In Defence of Dualism

[GIGObuster]

@Max_S

But this is irrelevant unless you assert an entity must be shown to exist in order to positively influence behavior.

~Max

Actually, that is a very weak statement made in order to avoid what Czarcasm is clearly inferring: what evidence you have for souls existing?

[Max_S]

@Tatterdemalion

Um yes?

What then of the child who refrains from opening a Christmas present because of a sincerely held belief that Santa Claus would know?

~Max

[GIGObuster]

@Max_S

Within the context of dualism, the thing that is typing is not properly your self. If you believe the above exposes some sort of inconsistency within dualism, you are mistaken.

Within the context of dualism:

[ol][li]My soul is my self. (axiom)[/li][li]My soul is a non-physical entity. (axiom)[/li][li]Therefore, my self is a non-physical entity.[/li][li]My body is a physical entity. (axiom)[/li][li]A physical entity is not a non-physical entity. (axiom)[/li][li]Therefore, my body is not a non-physical entity.[/li][li]My body is not a non-physical entity. (3)[/li][li]My self is a non-physical entity. (6)[/li][li]Therefore, my body is not my self.[/li][li]The thing that is typing is my body.[/li][li]My body is not my self. (9)[/li][li]Therefore, the thing that is typing is not my self.[/ol][/li]
~Max

I see that and I can conclude that that soul is irrelevant and useless to that body.

[Max_S]

@GIGObuster

Actually, that is a very weak statement made in order to avoid what Czarcasm is clearly inferring: what evidence you have for souls existing?

I am of the opinion that there will never be evidence as to the existence of souls and I stated as much in the original post.

@Max_S

In the spiritual realm there exist souls…

…there are no direct, causal interactions from the spiritual realm onto the physical realm. No physical being can directly observe the spiritual realm; therefore, the spiritual realm is non-falsifiable…

… I assert Dualism is the most intuitive and pragmatic basis for a moral society.

~Max

[GIGObuster]

@Max_S

What then of the child who refrains from opening a Christmas present because of a sincerely held belief that Santa Claus would know?

~Max

So Santa is an actual soul and not a figment of the Coca- Cola corporation *?

• In reality Santa’s modern image came before Coca-Cola popularized it for modern viewers. Coca-Cola gets some credit for cementing the modern image of Santa Claus in the public consciousness.

[Max_S]

Very well, let cognition be a behavior in the physical brain.

@begbert2

I, at least, both have a cognition and my cognition experiences linear time. This is yet more proof that my physical brain stores my cognition and not some dumb soul…

I hope I have not claimed that the soul “stores” cognition, because that would be false under my form of dualism. We are in agreement so far - except instead of saying your cognition “experiences” linear time, I would say your cognition “takes place” in linear time. It is still a category mistake to say your cognition, a physical behavior, experiences anything because physical behaviors are not sentient.

@begbert2

“my” soul doesn’t even share chronological continuity with my cognition. There’s really no connection there at all.

Your soul still experiences chronological continuity in the gathering-of-souls interpretation of Dualism. Every point on the record corresponds to the qualia from a moment’s worth of sensations in the physical world. It doesn’t just correspond, the record is the qualia from every moment, in chronological order, of your physical existence. That record is part of your soul and therefore part of you. In short, it is connected, but the connection is one-way.

@begbert2

And you want to know what I think of when I hear that souls/god/elvis/whoever doesn’t experience mortal time? Books. Books and movies. In a book in my hand time runs linearly from the first page to the last page, and yet I hold all of that time at once in my hands. I can flip forward and backwards through the pages looking at moments out of chronological order, all that. That’s an entity living outside time.

I don’t have a problem with that characterization. If you think it is somehow important that your soul looks at your record in order, you are again making a category mistake by assuming souls operate the same way brains do. Even then you are mistaken because real, physical brains do not necessarily read and process letters and words in order. Nevertheless it would be trivial to refine the gathering-of-souls interpretation, so that the records can only be referenced in context, by re-experiencing the entire thing up to that point.

@begbert2

In your model souls are just dudes doing literary review. Reality is just a big book they’re flipping through, citing the book to debate whether Frodo or Samwise is a cooler hero, and whether Sauron or Saruman was a more interesting villain. The connection between a given soul and a given human character is specious at best - it’s not like the souls are the authors or anything. They’re just observers. They’re just fanboys arguing on the internet.

How any of this fanboy arguing provides moral imperatives for Frodo or Samwise to act differently eludes me. Frodo and Sam don’t even know they’re in a book!

I have neither read nor seen the Lords of the Ring, but to fit in with your illustration I would also be in the book telling Frodo and Sam the book would be a better if they acted like they were in a book.

The reason your Lord of the Rings example doesn’t fully fit is because “fanboys” at a book club get to pick their favorite literary character. Notwithstanding the reduction of qualia into written words. In my gathering-of-souls interpretation of dualism, the soul does not choose their body any more than you have chosen your own. Your soul is stuck with your body, and if your soul ranks poorly in the moral debate that is bad for your soul.

~Max

[Max_S]

@GIGObuster

So Santa is an actual soul and not a figment of the Coca- Cola corporation *?

• In reality Santa’s modern image came before Coca-Cola popularized it for modern viewers. Coca-Cola gets some credit for cementing the modern image of Santa Claus in the public consciousness.

The claims that Santa Claus affects the physical world disqualify him from being a soul in my form of Dualism. But the point was that Santa Claus can induce positive behavior.

~Max

[GIGObuster]

@Max_S

I am of the opinion that there will never be evidence as to the existence of souls and I stated as much in the original post.

~Max

And your original statement looks worse then. That was neither intuitive nor pragmatic.

[Max_S]

@GIGObuster

I see that and I can conclude that that soul is irrelevant and useless to that body.

I say it is useful because I assert you need a soul to base morals upon. You need morals to sustain society, and society is desirable right?

If there were another philosophy with a sound moral system I have to fall back and say my form of dualism is better. I believe I have already lost that argument though.

~Max

[GIGObuster]

@Max_S

I have neither read nor seen the Lords of the Ring,

Heretic!!!

@Max_S

but to fit in with your illustration I would also be in the book telling Frodo and Sam the book would be a better if they acted like they were in a book.

The reason your Lord of the Rings example doesn’t fully fit is because “fanboys” at a book club get to pick their favorite literary character. Notwithstanding the reduction of qualia into written words. In my gathering-of-souls interpretation of dualism, the soul does not choose their body any more than you have chosen your own. Your soul is stuck with your body, and if your soul ranks poorly in the moral debate that is bad for your soul.

Why? Here you are imposing a very human quality for a soul (this sucks, and I’m stuck in/with the body of a yahoo for a lifetime!) that implies very small thinking or abilities for a soul, with a projection of human qualities into a thing that according to you is beyond our understanding.

[crowmanyclouds]

@Max_S

I say it is useful because I assert you need a soul to base morals upon. {…}

Why???

CMC fnord!

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@Voyager

You seem to be contradicting yourself. If drugs affect the soul, and can harm it, but the soul has no effect on the physical body, how do you account for the changes to the mind that come from drugs? Is the mind linked to the body but there is a soul that duplicates the mind?
If the soul is unfalsifiable, why should we even consider it?

It’s always at least slightly ironic when somebody levels the criterion of falsifiability against dualism, as Popper himself was a pluralist, positing the existence of three instead of two ‘worlds’.

Anyway, the problem with dualism really is that it either collapses to physicalism or idealism (the non-materialist monist view that everything there is, is in some sense mental). The argument can be stated as follows:

Either, the non-physical and the physical interact. Then, there must be some sort of causal nexus between them. If the physical only acts on the mental, we have a form of epiphenomenalism: while our sensations would be due to physical interactions, none of their consequences could have physical import. Consequently, I would not be writing this because of any of my subjective experiences. In particular, I could never have knowledge about epiphenomenalism itself and commit it to paper: such knowledge can only come from subjective experience, and if I were able to write it down, then the subjective experience would have physical consequences.

So we must posit that if the two interact, the mental must also be causally efficacious with respect to the physical. Then, somehow, somewhere, a mental event must cause a physical event—say, the swerve of an electron where it would not have swerved according to known physical laws. But this allows us to probe the mental, with just the same measures we use to probe the physical: study under what precise conditions such (Epicurean) swerves occur. Then, however, the distinction between the physical and the mental collapses: all physical objects are in fact only known to us by their causal consequences, by how they react back on our equipment we use to probe them (be that electron microscopes or eyes).

Consequently, if mental and physical interact, dualism is either incoherent, as we’re left to posit that our writing about the mental is not causally due to the mental, yet still applicable to it, or it simply collapses to physicalism, since interacting causally with the physical essentially can be taken as a (recursive) definition of the physical.

Thus, it follows that the mental and the physical on dualism can’t possibly interact. But then, our sensations aren’t in fact caused by the physical; whenever we see something red, that sensation isn’t due to something red out there in the physical world. It follows that we have, in fact, no knowledge of anything like the physical world, and thus, no valid reason to believe in its existence. If all that existed were the mental, then there would be no discernible difference. Consequently, positing the existence of the physical is simply unjustified; we should rather simply posit that only the mental exists, yielding a form of idealism.

Leibniz tried to get around this with his idea of ‘pre-established harmony’: like two clocks showing the same time without being in causal contact with one another, mental and physical could show ‘psychophysical parallelism’, simply being arranged such that mental and physical events correspond, without any causal mediation between the two. This is, in the end, merely an article of faith: we have to believe that such a harmony exists, without possibly ever having any sufficient justification for such a belief. Consequently, we are justified in rejecting the notion.

---

All that said, the most reasonable version of dualism put forward is, I think, due to David Chalmers, who posits a sort of ‘Matrix’ scenario with computational beings from different substrates (not necessarily substances, in my opinion). I think it falls short of full-fledged dualism, but it does away with many of the more simplistic objections to it.

[Max_S]

@begbert2

Where does the morality derive from, though? 1 explicitly requires an outside authority to tell you what’s moral or not. I’m not really seeing that in you model - and I’m not seeing how the presence or absence of souls impacts that. 6 also doesn’t mention souls - you seem to be asserting based on literally nothing that we need to be nice to souls and NOT people, but there’s no way to tell if a soul is present and no reasons given for why souls matter specifically. And 7 is nonsensical to me and provides no moral guidance anyway.

Deism could fit within my form of dualism. The deity judges souls for the behavior of their bodies. The only problem is, what with the physical realm unable to observe anything in the spiritual realm, the deity’s methodology is unknowable. What is the solution to this? The deity’s methods are assumed as an axiom, just like everything else in the spiritual realm. Whoever forces upon you those axioms is effectively the one imposing obedience. If nobody is being misled it would be your brain forcing itself to abide by the rules. If the result is more desirable behavior, what’s wrong with that?

Extra axioms count against Occam’s Razor - but that only counts in the run-off. Against a simpler theory with similar results, the simpler theory wins. Against a simpler theory with less desirable results, the complex theory wins.

I don’t actually see any difference between 1 and 6. The government could just as easily be the one explaining how a deity judges your soul.

I constructed the gathering-of-souls as a parallel to the gathering of bodies in the physical world which, presumably, decides what is or is not moral for physicalists. I say presumably because I don’t see the basis for sentience yet and it seems everybody is basing moral rights on sentience. The gathered souls, being non-physical, do not need to base their morals on a physical sentience.

~Max

[Max_S]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

It’s always at least slightly ironic when somebody levels the criterion of falsifiability against dualism, as Popper himself was a pluralist, positing the existence of three instead of two ‘worlds’.

Anyway, the problem with dualism really is that it either collapses to physicalism or idealism (the non-materialist monist view that everything there is, is in some sense mental). The argument can be stated as follows:

Either, the non-physical and the physical interact. Then, there must be some sort of causal nexus between them. If the physical only acts on the mental, we have a form of epiphenomenalism: while our sensations would be due to physical interactions, none of their consequences could have physical import. Consequently, I would not be writing this because of any of my subjective experiences. In particular, I could never have knowledge about epiphenomenalism itself and commit it to paper: such knowledge can only come from subjective experience, and if I were able to write it down, then the subjective experience would have physical consequences.

So we must posit that if the two interact, the mental must also be causally efficacious with respect to the physical. Then, somehow, somewhere, a mental event must cause a physical event—say, the swerve of an electron where it would not have swerved according to known physical laws. But this allows us to probe the mental, with just the same measures we use to probe the physical: study under what precise conditions such (Epicurean) swerves occur. Then, however, the distinction between the physical and the mental collapses: all physical objects are in fact only known to us by their causal consequences, by how they react back on our equipment we use to probe them (be that electron microscopes or eyes).

Consequently, if mental and physical interact, dualism is either incoherent, as we’re left to posit that our writing about the mental is not causally due to the mental, yet still applicable to it, or it simply collapses to physicalism, since interacting causally with the physical essentially can be taken as a (recursive) definition of the physical.

Thus, it follows that the mental and the physical on dualism can’t possibly interact. But then, our sensations aren’t in fact caused by the physical; whenever we see something red, that sensation isn’t due to something red out there in the physical world. It follows that we have, in fact, no knowledge of anything like the physical world, and thus, no valid reason to believe in its existence. If all that existed were the mental, then there would be no discernible difference. Consequently, positing the existence of the physical is simply unjustified; we should rather simply posit that only the mental exists, yielding a form of idealism.

Leibniz tried to get around this with his idea of ‘pre-established harmony’: like two clocks showing the same time without being in causal contact with one another, mental and physical could show ‘psychophysical parallelism’, simply being arranged such that mental and physical events correspond, without any causal mediation between the two. This is, in the end, merely an article of faith: we have to believe that such a harmony exists, without possibly ever having any sufficient justification for such a belief. Consequently, we are justified in rejecting the notion.

---

All that said, the most reasonable version of dualism put forward is, I think, due to David Chalmers, who posits a sort of ‘Matrix’ scenario with computational beings from different substrates (not necessarily substances, in my opinion). I think it falls short of full-fledged dualism, but it does away with many of the more simplistic objections to it.

The form of dualism I defend in this thread is epiphenomenalism. I claim the paradox of knowing epiphenomenalism to be unsolvable, yet still it is rational for a physicalist to act as if epiphenomenalism were true.

This is because I don’t believe physicalism can provide a basis for morals.

~Max

[Max_S]

@begbert2

Most people don’t have to be told how to feel emotions; they happen naturally, as part of the cognition happening in their physical brains.

If you cannot point to it, even theoretically, then most people say it doesn’t physically exist. This is why dualism is intuitive - feelings don’t physically exist. They are real, but you can’t find them with a microscope.

The rest of your post is compatible with a dualist’s definition of “feelings”.

~Max

[Max_S]

@GIGObuster

Uh, feelings come from thinking also. What you post here is not making sense.
Well, thing is that smarter people than me already figured that out, as noted in one of the cites I made, “Mind/Body dualism has adverse consequences for psychiatry, such as stigmatization of mental illness, restricted funding for research and patient care, discrimination against patients with psychiatric or addictive disease in the insurance market place and leads to cognitive distortions affecting the training and practice of psychiatry.” So, no, there is no need to act as if souls existed in a very peculiar interpretation of dualism. In reality it can be harmful in some situations. That is the trouble for thinking that there is a literal separation when a lot, if not all of it, should be seen as a metaphorical separation.

I’m not sure what the difference between literal and metaphorical mind-body separation might be when the separation is non-falsifiable.

And I hate to pull the no-true-Scotsman card, but I have to disavow whatever kind of dualism your cites are talking about. There’s no other response to make unless it’s some sort of quackery-psychiatrist.

We have already established that “mainstream” dualism is not compatible with the dualism I am defending here.

~Max

[Max_S]

@begbert2

Define “agency”.

Perhaps it was a mistake to bring this up. Oh well.

Moral agency. Your physical consciousness isn’t culpable for the actions of a deterministic physical process. You had no choice in the matter. The same cannot be said of a soul.

Perhaps you are thinking a soul cannot be held accountable for the actions of a body it has no control over? That’s not necessarily true either, but I would have to move from dualism into pluralism and endorse a multiple-world theory of physical reality. At every point where there are multiple solutions, the soul picks which solution to move forward with and is thus responsible for your actions.

I’m not willing (too tired) to defend or elaborate on that right now so I’ll let the matter drop. The correct basis of morality would be sentience, not consciousness.

~Max

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@Max_S

The form of dualism I defend in this thread is epiphenomenalism. I claim the paradox of knowing epiphenomenalism to be unsolvable, yet still it is rational for a physicalist to act as if epiphenomenalism were true.

This is because I don’t believe physicalism can provide a basis for morals.

~Max

Well, but then, you can just do an end-run around this whole dualism thing and have the physicalist act as if physicalism provides a basis for morals. Or literally anything else: morals are due to a higher power, or due to objective moral laws, and so on. Dualism only seems to complicate the matter, because it’s not straightforward to argue that it succeeds in providing a basis for morals, so if you would have us pretend that something we can’t possibly know to be true is actually true, why not choose something where the case is made more easily?

[Max_S]

@begbert2

And also, “my” soul can have no causal effect on any of the things I say or do. (Unlike my consciousness, which definitely does.)

How does one use dualism to justify a moral belief? Any moral belief. Just list one. One moral belief, and how dualism justifies it.

You can make up literally any rule and just say it affects souls in the spiritual realm. If I remember correctly your soul is a little girl walking on the beach.

“Adultery reflects badly on your soul. It makes her throw up a little which ruins her walk.”

Now obviously a form of dualism where just anyone can change the rules is absurd. It has to be reasonable to most people to pass the smell test, to convince pragmatists it’s worth following the rules.

I’m nobody to come up with all the rules. That’s what religions are for, although perhaps they haven’t succeeded yet. But I can sit here and say it’s possible all day long.

~Max

[Max_S]

@GIGObuster

“Throughout history, every mystery ever solved, has turned out to be… not magic.” - Tim Minchin.

I disagree with the a core premise of psychiatry, that there exists such a thing as a mental illness that can’t be treated by treating the human body, if only we knew how the body worked. This is despite my support of dualism and I think it is despite my support of talk psychiatry in another thread.

Psychiatry is heuristic, it is not a precise science. If the mind they are trying to treat is a purely physical brain, then in theory a neurosurgeon could “fix” whatever mental problem comes up. We don’t have the technology or know-how but in theory, it’s all there. So I’ll support this form of psychiatry, but only as long as it is needed. Eventually psychiatry will go the way of alchemy and phrenology and we will all see neurologists for our head problems. Maybe talk psychiatry will stick around because talking is so cheap.

If the mind they are dealing with is the soul I’ve been describing here, psychiatrists are chasing a wild goose. They can’t observe the soul because the soul has no causal relationship with the physical world.

If the mind they are dealing with is the soul in mainstream dualism, that is, it is nonphysical but somehow interacts with the physical world, then I dismiss the entire field as quackery. If it interacts with the physical world and we can observe it, it is the physical world and therefore see above.

~Max