Dualism vs. Materialism

Great Debates
1

Here Triskadecamus asserted the following:

I thought it would be inappropriate to hijack that thread; therefore, the statement prompted this thread. The concept raises a few interesting issues:
[list=1]
[li]What is the solution of the mind-body ontological problem? This is my intended focus of this thread. The two major accepted schools of thought are dualism and materialism. Dualists assert that the mind resides in the soul. Depending on the particular dualistic view to which one subscribes, the soul may or may not interact with the brain. Materialists assert that mental states are neurophysiological states. Again, there are several materialistic views.[/li][li]What are the ramifications of the solution, e.g. do souls exist? I am aware that attempting to prove the existence of such a thing is impossible, but what inferences can be made from the solution and precisely how valid are those deductions?[/li][li]Is the solution free from epistemological uncertainties and solipsism?[/li][/list=1]

2

I want to be clear on this. Are you saying that there are people that espouse the idea that the mind (part of the soul) has no interaction with the brain at all?

3

When is this due? I’m not even sure I can get past number 1…Are you grading on a scale?

HONEY…WHERE THE HELL IS MY DICTIONARY?

This was NOT in the course catalog.

4

Ptahlis asked:

Yes, they are called epiphenomenalists. The problem with their assertion is that it suffers from dual causation. Generally, Ockham’s Razor is considered an acceptable rebuttal to this tenet.

5

Can anyone come up with even an adequate operational defintion of the “soul”?

6

Dammit, I lied. The epiphenomalist’s argument doesn’t suffer from dual causation. That was a bit counter-intuitive based on the definition.

7

Although I don’t know enough about either the philosophical underpinnings or the neurological science to argue in any depth with any sophistication, the existence and efficacy of things like general anesthesia seem to argue heavily in favor of materialism. It’s designed to work on the brain, and it sure appears to put the mind away, too.

8

Materialists deny the deny the soul’s existence as something undetectable and unknowable, thus adding an unnecessary concept, like ether. A dualist claims to have a direct perception of his own soul, thus it’s obvious to him that it exists, even if he can’t explain what exactly it is. Since we can’t see into each others minds, there’s not much point in a materialist telling a dualist, “you don’t really perceive this so-called soul”; or for the dualist to say, “the fact that you can’t perceive your soul doesn’t prove its non-existence.”

Is the existence of soul-perception in such a large number of people some degree of evidence that in fact souls exist? Or are they all simply deluded? To borrow an analogy from my favorite author, Raymond Smullyan, in a society where many people are color blind but some have color vision, can the color blind accept that this concept of “color” exists, even if they can’t perceive it, or are they forced to insist that the color sighted are making something up. The analogy isn’t exactly the same, as the color sighted could demonstrate the existence of color by means of physics, by showing that they perceive light of one wavelength differently from light of another. Of course, they couldn’t do so until their science had advanced to the point where they understood the concept of wavelength, and had the technology to measure it. Until they had the science, though, they’d be in the same boat as dualists are now.

9

Whether or not it “exists”, I don’t see how anyone can talk about the “soul” without offering at least some definition. There are perfectly good definitions for all sorts of things that don’t exist. But without some kind of definition, I wouldn’t know a “soul” if one came up and bit me on the ass.

10

Sounds like a good enough definition of a soul as any. I define a soul as something that comes up and bites you on the ass. My dog=soul. Yes souls exist, and they are short, stocky, hairy, and with lots of teeth. :smiley:

The problem with what Gilligan wrote, no offense he doesn’t seem to be a dualist, is that the Dualists still can’t define what it is. With the color blind anology, at some point in the future, we can show that people can see color. The same can be done for all sorts of things. As a materialist I understand this. The problem with souls, as dualists define them, is that we can never prove they exist.

Just as easily as someone can claim a soul, I can claim to make my appendix trifrybulate. I can’t define what that means, but I know that I can do it. That is my main argument against the soul. If you start arguing for a soul, you can logically argue for any kind of crap.

As for an REAL definition of a soul, lets rely on m-w.com

-Main Entry: 1soul
Pronunciation: 'sOl
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English soule, from Old English sAwol; akin to Old High German sEula soul
Date: before 12th century
1 : the immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life
2 a : the spiritual principle embodied in human beings, all rational and spiritual beings, or the universe b capitalized, Christian Science : GOD 1b
3 : a person’s total self
4 a : an active or essential part b : a moving spirit : LEADER
5 a : the moral and emotional nature of human beings b : the quality that arouses emotion and sentiment c : spiritual or moral force : FERVOR
6 : PERSON
7 : EXEMPLIFICATION, PERSONIFICATION <she is the soul of integrity>
8 a : a strong positive feeling (as of intense sensitivity and emotional fervor) conveyed especially by black American performers b : NEGRITUDE c : SOUL MUSIC d : SOUL FOOD e : SOUL BROTHER

That seems good enough. We can use definition 1 and 2.

11

I think that part one would be a more appropriate definition. It appears to be the most congruent with the dualist’s interpretation of mind-body interaction.

Part two seems to elimate the squirrels and vegetables on the board from the discussion. Does that suffice SingleDad?

Are there any dualists who could offer their perspective?

12

You are correct in that I am not a dualist, and I agree that a good definition of “soul” is lacking. We need some dualists in here to provide one. But I don’t hold the lack of clear definition to be either disproof of the perception, or even meaningless of the term. This is why I think Smullyan’s analogy is a good one. Primitive people (and young children now) knew nothing of physics or optics, but still perceived color. Our current understanding of the science did not exist for them, so they could not define “color” to a color blind person, except perhaps in an unsatisfying self-referential way. The fact that we can define it scientifically now is irrelevant to people in the past. I am not sure if they could even imagine that there would be a scientific explanation for it. (Perhaps someone here has some historical knowledge about how color was explained in ancient times.) But their lack of definition and explanation of color did not mean their perception of it did not exist. This is why I am sympathetic to the problem that dualists face, even though I don’t agree with them.

13

Gilligan, the problem with Smullyan’s analogy is that it is based on someone having perception of a soul. Can a soul be perceived?

14

Well, if souls were in fact being perceived, that would pretty much answer the question as to whether they existed or not. I’m sure different dualists would answer this question in different ways. (Where are they, anyway?) Some might say they believe they have a soul, others would say they directly perceive it. Smullyan claimed to directly perceive his “identity”, as something distinct from either his mind or his body. In a sentence such as “I have a mind and a body” he claimed an intuitive understanding of “I”, that defied explanation. (I suppose a materialist would say “I am a mind an a body.”) This seems to correspond to the above definition of soul. Now as a materialist, I could explain his statement in several ways. One, that he’s lying. Two, that he is mistaken about having any such perception, but is so hopeful of it that his judgement is clouded. Three, that he is perceiving something, but not his soul; some other unknown aspect of his mind’s processes. Four, that he is correct. Personally, I think that either two or three are accurate but don’t know which.

15

The biggest problem I have with the concept of a soul is that it seems to implicitly connote something beyond perception. There are plenty of things that have no real definition that are nevertheless common to us. We all understand what is meant by words like “anger”, “fear”, and “sleepy”, but they aren’t anything we can define exactly. We rely on the idea that another’s experience of these perceptions is like our own.

“Soul” however, seems to be a postulated thing above and beyond our sense of identity or self awareness. (At least it usually is.) The existence of the soul plays a part in many other stories for which we have no evidence: an immortal afterlife, reincarnation, psychic channeling, precognition, and even the sanctity of the embryo. Given that the soul has seemingly no measurable function in reality, but has plenty to do in the realm of the supernatural, I must personally conclude that its objective existence is pretty dubious.

16

I think one problem is perception - just because someone perceives something it doesn’t necessarily mean it exists. Optical illusions are an example. One can easily perceive something that doesn’t exist, or something that is really part of something else but we only perceive part of it.

Our perception of a soul, even if all we are talking about is the conciousness most of us possess, does not preclude that soul from being an epiphenomenon of the brain.

I’d have to agree with pldennison that general anesthesia is evidence for materialism, as are the fact that there are no recorded cases of brain dead individuals returning to life to tell us about their experience after death.

Dualists or idealistic monists (people who believe matter arises from conciousness, if I have my terminology right) use Near Death Experiences (NDEs) as evidence of mind/soul surviving bodily death, but I believe that inherent in their name is a qualifier of this evidence - they are Near Death Experiences, not Death Experiences. Of course I understand terminology is not always useful as an argument like this, but in this case I believe it is valid as people who come back are not brain-dead.

Also used as evidence for mind being separate from materialism are mind/body healing (e.g. the placebo effect), reincarnation stories from children who cannot know (from this life) the details they proffer about their prior lives, and psi (psychic phenomenon, telekinesis, remote viewing, etc.)

Mind/body healing is not troubling to me (a materialist), as I believe the mind to be an emergent property/epiphenomenon of the brain, and the brain is a part of the body. Thus, it makes sense that the brain can influence the body’s healing systems, and the placebo effect makes sense on this level. No contradiction with materialism.

Reincarnation stories have so far remained unconvincing to me. I have not studied enough of them to authoritatively say they are useless, but I’m sure given enough time my wife (some kind of idealist) will give me all the material I could possibly want to study. If anyone has further comment on this, I’d enjoy discussing it.

Finally, psi has always been just barely out of reach - tantalizingly so. I’ve always wanted there to be psi. Just think how cool it would be to be able to steer your car with the power of your mind, even though you are a quadriplegic. However, I’ve never been convinced that there is anything to it.

Dean Radin wrote a book called The Conscious Universe in which he discusses the scientific evidence for psi, as gathered through meta-analysis of parapsychology research. The most compelling facets of the research were the Ganzfeld and RNGs (random number generators) affected by psi.

The Ganzfeld is a sensory overload type of experiment, the theory being if the senses are deadened with monotonous input the mind will open to psychic imagery. The receiver is placed in a room with red light with half ping-pong balls over his eyes, so his vision useless. The room is filled with white noise to make his hearing useless. Then, he dictates into a microphone the images that come into his mind. Meanwhile, someone else (the sender) is watching a TV and ‘sending’ the images to the receiver. Afterwards, the receiver looks at 4 video clips and picks one as matching his imagery that he gave under the ganzfeld. By chance, he should get 25% correct, but he gets more than that (say, 35% correct.) It’s puzzling, but it’s all a bit too touchy-feely for me to buy into it. I mean, it’s not like the sender is watching Ben Hur and the receiver says “I see Ben Hur”, the receiver says things like “I see wheels spinning and I see giraffes running,” along with about a gazillion other things. Later, when watching the video, the action of horses running is similar to giraffes running, so the guy makes a match. I just can’t get excited about it. In addition, there is an article in the most recent Skeptical Inquirer about new analysis that refutes the claim of statistical significance.

Finally, that brings us to RNG studies. Apparently the data Radin has shows that when someone is concentrating on a random number generator (using true random data from noise in an electronic circuit or other source) the results are ‘less random’. For example, if you do 100 coin-flips per experiment, and do N experiments, you’d expect to get a bell curve of results around 50 heads. When someone is concentrating on the RNG, the distribution changes and you get more events than expected at different standard deviations. The effect is small, but argued to be real. This is the only thing I find exciting unless the reincarnation thing surprises me. How in the world our mind could affect a system like this is beyond me. People like Radin claim that it is evidence against materialism. I’m very interested in it, but I’m not sure that it would be the final nail in the materialism coffin. If this data bears up it will be very exciting indeed.

17

Gilligan wrote:

This concept is where the analogy from light supports the materilist’s view. We perceive colors and brightness, but the physical phenomena we are interpreting are intensity and wavelenght of waves. Similarly, one might think that introspection is permitted by the soul, but one is actually interpreting a cascade of sodium ions across an axon. Reductive materialists utilize this defense.

Ptahlis wrote:

Again, quale are the sensations of anger, fear and sleepy; however, one is actually interpreting a cascade of sodium ions across an axon. Quale do present a problem to some sects of materialism. Functionalists, for example, believe that a mental state is a result of environmental input, behavioral output, and causal relations to other mental states. If two individuals were to be subjected to the viewing of two different colors yet responded that they had both seen red, they defy the view of functionalism. This arguement is that objection of inverted qualia. Likewise, a robot could be programmed to react in a specific fashion when subjected to a particular stimulus. By the functionalist’s definition, the robot has a mind. This argument is the objection of absent qualia.

douglips, read Talbot’s Holographic Universe. You may find it of interest if you liked Radins’s publication.

18

I’ll just sit here calmly amused at the antics of people trying to use pure reason to talk about souls. It’s like trying to smell a colour.

19

Nen, are you saying that these cascading sodium ions constitute evidence against the existence of souls, or that they make the idea of a soul unnecessary to postulate? I would agree with the latter, but not the former.

20

Luckily, matt, there are still people intelligent enough not to mistake an argument for a conclusion. Can I take it from your wording that you believe souls to be unreasonable?

In the movie Mask, Eric Stoltz’s character Rocky Dennis is able to demonstrate “color” not to a colorblind person, but to a blind person. So, someone show me one of these “souls,” willya?