Churchland: Matter and Consciousness

Dualism Notes

7: what is the real nature of mental states and processes, what medium do they take place in, and how are they related to the physical world? Does consciousness survive the destruction of the body, could a physical system like a computer ever have conscious intelligence, where do minds come from, what are they?

Types of Dualism

7. Dualism not as popular as it once was, but still deeply entrenched in most religions, and has been dominant 'theory of mind' through most of western history.

Substance Dualism

7. Minds are distinct non-physical things.

8. Very little positive characterization of mind-stuff.

8. Cartesian Dualism: Mind is a distinct type of substance whose essence is thinking.

8. You are not your body, but the thinking thing.

8. Descartes assumed no purely physical system could have language or reasoning.

9: How is thinking substance supposed to causally affect matter?

9: Inadequacies of Cartesian conception of matter as 'extended substance'

Popular Dualism

9: Ghost in the machine. (Energy fields 'inside' the body/head)

10: Popular dualism still leaves open possibility of life after death (but doesn't guarantee it) Still that may give reason to wish it were true, not to believe that it is.

Property Dualism

10: Brain is physical, but has special set of properties that other physical things don't have.

Epiphenomenalism

11: mental states emerge from brain activity, but don't causally effect it.

11: can trace brain activity to explain behavior without appealing to conscious states.

Interactionist property dualism:

12. Mental states emerge from complex physical states and affect them in turn (like being colored, solid or alive)

12: these emergent properties must be irreducible to physical ones, but the claim of evolutionary emergence and irreduceability can seem puzzling.

Elemental-property dualism:

13: consciousness is like electric charge. A property that might have seemed reducible to others, but must be taken as primitive:

13: but charge is shared by all things, should consciousness be as well (panpsychism)

Arguments for Dualism

Argument from religion

13: dualism required by ones religious beliefs

14-5: has a poor history (stars aren't suns, earth center of universe, disease not caused by germs, lightning rods 'evil'.

15: distribution of religions suggests that they are believed for inculturation, not reasons.

Argument from introspection:

13: When we introspect, we don't 'see' neural networks pulsating.

15: introspection may not reveal how things really are, just as sight doesn't reveal that a red surface is 'really' a matrix of molecules, warmth doesn't 'feel' like mean kinetic energy.

Argument from irreducibility:

14: Descartes on language and reasoning

14: qualia and sensations

16: any calculator can do many things Descartes said only we could do, jury still out on rest.

16: qualia more of a problem, but its not as if the dualist has nay explanation for them either

Argument from Psychic Phenomena

14: special kind of irreducibility: clairvoyance, etc. lacks 'physical' explanation

17: if it exists, no reason to rule out possibility of physical explanation, and no good reason to think it exists.

Arguments against Dualism

18: Greater simplicity of monistic views

18-9: Explanatory impotence of dualism (physical explanations of much mental phenomena, no good dualistic ones)

20: Neural dependence: if there was a mind-substance, physical state of brain shouldn't have such a big effect on the mind.

20: Evolutionary history: Dualism requires mind be all or nothing, and hard to see single step on evolutionary ladder when it could have been suddenly added.

21: "there seems neither need, nor room, to fit any nonphysical substance or properties into our theoretical account of ourselves. We are creatures of matter. And we should learn to live with that fact."