For those not aware of one of the classic argument contra physicalism (the opposite of dualism), I will briefly tell the tale.
Imagine a female named Mary. Mary is a philosopher’s experiment. Quite unethically, perhaps, but nonetheless, she was raised in a completely grayscale environment. No color at all. We could perhaps imagine that she was forced to wear some strange contacts (whatever, this is just a thought experiment).
In this room Mary lives in, she is presented with all physical facts, say, via a computer. She learns and learns and reads and reads and eventually, bam, she’s done. She now possesses all material facts. The physicalists dust off their hands and say, “Mary now knows everything.” She is allowed to leave the room and goes outside to stumble upon a rosebush.
Encountering this in regular daylight we might be led to wonder: did she learn something new (specifically, what red looks like)?
The biggest problem with physicalism is this: its inability to explain the qualities of objects. But now, does this help us out with dualism? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to help dualism any as, point of fact, none of us can say what red looks like. So dualists would also have this problem, the problem of not being able to describe qualia (how something appears to a person).
Dualism is strongly rooted in our language because, I think, our language serves us most of the time to refer to objective referents. Since we sometimes need to discuss ourselves, it is only natural to then posit the mind as an object as well. And, after all, does it not seem like my mind—my consciousness—is a place only I can visit? I mean, don’t I know what red looks like?
I don’t want to revisit my own thread on Wittgenstein’s Box, but I want to say that we should not accept a dualist/physicalist dichotomy right off.
Ramujan’s comment on logical atoms makes me want to say things like qualia are still physical, but since we use them to describe things they themselves are not describable. This seems tolerable, doesn’t it?
But the problem that dualists face when they try to put forward their argument is that physicalists, their opponents, want evidence of dualism. Any such request is quite paradoxical for several reasons, most of which have been touched on in the thread already, for if we have evidence of dialism then this evidence can be studied and presents itself as a physical effect, and so comes back to physicalism. But then, wait, did we just prove from a rationalist platform that dualism is impossible? Which makes physicalism true a priori. Not quite a tenable position, I should think.
Dualism finds its home best, IMO, in effects without apparent causes in the behavior of humans (since, after all, we are talking about “mind”). But it doesn’t have to be that strict, for finding events without causes in the universe at large could lead one to say that these affects must also be going on in us, too, since we are part of the universe, and so dualism can find a home here in a broken causality. But this sounds familiar: physical evidence of a non-physical thing.
A dualist needs to do this, then, to maintain their position in the face of physical evidence: make something happen without a cause; that is, predict and event that should otherwise have no cause, and then show that this event happens. But hell, the funny thing is that we do this all the time: we speak of intention, we act, and many times others cannot say why and couldn’t have predicted it themselves.
Sure, the mind manifests itself in the body, and the body can be controlled by outside means, but when it isn’t it is still going. And let’s run with this thought. For we want to say that we can say, formally, why the body does something; that is, in some hypothetical way, human behavior can be completely determined once a person’s brain (and the environment in which it acts in) is determined. And why would we say this? Well, for example, when we stimulate this part of the brain we trigger the patient to raise his arm, or convulse, and when we remove this part the patient can no longer speak, and when we clip this it seems as if there are two people present (this one has been researched, quite strange; it wasn’t actually clipped, though, just numbed so it temporarily didn’t function… eahc half of the brian was like a different person). So, see? Physical effects.
Sure, but why would the dualist argue here? Of course you can control the physical effects with physical effects. The question is one of determination, IMO. If human behavior is essentially underdetermined (that it, there is a theoretical limitation on the prediction of human behavior from physical evidence without physical interference—i.e-simple observation) then dualism might just be where we stand, for if the physical cannot explain what happens, then why does this person do such-and-such?
