Substance Dualism

[Unga]

I've actually never given thought to it until I read a couple of papers. I guess i'm still pretty used to the idea that my mind belongs to my body and vice versa.. but dualism has got some pretty great arguements on it's side. What do you guys think? For or against, and why

For those who don't know what substance dualism is, it's the distinction between mind and body.

[raeanna74]

Do you mean that the mind is a separate entity in a way?

I'm not sure but what you said made me think of how my grandmother, when she was dying still had all her thinking abilities. She could carry on a deep philosophical conversation with you or peruse the stock reports even while she couldn't even breath well on her own. The body is the shell, the mind is the person. Is this what you are speaking of?

[Unga]

"The body is the shell, the mind is the person. Is this what you are speaking of?"

Yep! Unless you think that the body is the person. I'm kind of new at this. I'm trying to get a better understanding of it and more opinions so i can fix up my paper

[phukraut]

One of the questions that came up with Descartes' version of dualism was just how do the mind and body interact? what process? i could not find an answer to this.

[Macheath]

All of the elements of your mind are copied to a computer. Do you experience a transfer of consciousness to the computer or do you remain a separate entity?

The computer says it is you and answers questions only you would know. You regard the computer as an imposter but it is not; it is most certainly you.

The scientists are conviced the mind transferrence went off flawlessly and euthanise the unneeded human entity. Your consciousness resides in the computer but it is not "you" from your perspective.

From your perspective, the scientists are murdering you, but what can you do? You agreed before the operation that the body would be disposed of. How were you to know that your mind would leave your perspective and objective reality behind in the unneeded body like useless trash; recreating a seamless continuation of your consciousness in the computer.

Decide for yourself how this little scenario relates to the thread. Personally the whole idea terrifies me, but that is the nature of consciousness.

[tecoyah]

Dave....will I dream?

I don't know HAL.

[Unga]

Originally posted by phukraut
One of the questions that came up with Descartes' version of dualism was just how do the mind and body interact? what process? i could not find an answer to this.

Yea, that's just what i'm reading and a paper calling "Difficulties of the Dualist"

[asaris]

I've never given the subject much thought; to the extent I have, I tend towards Searle's emergence theory. That is, the mind 'emerges' from certain combinations of matter kind of like wetness emerges from a conglomeration of water molecules (one water molecule isn't wet). So I'm sort of a property dualist, I guess.

The difficulty with purely non-dualistic theories is that none of them so far really work. It's hard to see how mere electrical impulses and the like can provide us with the sort of mental life we have, with thoughts and sensations and judgments. It goes against some of our basic intuitions to say that there's no difference between the mental and the physical. It just seems clear that a thought is not a physical object. But, of course, dualistic theories, especially substance dualism, have their own flaws, as Unga pointed out.

[CSflim]

Searle's theory is nonsense.
It is a blind reliance on "common sense". Searle needs to realise that common sense is a method not a conclusion. (Applying common-sense-as-conclusion we can rule out Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Evolution and just about everything else as false, on the basis of their counter-intuitively). On first glance it appears that what Searle is saying is a way to explain consciousness, without resorting to either magical dualism a-la Descartes, or resorting to counter-initiative mechanistic explanations. In reality, Searle does nothing of the sort, merely passes things off as being the result of the mystical "causal powers of the brain".
Essentially Searle opposes the idea that functionalist approaches can explain consciousness. Zenon Pylyshyn accurately sums up Searle’s viewpoint as follows:

If more and more of the cells in your brain were to be replaced by integrated circuit chips, programmed in such a way as to keep the input-output function of each unit being replaced, you would in all likelihood just keep right on speaking exactly as you are doing now except you would eventually stop meaning anything by it. What we outside observes might take to be words would become for you just certain noises that circuits caused you to make.

Now perhaps you would agree with this. Perhaps you think that solely on the basis that the new brain is made from silicon it all of a sudden cannot be conscious, as it is made "from the wrong stuff". This is an incredibly anthropocentric outlook on life.
Imagine we were to land a human on mars, and find these green things with "eyes" and "legs" walking around in "cities" and "talking" to each other. We then take a sample of one of them back to the lab for a DNA test, when we discover to our shock that they aren't made of DNA at all! They are made from XNA. And as we all know, life is made from DNA, ergo these green things aren't actually alive at all! They are only falsely putting on the outward appearance of life!
Of course the preceding anecdote is nonsense. What would really happen, is we would then realise that life can exist in substrates other than DNA.
So back to you plus silicon minus neurons. You continue to act as you did. You constantly profess your profound and deep love for your significant other, you write beautiful poetry pondering "the meaning of it all". Perhaps you even log on to TFP to discuss the mind-body problem. And you do all of this without being aware of any of it!?
How do you think this non-you would react to being told that you were going to be put into slavery, on the basis that it's not actually cruel, because you are not really conscious.
How about we stop short of replacing all of your brain, We only replace half of it with circuits. Searle assures us that that would mean that we would only be half conscious. We would experience some of our consciousness fading. We would feel darkness spreading over our minds.
Fair enough, but think about what this would really mean. You would be feeling your mind going, and would be conscious of this happening, yet you wouldn't be able to tell anyone about it. You wouldn't be able to act any differently. You would be having these incredibly strange experiences, yet would be unable to think about them or report them. What does that even mean? Again, we seem to have run into the nonsense barrier.
(For a similar argument by David Chalmers defending his Principle of Organizational Invariance see "Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia").

Perhaps you still want to cling desperately to "Bio-Chauvinism" or "Searlism", and you accept the absurdity that I have explicated above. Can we do this. After all, what's a worldview without a bit of nonsense thrown in, huh?
We I think the killer argument comes when we think about evolution.
How exactly does the evolution of the mind, fit into the Bio-Chauvinistic view? Lets think about this clearly.
Evolution "wants" to create creatures who are successful at reproducing. There is obviously a selection pressure for intelligent behaviour. So evolution goes about "designing" an intelligent creature.
Remember Intelligence is a purely functional thing.
In Searle's view the "causal powers of the brain" are totally separate from the functional aspects of the brain. You have the functional aspects of it (i.e. that which accounts for intelligence and behaviour) and on top of that, somewhere in the neurons there are chemical reactions going on that cause awareness. And since Mother Nature doesn't care about subjective experience (in fact could not even know about it) there is no selection pressure for the brain's "causal powers" only for its functional operation. So when evolution was creating the brain, it was selected for its functional properties, but it's "causal powers" were just a result of random mutation.
John Searle is saying that the reason you are conscious is a pure accident!

I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy it! Intelligence and Consciousness are inextricably linked and you cannot separate one from the other.

[CSflim]

I have scanned in two very short stories, and uploaded them to my website (rather than posting them directly in here). They are both light-hearted, but make their points well.

An Unfortunate Dualist by Raymond Smullyan.

and "They're made of meat" by Terry Bisson.

Perhaps if you don't feel like reading my long-winded rant, you would do better with these.

[asaris]

You argue that consciousness can't be a pure accident, but its not clear why that's the case. Surely a creature that acted exactly as if it were conscious would be just as good from an evolutionary standpoint as a creature that actually was conscious, right?

I would reject the hypothesis that this position entails what you call "bio-chauvinism". (Nice word, btw.) Certainly it's possible, as far as we know, for a silicon 'brain' to be conscious -- I don't know why it wouldn't be. And I don't understand why you insist that the appearance of consciousness is consciousness. It's certainly possible for a creature to appear to be conscious and not actually be conscious. Of course, we have every epistemic right to believe that such a creature is conscious, but we could still be wrong about it. You might object that, according to the Searlian view, only neurons can produce the emergent property 'consciousness'. But certainly that's not necessarily the case, just like it's not just water molecules that produce wetness.

Finally, you criticize me, and to some extent rightly, for relying too much on common sense. It would be an interesting discussion, though probably one best held in another thread, how to use common sense in philosophy. But I would certainly be remiss if I thought our common sense intutions were an infallible guide to the nature of reality. But likewise, the fact that a theory that does violence to our common sense intutions is a good reason to believe it to be false. If an ethical theory told you that, in fact, killing was okay, that we be a good reason to reject the theory, right? I don't see that's it's all that different in philosophy of mind.

edit: Read Chalmer's essay.

Well, I should start off by saying that, off-hand, I don't have any problems with non-reductive functionalism. It's the various reductionisms that I don't like. And, to repeat, just about the only philosophy of mind I've ever done was reading Searle's book Rediscovery of the Mind, and that was over six years ago.

Two difficulties I can see with his argument. First of all, when he discusses 'suddenly disappearing qualia', he seems to assume that large portions of the phenomenal field disappear at a single time, and this is what gives his example a lot of its plausibility. If you assume small chunks of qualia disappearing, it becomes much more plausible. Imagine, as I sit at my desk, that some evil demon is slowly replacing my neurons with silicon chips. At some point, the pen to my left disappears. But, since I need it to grade some papers, I reach for it, and grasp it. I don't do so consciously, however. Certainly it's possible to grasp something without being conscious of it -- think of the experience where you're holding your glasses, and find yourself wondering where they are. Moreover, other than whatever its apparent plausibility might be, Chalmers gives us no real reason to believe his example is more plausible than SD qualia.

The second difficulty is that Chalmers's objection to 'Dancing Qualia' are based on the assumption that qualia would be inverted within the same phenomenology. That is, when the subject's qualia invert, they're replaced by relevantly similar qualia -- colors with colors, for example. But that's not necessarily, or even probably, the case. To turn back to me becoming a robot. At some point, I don't perceive 'yellow' anymore. Instead, I percieve something that can still be distinguished from red, blue, etc., but is not phenomenologically the same as color. It's not so much, as Chalmers assumes, that I'm perceiving different qualia. It's that I'm perceiving qualia differently. Consider the question "What does the world seem like to a bat?" It's clear, as long as you assume that there is such a thing as what the world seems like to a bat, that it's very, very different from what it seems like to us. It seems to me that this is the sort of thing an inverted qualia person would want to say, and that with this, the plausibility of Chalmers's example disappears.

[CSflim]

Originally posted by asaris
You argue that consciousness can't be a pure accident, but its not clear why that's the case. Surely a creature that acted exactly as if it were conscious would be just as good from an evolutionary standpoint as a creature that actually was conscious, right?

Let me restate my argument more clearly:

1. Evolution can only "design" things when there is a selection pressure for it to work with.
2. There is a selection pressure for intelligence.
3. There is no selection pressure for sentience.
4. According to Searle, intelligence and sentience are totally separate things. Intelligence comes from the functional operation of the brain, sentience from "causal properties".
5. Therefore consciousness cannot have evolved.
6. We are conscious
7. We evolved
8. Therefore consciousness arose purely by accident.

Surely you are not going to trivialise consciousness by simply saying that it is just some weird accident on the part of Mother Nature?

I would reject the hypothesis that this position entails what you call "bio-chauvinism". (Nice word, btw.) Certainly it's possible, as far as we know, for a silicon 'brain' to be conscious -- I don't know why it wouldn't be.

Well, I was arguing against Searle, and Searle is certainly a bio-chauvinist. He insists that a silicon brain would not be conscious. (unless we installed it with the same “causal powers” of the brain. But that would have nothing to do with its operation.

And I don't understand why you insist that the appearance of consciousness is consciousness. It's certainly possible for a creature to appear to be conscious and not actually be conscious. Of course, we have every epistemic right to believe that such a creature is conscious, but we could still be wrong about it.

Well, this is of course what it all comes down to isn’t it.
I find it absurd to believe in zombies...people who talk and act and all the rest, just like us, but do not have any awareness. Bear in mind that these people will constantly refer to the experiences that they are having. Perhaps I could be accused of falling into the trap, which you talk about in the following paragraph, but I don’t think so. Chalmer’s paper that I linked to above is a good argument for this view, as is, I believe, my evolutionary argument.

Finally, you criticize me, and to some extent rightly, for relying too much on common sense. It would be an interesting discussion, though probably one best held in another thread, how to use common sense in philosophy. But I would certainly be remiss if I thought our common sense intutions were an infallible guide to the nature of reality. But likewise, the fact that a theory that does violence to our common sense intutions is a good reason to believe it to be false. If an ethical theory told you that, in fact, killing was okay, that we be a good reason to reject the theory, right? I don't see that's it's all that different in philosophy of mind.

Yes perhaps I should have made myself clearer here. What I meant was that we should see "common-sense" as a method for finding things out, not as a base of obvious conclusions.
In fact we have a name for the systematic usage of common sense in finding things out; it's called science.
But my point is many of the theories of science go against the knowledge of common sense, while using the method of common sense.

"The fact that a theory that does violence to our common sense intutions is a good reason to believe it to be false."
Very true. If we have two theories about something, then all things being equal the one, which appears to make most sense, should win out.

But the problem arises when things aren't equal. (e.g. Quantum Mechanics v.s. Classical Mechanics). Are we flexible enough to accept that things are less intuitive than we might have imagined (QM), or do we insist that, no, common sense must win out (Newton was completely correct after all!)

So perhaps you should just forgive me for this argument. Common sense is of course a strong guide to use in philosophy. Just as long as you don’t cling to it too strongly.

Now perhaps you may feel that I have sold you short. After all I only attacked the ideas of others, without being so brave as to put forward my own ideas (presumably to receive likewise treatment). I am aware of this. My view on this subject is quite a subtle one, and no single ‘-ism’ encapsulates what I believe. I had started writing down my ideas to post on this board as a new thread, a few weeks ago, but it remains unfinished. I didn’t want it to be unreadably long, and I also wanted to make my ideas clear. Perhaps I will return to it and finish it reasonably soon.

[CSflim]

Originally posted by asaris
Two difficulties I can see with his argument. First of all, when he discusses 'suddenly disappearing qualia', he seems to assume that large portions of the phenomenal field disappear at a single time, and this is what gives his example a lot of its plausibility. If you assume small chunks of qualia disappearing, it becomes much more plausible. Imagine, as I sit at my desk, that some evil demon is slowly replacing my neurons with silicon chips. At some point, the pen to my left disappears. But, since I need it to grade some papers, I reach for it, and grasp it. I don't do so consciously, however.

But would you be aware that your consciousness is disappearing? Woudln't it scare you at all? Wouldn't you want to exclaim "Dave, my mind is going"?
If so, then consciousness has a functional element
if not, then why not?

Certainly it's possible to grasp something without being conscious of it -- think of the experience where you're holding your glasses, and find yourself wondering where they are. Moreover, other than whatever its apparent plausibility might be, Chalmers gives us no real reason to believe his example is more plausible than SD qualia.

The second difficulty is that Chalmers's objection to 'Dancing Qualia' are based on the assumption that qualia would be inverted within the same phenomenology.

But that is exactly the point. It is a thought experiment based on this premise.
We start out with the assumption that functional description is not suffient to describe phenomenological experiences.
From this we conclude that we could build one machine that experiences the color of blood as red, and another machine, entirely functionally equivalent that experiences blood as yellow. It is one of the starting assumptions of the reductio-ad-absurdum thought experiment.
Chalmers argues that this assumption leads to absurdities (similar to the above), and hence we should reject our starting assumption, and come to the conclusion that functional identity is enough to ensure phenomenological identity.

An almost identical argument could be made for your new assuption.
You claim that functional isomorphism does not imply even a phenomenologically similar experience, not just a varied experience (you experience blood as 'loud' instead of red). The same reductio-ad-absurdum argument seems to apply here? I cannot see why it wouldn't.

Consider the question "What does the world seem like to a bat?" It's clear, as long as you assume that there is such a thing as what the world seems like to a bat, that it's very, very different from what it seems like to us. It seems to me that this is the sort of thing an inverted qualia person would want to say, and that with this, the plausibility of Chalmers's example disappears.

I'm sorry, I don't follow this argument at all.

[asaris]

Surely you are not going to trivialise consciousness by simply saying that it is just some weird accident on the part of Mother Nature?

I'm not sure what the point of this argument is. Surely the mere fact that something isn't actually selected for by evolution doesn't trivialize the matter. There are lots of random things in evolved organisms; that's why it's evolution, not design. But just because they don't help us pass on our genes doesn't mean they're not good things. But this might just be a point we disagree on.

But that is exactly the point. It is a thought experiment based on this premise.
We start out with the assumption that functional description is not suffient to describe phenomenological experiences.
From this we conclude that we could build one machine that experiences the color of blood as red, and another machine, entirely functionally equivalent that experiences blood as yellow. It is one of the starting assumptions of the reductio-ad-absurdum thought experiment.

That's not quite right, at least how I read the Chalmers. The starting point is the view that, in a being with a silicon brain, qualia would be different. Chalmers assumes that this means different within the same phenomenology, but this is not necessarily the case. That's what the bat was meant to show -- that there can be different phenomenologies for the same thing.

And I don't think Chalmers's reductio applies to this position. His argument depends on the 'flipping of experience' -- the dictionary's yellow, no it's 'yellow', no it's yellow. But if 'yellow' means something radically different to the silicon brain, you wouldn't necessarily get this same sort of cognitive dissonance. I suppose I'm being a bit unclear, but I don't think I can get clearer. To return to the bat, it doesn't seem to me that we can say what the world looks like to a bat. It's just too different to compare.

[MojoRisin]

What about the soul man! THE SOUL!!!

[Date the Banana]

Read the "otherland" books by Tadd Williams. One of the (many) twists in the story involves the Grail brotherhood, a group of extremely wealthy individuals who make a computer copy of their brains, and activate it at the exact moment of their death. Yes, their actual bodies die, but because they do so at the same time as the computer program goes online, they can't tell the difference. If they stayed awake after the creation they would have diverged and had different memories from the mechanical model, but as it was in the book they skipped that part. Of course, like in all good sci-fi, something goes horribly wrong....

[Spanxxx]

Originally posted by wicked4182
What about the soul man! THE SOUL!!!

haha. I've been reading all the way to finally see if someone would mention the "soul". The thing that an enormous population of the earth believes in, in one way or another. The "breath of life", your "essence", "being", or many other ways you want to put it.

This is always a fun topic.


Someone brought up the spooky story about transferring your consciousness to a computer, and then it would render you obsolete and the doctors.... blah blah..scroll up to read it..

Anyway, I once proposed something like this to someone along the lines of cloning. If we were to clone someone and THEN give them the exact same copy of your consciousness/memories/thoughts, then would they be you? And of course, they won't be. First, there is the problem with age. To clone, doesn't mean you wind up with a being that is identical to you in age, form, etc.. BUT, given we made a human body identical to yours in all forms, but gave them your consciousness, THEN would they be you?

And, of course, the answer is no. From the moment that happens, your experiences are different. You are you, the cloned you is, well.. The Cloned You (barring you haven't given him/her a name yet). You will both from that moment on take different paths based on every decision you make from that point forth. Therefore, you will never be the same person.


I really enjoyed the movie Bicentennial Man with Robin Williams. Though, it was not a well received movie by most critics, I found it very intriquing to watch. If for nothing else, than to just THINK about afterwards and extrapolate my own precepts from their ideas behind the movie. I found it very interesting to think about a series of robots that were created to basically be humans in almost every single respect. Then, one day, one model started to malfunction.. it started to transcend it's boundaries and actually "become" conscious and to start to "feel". Once it started to have emotion, it started to become "real", for lack of a better word.

[Yakk]

Is a computer program part of a computer?

Is the intended purpose a computer is designed for part of the computer?

I suspect consciousness might "simply" be our brain modeling and predicting our own behaviour, as a result of our ability to model and predict other's behaviour. We built up this complex and somewhat accurate ability to model the behaviour of other humans and the universe around us, and we turned it around on ourselfs. And hence, we became conscious of ourselves.

Based off the current ways of thinking in vogue, I'd use an analogy of a computer and computer program. If I was born 100 years ago, I'd probably make analogies about mechanical gears and the like: I suspect the computer analogy is closer to the truth. I also suspect we'll come up with better analogies in the next 100 years. =)

A sufficiently complex system can have emergent properties. I've built systems by hand that generate properties that aren't coded into the atomic units of the system: it wasn't that hard. I don't find it hard to suspect that given a sufficiently complex system arranged in sufficiently complex and interesting ways emergent properties like consciousness could occur. And, if you emulated the system perfectly, the emergent property would exist in the emulation.

My soul is softwired.

As for uploading, I'd suspect people will upload themselves and keep on living until they choose to die. Possibly people will delay the uploading until they are ready to die. Or, upload repeatedly, and don't execute: only start the execution after they have died. It will probably take much longer to figure out uploading than it will to figure out how to construct AIs from scratch however...

[copenhagen]

Macheath, That is some heavy shit. But here is one thing for you to consider. Computers at the present time could never emulate the functions of the human brain, so in theory you would be killing off the only viable copy of the person; witch would be its actual body and its only way to carry out its thought process.

[yougene]

Dualism arises from the way our brains function. We make sense of the world by breaking up the things that we experience, categorizing them, and then comparing them. Through comparison we seperate everything. That is the point of view the average human seems to take. It seems as though everything is just a collective single though. Everything is interconnected with everything else. The body is an extension of the mind, as the mind is the extension of the body, the body is the extension of the system that spawned us. Dualism does or does not exist depending on the point of view that you take. Neither point of view can be proven to be more valid than the other one yet both seem to be valid.

[gorpa]

Has any one mentioned dualisms reliance on both the body and mind to achieve self? There is an inherent flaw that results here. If either the body or mind were to be destroyed (i.e. someones grandmother being physically incapacitated but still able to think etc.) it would result in a destruction of self. How can self be preserved if the body dies and the soul continues on?

[asaris]

Good point, gorpa, but I think your example is flawed. 'Physical Incapacitation' is not the destruction of the body; presumably, this person's grandmother still has *some* bodily functioning, even if it is severely restricted or even if it can only be accomplished with the aid of a machine.

Moreover, traditional dualisms (of the Cartesian variety) don't have this problem, since they don't rely on both the body and mind to achieve self -- only the soul is the self. (The picture is more complicated on the Aristolean/Thomistic view). It's only more sophisticated dualisms, that would have your problem.

And I don't see why that's not a bullet that can't be bitten. I have no problem saying that the self cannot be preserved without the body. There's a *reason* Christianity teaches the resurrection of the body, and not some eternal disincarnate existence.

[roachboy]

dualism is a residuum of theology.
check out the work of varela and/or marutana for a convincing demolition of it based on recent cognitive science crossing into philosophy (phenomenology in particular).
their work is worth the effort.....

[dohminator]

Basically, once both the computer and the human existences have seperate thoughts and experiences, they become seperate beings. Even though me and the computer have the same past, there is some divergence that makes us different. In the same way, twins are not the same person, except that the divergence starts much earlier.

If my body was killed before either the computer or my body were woken up, then the computer continues my conciousness and in effect becomes me.

This is crazy stuff, but it works.

Originally posted by Macheath
All of the elements of your mind are copied to a computer. Do you experience a transfer of consciousness to the computer or do you remain a separate entity?

The computer says it is you and answers questions only you would know. You regard the computer as an imposter but it is not; it is most certainly you.

The scientists are conviced the mind transferrence went off flawlessly and euthanise the unneeded human entity. Your consciousness resides in the computer but it is not "you" from your perspective.

From your perspective, the scientists are murdering you, but what can you do? You agreed before the operation that the body would be disposed of. How were you to know that your mind would leave your perspective and objective reality behind in the unneeded body like useless trash; recreating a seamless continuation of your consciousness in the computer.

Decide for yourself how this little scenario relates to the thread. Personally the whole idea terrifies me, but that is the nature of consciousness.

[asaris]

False, Roachboy. Dualism stems in main part from Plato, not theology. It got assimilated into Christian theology through the early church fathers, who were generally Platonist.

[roachboy]

asaria--well yes. i suppose i should have use a different shorthand. the history of western metaphysics. then all would have been well. the standard plotsummaries link this split back to the doctrine of forms, platos "third perdio" yes.

but the substance of the post is still the same.

[apeman]

yeah, i'm not big on dualism, but i tend to just disagree with Descartes on principle (except in the area of maths).

nice stories by the way csflim have you got any more like it? they make the points well and humourously

[CSflim]

Originally posted by apeman
yeah, i'm not big on dualism, but i tend to just disagree with Descartes on principle (except in the area of maths).

nice stories by the way csflim have you got any more like it? they make the points well and humourously

The unfortunate dualist is taken from The Mind's I, a book edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Danniel C. Dennet. It is a collection of essays/short stories from various authors, followed by "reflections" written by Dennet or Hoftsadter or both, about the piece. I highly reccomend it.

[apeman]

I've heard of both of them, I must have learned something I'll have a look for it, cheers