems that modelled their own states in order to regulate their reactions, and the operation of those systems, felt from the inside, is consciousness. On this view, consciousness is what certain kinds of information processing feel like from the inside, and it was selected for because an organism that models its own states can regulate them better.
  2. The interaction problem. If the mind is non-physical, it is unclear how it could cause anything physical to happen, or be affected by anything physical. Every physical effect we have ever traced has a physical cause. A non-physical mind would either violate the conservation of energy or be causally inert, in which case it could not be the thing that is reading this.
  3. The evidence from damage. Brain injury, stroke, and dementia alter personality, memory, perception, and moral judgement in specific and predictable ways depending on the region affected (Phineas Gage being the classic case). If the mind were separate from the brain, damage to the brain should affect the mind's expression but not its content. It affects both.
  4. The evidence from chemistry. Anaesthetics switch consciousness off. Psychedelics, antidepressants, and alcohol alter its character. There is no dualist account of why molecules should have these effects on something immaterial.
  5. Property dualism (the view that mental properties are non-physical properties of physical things) is harder to dismiss but, as far as I can tell, adds nothing. If every mental property is fully determined by a physical state, the claim that it is nonetheless a different kind of property is a claim without consequences, and I set it aside under Popper's Razor.
  6. The thought experiments usually offered in support of dualism (Mary’s Room, Philosophical zombies) establish at most that we cannot currently imagine how experience arises from matter. An argument from what we can imagine is an argument from Personal Incredulity. See my notes on Mary’s Room for why I do not think Mary learns anything about the world.

Personal Context

  1. I am an atheist. Dualism is a load-bearing assumption of most religions, since without a soul there is nothing to be judged, saved, or reincarnated, and so the failure of dualism bears on those claims too (see Life After Death).

Also see