Meat sacks are not necessarily sentient. Sentience does not necessarily exist, and neither do morals. Dualism says they exist in another realm which is affected by actions in the physical realm. Most forms of dualism then say actions in the nonphysical realm also affect the physical realm, mine does not. Before this thread I thought strong physicalism implies consciousness, sentience, and morals to be as illusory as souls - not even an illusion because there is no sentience to be fooled. I still haven’t been convinced otherwise, but I will be looking into a book that purportedly explains consciousness without souls.
In my form of dualism the physical realm is causally self-contained, so none of the above criticism applies. Physical events can affect the spiritual realm but spiritual events cannot affect the physical realm. “We” aren’t our souls, but “we” should act to the benefit of souls, not bodies.
I apologize, I am not yet ruling out sentience in non-dualist philosophy. I am currently unconvinced is all. This line of inquiry is on pause until I read “Consciousness Explained”, unless someone does my homework for me and explains it here. The library didn’t have the book or know any partner libraries that had it. I’ll be heading over to the local college today or tomorrow to request it, and hopefully I can start reading within the next week or two.
In a general sense, during moral analysis of actions that affect living humans and corpses, the moral weight assigned to dealing with dead humans can affect the decision.
It turns out I answer the hypotheticals the same way as I would without dualism (assuming consciousness and sapience somehow still exist), so in this regard physicalism is simpler and therefore better.
This goes along with what I said earlier, that you seem to be carrying over some of your dualist ideas and having trouble making them work in a physicalist framework, and then deciding that there’s therefore something inherently wrong with physicalism. Here you’re sticking with the idea that consciousness and morality are what souls do, and then reaching the conclusion that a world without souls means that there is no consciousness or morality.
When what we’re saying is that the physical processes of the brain are consciousness, and morality is an abstract idea that those conscious physical beings can consider.
That is exactly what I mean. Your notes about intuition are quite harmful to my defense, indeed, I agree that the “standard” concept of Dualism with souls causing actions in the physical world is demonstrably false. That is why I chose this particular “non-standard” form of Dualism to defend. I still think my form of dualism is more intuitive and pragmatic than a world without sentience or consciousness. Such a world would have only the illusion or appearance of sentience, consciousness, and morals. You would probably agree, although you and the other posters in this thread are slowly convincing me that physicalism is not the barren philosophy I just described, and that nobody with common sense actually proposes such a philosophy.
Sentience observably exists - in my opinion the behavior of humans is literally impossible to explain if that behavior is not backed by mental processes that are both aware of the environment, have internal state (that is to say, thoughts), and are continuously aware that they have thoughts. I do not know how to define sentience other than as this.
Now, there are various interesting subdiscussions to be had regarding the location and mechanics of our consciousnesses, but you can start out with firm certainty that human behavior is backed by consciousness, based on observation alone.
Why should we act to benefit souls? The damn things are parasites. They don’t provide us with consciousness - they can’t, because we know that whatever consciousness we have drives our physical actions, which souls can’t do because that would be breaching the causal barrier you’ve imposed.
I don’t consider personality to be carried over into the spiritual world, although necessarily the soul will be aware of the personality of it’s body via qualia obtained through sensations of the same.
My form of dualism is also consistent with a form of deism, up until a soul or deity wants to induce changes in the physical realm. That would be incompatible. Judging of souls is compatible.
So to recap, the soul really is a completely different person from me with a completely different personality, who I’ll never meet and who parasitically leeches off my senses. The soul is created while I’m born and presumably spends its entire life in an existential hell where it observes my actions and has opinions about what I should do but has no way to communicate with me or otherwise influence the events in the life is has no choice but to experience. And then at some point they are judged for the actions it did not have any control over.
Yikes. Sucks to be them - but I still don’t know why I should care about them. I mean sure, I shouldn’t deliberately try to make their eventual judgement harsher, but honestly the only thing I know about what the deist God will be judging by is that he hates accountants, and that doesn’t give me much to go on.
And in any case, even if the soul does get judged harshly that’s no skin off my nose - I’ll already be dead. So my incentives to avoid becoming an accountant are low.
When receiving a cybernetic implant, the question is “does this implant change who I am? Is that change a moral change?”. My answer for the dualist is the same and I am guessing your answer is the same too.
When considering a drug such as Versed, to a dualist’s soul that’s like taking out an organ and putting it back - except the organ is the whole body. Remember that a dualist believes the soul to hold all the moral cards, so with informed consent a beneficial operation with Versed is indeed a beneficial operation. Without dualism, it is my understanding that so long as there is informed consent… actually you said there might be a problem if you try and withdraw consent during the operation. Could you elaborate on that? Maybe drugs are different for your philosophy.
Oh, and as an additional note to the “can material brains house consciousness” question, I can say with absolute certianty that 1) I personally have consciousness, and 2) my consciousness can impact my physical actions in the real world. Given the arbitrary rule that the supernatural can’t influence the physical, I know that material brains must be capable of housing consciousness, simply because my consciousness has to be housed somewhere and there’s simply nowhere else it could be.
That arbitrary non-interference rule really makes this fun!
Does a soul have a personality? Does it match the personality of the mind at birth?
Can the soul’s personality change - understanding it would not change due to changes in the material body. If so, how?
Can the sould actually do anything except watch? If it cannot, how can it be judged?
My reference to deism was no about the concepts being connected, but more as another example of belief in something for which there is by definition no evidence and which is unfalsifiable.
My goal is not to convince anyone else that dualism is or is not better. My goal is to convince myself. Losing the debate is a win so long as we reach a conclusion one way or the other.
I don’t advocate Dualism itself as true or false. It is inappropriate to declare something absolutely true or false if you do not or cannot be certain. To say you know such a thing would be false knowledge. What I do argue is that Dualism’s spiritual realm is unobservable; unfalsifiable. “We” meat-bags can never know whether souls exist or not.
Most people’s response is that therefore, Dualism is useless.
I reply to this by arguing morals based on Dualism leads to demonstrably better behavior than the alternatives. Proving or disproving that is the basis of this thread.
I was also expecting someone to argue that having no morals at all would be better, that better behavior isn’t necessarily better, but that hasn’t happened.
But you haven’t argued that morals based on Duelism leads to demonstrably better behaviour-you’ve merely stated it without providing evidence that it is so.
Consider the pea. Originally, it was not a thing. It came from a plant called “pease”, which itself was a singular form, but, since it sounded like a plural, the word “pea” eventually arose as a back-formation to describe a single seed from the pease plant.
Similarly, “soul” is a back-formation out of the application complex thought. Its origin lies in the survival instinct present in lifeforms, and is easily observable in a great many animals. It clearly has evolutionary advantage, because beings invested with the desire to survive will tend to prevail over beings that are indifferent to their own survival.
What does that mean for morality? Nothing. The “soul” is not a player in morality, other than the fact that it drives our desire to survive. Morality is only about maintaining our relationships with other people and critters in ways that optimize comfort and survival. The “soul’s” depiction of our survival is used by the brain when making moral calculations.
Is there more to it than just that? What is my singularity, into which all perception seeems to flow? What is “me”, that is so discreetly and irrevocably isolated from “you” or “her”? Why should it matter, really? It just is, and the survival instinct accounts for it completely. Everything else is fiction (until someone can provide solid evidence to the contrary) and “dualism” is superfluous.
Clearly you have not perused the NOTs (New Era Dianetics for Operating Thetans). According to the doctrine, we are swarming with Body Thetans left over from the massacre of Incident II, and only the practices outlined in the NOTs will allow us to clear these ectoplasmic parasites from our bodies.
But, a shower might at least make you feel better for a while.
If you were to physically say anything, that sense of “you” is the physical brain. But this is merely a reflex.
Let me be clear about this, in dualism the soul is sentient, not the body. The brain doesn’t feel pain, it reacts to painful stimuli. Not my brain, not your brain, not an ant brain. Pain is not itself immoral, but sending that pain up to a soul is.
Damaging an object is not itself immoral, but damaging an object that another soul has rights over is.
