Mind/body dilemma? Can't we just all agree on monism and that the other side is wrong

Is a mind a terrible thing to incorporate? Or is a body a terrible thing to give a mind?

Huh, we gotta get rid of one or the other, right?

I'm not totally sure that you have to get rid of one or the other, but dualistic theories seem to have a lot less explanatory power than do monistic ones. At the end, I always find myself asking how the mind and the body are related (connected?) to one another, and no good explanation has ever surfaced.

That problem is avoided if you just say that the mind is an emergent property of matter, or that matter is an emergent property of the mind.

I'm a matter-first guy. First off, it seems like the simpler explanation: what exists is what appears to exist. Secondly, I don't know how mind-first people are able to avoid solipsism on the one hand, or a sort of intellectual animism on the other. Those are the places I wind up when I try to take idealism seriously.

It seems to me that 'mind' is so confused and incoherent a notion that we should stop using the word for a while. Let's spend the 10 to 100 years necessary to understand the functioning of the human brain, then decide if there is anything left over that 'mind' might refer to.

3 : I can agree with that, but eventually someone in the group is going to attempt to show how the mind is necessary for something poorly defined.

The position I am most attracted to is the mysterian one. As unsatisfying an "explanation" as it is (it is not an explanation), it simply states the obvious: materialistic monism is the obvious choise, with the caveat that "mind" is such a unique thing that attempts to reduce it to matter end up ignoring the phenomenon completely (calling it an illusion, etc.)

I cannot get with bertilak's suggestion for one big reason: even if we talk only of brain states, we cannot directly via introspection get at brain states. Our minds detec thoughts, sensations, etc, rather than brain states (which we can only SEE from the OUTSIDE.)

So what? The concept of mind is fuzzy and materialists of a reductionist sort can't make sense of it. Dan Dennett will not be able to sleep at night; who cares? The human mind thinks in terms of the mind, not the brain. Demanding that we do otherwise (speak of brain states to refer to thoughts), is like demanding that I learn a new language solely to please philosophers.

Isn't it a question of the relevant level of theory? If you install on your PC a program that doesn't do what it should, you will have a hard time debugging it by considering the behaviour of the electrons in the chips, although that's where the low level physical explanation is. Similarly, explaining our behaviour in terms of the chemistry, or worse, physics, underlying the firing of our neurons, is a bad way to start. Hence the mind as a theoretical construct. Predictions made on the basis of a theory of mind will never be as reliable as predictions based on chemistry, but far more tractable.

Dan Dennett will have no problem with this. He is one of those I learned it from. (Any errors and misunderstandings are mine.)

Interesting point. Where did Dennett use this, or a related, analogy. I would like to check it out, because I always figured him for a reductionist that cared little for talk of "levels of explanation."

# 7: KevinCK "Where did Dennett use this"

I'm sorry, I don't remember. It may well have been in Darwin's dangerous idea, I think that's where he criticises "greedy reductionism".

ETA: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_reductionism

>8 jimroberts:, Thanks for that link. Lots of books cited in there that I'm going to have to read now.

Yes. thanks for the link. I am beginning a research project that questions, in part, whether reducing mind to matter is a useful project. Dennett is one of the fellows I've been reading on this score, and he contradicts himself. If he is a critic of greedy reductionism - and does not want to 'explain consciousness away' - then he says quite the opposite in his book "Sweet Dreams." There he states, quite a few times, that consciousness is an illusion (which, by defnition, implies that it is not real).

I will have to reread Consciousness Explained on this score, as I smell a contradiction.

I recommend The Tree of Knowledge by Humberto Maturana for an interesting alternative perspective.

He comes from the point of view of an evolutionary biologist -- and uses a discussion of biological structure to attack the entire premise of Cartesian dualism.

I highly recommend it for an alternative to the whole "materialism vs. dualism" dilemma.

Those who write arguments against Cartesian dualism argue against a position that nobody seems to hold. After Popper and Eccles, I am hard pressed to think of anyone who defends Cartesian substance dualism. The closest thing I recall is defences of property dualism, but these authors (was it Penrose?) would have disagreed with substance dualism.

I think the tendency is to see anyone who is not an iron-clad monist (the mind can be reduced to the physical) as a substance dualist. In reality, most of those who disbelieve in explanatory reduction of this kind are Mysterians or property dualists.

12: Well, based on what you've said, I'd DEFINITELY be interested in hearing your take on the view described in The Tree of Knowledge. I don't think your generalizations apply there... but of course, I can't be sure until you read the book yourself and let me know what you think.

Easy question.
You may believe in every thing you want. But belief isn't such kind of action which can always be verified. An hypothesis could be verified with an experiment.
I should believe in dualism but what kind of proof can I produce, in order to verify objectively my belief?
So, until someone will produce a real proof of a dualism, we could always accept monism as the best verified theory.
Vale

#14 says, "An hypothesis could be verified with an experiment."

Hypotheses aren't verified by experiments. Experiments produce data that can be consistent or inconsistent with predictions of a hypothesis. You can do a million experiments that yield data consistent with a hypothesis, and although this may increase the chances that the hypothesis is right, it never constitutes "proof". It could be that the right experiment to disconfirm the hypothesis simply hasn't been performed yet.

In short: There are no hypotheses that have been "proven" by experimentation.... only hypotheses that have not yet been falsified by experimentation.

#14 says, "...until someone will produce a real proof of a dualism, we could always accept monism ..."

You say "could" and I suppose that is true. But this style of argument is a red herring. You could equally argue that you "could" accept dualism until one provides a "proof" of monism.

And the fact is, the notions of "proof" and "verification" are being misused in this context.

Until someone comes up with a SPECIFIC dualist theory that makes a SPECIFIC prediction that can be tested experimentally, the whole notion of "proof" simply doesn't apply.

That last sentence doesn't mean "there is no proof of dualism." It means: The whole notion of "proof" is not applicable, in the absence of a specific theory with testable hypotheses.

To Mr. greg....
To not be a professor with me! I graduated in philosophy of science, I dont' need your boring lesson on Popper! I wrote just only that monism is the better view at the moment, until someone will find/create, etc. a new, most powerful theory in which dualism could be considered a sort of postulate (a fact?). This doesn't mean that I believe/hope in dualism as a theory with equivalent predictive power. I don't think human being needs the ultimate "proof": not always a belief is a thought based on a rational way of thinking. S.one could believe in phantom, in ET, etc. without having a proof/test/an indirect element, etc. but this is belief; according to me not a good belief, but it's a belief.
That's all
Vale

#16: I just think you should be precise with language. If you don't mean "proof", then don't use the word "proof."

ref #5
I suppose the mysterians could turn out to be correct, but given the level of evidence (only that the problem is tough and hasnt yet been solved) it seems way too early to say its beyond human ken.

The jury is still out.

It is easy to claim that something is beyond the reach of human knowledge but its quite another thing to prove that it is, or even to come up with a plausible argument which may fall short of actual "proof" but which seems convincing.

Its a little like the creationists who want to say that this or that (the eye, the flagellum, whatever) are too complex to have arisen by a large number of small changes. Every such proposition has fallen, so why would we think that a mere claim that consciousness is beyond our reach will survive any better?

Have you considered the other kind of dualism - dual aspect monism? This is essentially Spinoza's position in his Ethics - he wasn't happy with Cartesian Dualism or any other form of substance dualism, and argued at length for there being a single substance but conceived in different ways. So, in the case of the mind, it may be substantially neither material nor immaterial, and we are just stuck with two distinct modes of explanation concerning the same thing: the material view, backed up by empirical data we can share and is thus objective in some sense, and the immaterial view which is similarly empirical but accessible only from the interior, subjective standpoint. It is not that the mind is reducible to brain function, but properly understood the two modes of explanation are analagous in every detail, or so Spinoza would claim.

With this is mind (no pun intended) there's no need to worry about whether the material or 'mental' explanation is the correct one - they both are.

Of course Spinoza doesn't call these modes of explanation, he calls them attributes perceived under modes, or something like that (it's been a while since I read him).

I'm sure there are plenty of objections to such a position, but I forget what they are, so you'll have to provide them yourself.

I wonder whether this issue can also be tackled using two-dimensional semantics, but that's not my strongpoint...

ref #19
Clever, but no cigar.

You cant jawbone the problem away.

We now know, as no one in Spinoza's time could know, that physical life emerges from (or is supported by) "dead" chemical processes, and that mental life, somehow, emerges from the action of individually non conscious brain cells.

What turns dead chemistry and mechanical stimulus-response into "qualia" is the hard problem, and so far, nobody has clue one.

PS. If you want to know how I "know" that individual brain cells are not conscious, the truth is, I dont know that, I just guess it. I bet you guess it too.

PPS, Actually, even if they were conscious, that wouldnt help the hard problem, because we still need to figure out how that great horde of teeny tiny little individual "I am me's" somehow coalesce to give rise to a new individual, the actual yours truly.

>20 modalursine:

I agree that getting qualia from dead chemistry is a problem, but it seems to be a problem only if you think that all phenomena should be reducible to physics or neuroscience or chemistry or whatever. Physics simply doesn't do phenomenological concepts. No amount of investigation into 'emergence' is going to give physics such concepts, and the only way to discover if qualia are present is to ask someone 'are you experiencing this'. That's the nature of phenomena, they are only available as particular subjective experiences. So, let's say that we could model every possible variation in complexity of a biological life-form from the simplest to the human (with a sophisticated brain and capacity for language). Imagine doing any number of possible tests on each of those models, looking for the stage at which the thing is sophisticated enough to have qualia. How is this going to be possible without asking the question - "Do you experience?" Perhaps we can define mental life as simple being able to refer to memory, or to reflect upon thinking. Presumably a computer can do this, so long as it can store a record of it's past processes and reinstate them as a simulation for analysis. Sure, that could be 'mental life' but then it doesn't tell us anything about qualia either.

E.g., there's been a recent surge in interest in 'neuro-aesthetics' in relation to art. I can't help thinking that such research projects are convenient ways to get research funding but won't ever lead to any result in the field which they are allegedly concerned with. There'll be interesting results in neuroscience, but nothing much to do with aesthetics of art. Obviously if you are doing philosophy, and you argue that your field might be preparatory for advances in neuroscience, then funding will be easier to come by...

Eh...

I figure what is thought of as "qualia", that is, thought of a singular thing -- experienced phenomena... is just a congregate of multiple processes.

Perhaps getting qualia from 'dead' chemistry is a problem in 2009... but probably not in the near future.

New sciences will emerge. Perhaps physics doesn't do phenomenological concepts... but biophysics will. If biophysics doesn't, perhaps a psychophysics or even a sociophysics will.

#21"No amount of investigation into 'emergence' is going to give physics such concepts, and the only way to discover if qualia are present is to ask someone 'are you experiencing this'."

Er animals? They equally can't answer. Of course you quickly start hitting the problem of how to define life - a surprisingly difficult question. But once you've reached the minimum qualification for life, you're really not that far away from emergant properties. Still difficult today ... but "only a few years away" maybe.

>23 reading_fox:

Yeah, you can't ask animals if they have qualia. But I wasn't suggesting that being able to communicate that you have qualia was essential to having them, only that without the communication of subjective experience we aren't going to find any evidence that they are present.

I think the 'life' concept is a separate issue. This is purely speculation: I think the concept 'life' may usually be meant to indicate something intrinsically valuable, and it's therefore not obviously appropriate to any physical reductionist progamme either. I'm not sure that 'life' should be an evaluative concept of this kind, but I think the problem with identifying it mainly arises for those who think it just is a good thing.

Anyone have a rigorously worked-out view on the fact/value distinction that might help with this discussion?

Furthermore, none of the physical sciences will ever do phenomenological concepts. Why? Essentially phenomenology is enquiry from the standpoint of the subject. It's pretty much the antithesis of the approach taken by all the physical sciences. I'm not aware that anyone has ever seriously proposed that the physical sciences proceed phenomenologically - it might be interesting if they did, but I suspect that anything like a mind/body problem would then be radically different from the one we are considering, if it could arise as an issue at all.

ref #21 I agree that getting qualia from dead chemistry is a problem, but it seems to be a problem only if you think that all phenomena should be reducible to physics or neuroscience or chemistry or whatever

Fair enough, but if you dont, you're in a different but no less comfortable pickle:

How does a non physical thing-a-me-bob influence physical mental processes, and how do "heavy drugs" change mental state? Or why should a heavy metal spike through your brain (assuming you survive) change your personality?

So thats two kinds of magic:
An incorporeal "mind" moves physical things.
Physical things change the incorporeal mind.

Thats Magic, and its turtles all the way down.

Not at all. You are assuming that the only alternative to physical reductionism (there's one explanation, and it's physical) is substance dualism, which asserts that there is a wierd incorporeal substance. Obviously that's just wierd, and would give rise to all the problems you indicate. That's old news. I'm not talking about substance dualism. I'm talking about two distinct modes of epistemology.

Substance dualism is not the only alternative to substance monism, as a possible way of handling the problem. What I'm proposing needn't directly have anything much to do with 'substances' at all.

Imagine the neurosciences as being like mapmakers, they describing the features observed from an objective standpoint, many miles distant from the actual places they describe. Let's say that at a given moment the map can even tell us where everyone in a given region is located. So it can describe where people are, and maybe what they look like, what they are doing etc, how they interact. The map doesn't tell you anything about what it 'feels' like to be the person located. It only tells you where they are, how long it might take them to get from A to B, what the terrain is etc etc. Functional stuff described in physical terms. Now imagine the data from the perspective of one of those people described in the map, in that environment, down on the ground. What's different isn't just that the person on the ground has a different physical perspective from the map maker. The big difference is that when the mapmaker describes that person they can say all kinds of physical things about location and visible behaviour in relation to the enviroment, but the person being described is directly aware of what it feels like to be there, functioning in that way. The point is that there are two epistemological views - the one of the mapmaker and the one of the person mapped. They may each tell stories that correspond in many different ways, but they are nonetheless different stories and can't be translated without changing perspective - first person to third person and vice versa. Neither the map nor the mapmaker knows what it feels like to be the person mapped, in the environment, only that person does. There's no substance dualism here. We needn't specify anything about substances to see what the problem is - two distinct perspectives, and not everything that is available to one is available to the other and vice versa.

There's no magic, no mysticism, no wierd substances or casual interactions.

ref #27
You say there's a "third way" between materialist reductionism on the one hand and belief in spirit or mind stuff as an elemental essence on the other.

I cant recognize a third way in what you're saying
"...Neither the map nor the mapmaker knows what it feels like to be the person mapped, in the environment, only that person does...

That may just show what a clod I am, but the problem was to explain how there could be a subject that "Feels" anything at all.

So far, the only two approaches I'm aware of are that it was built up from something simpler (in some mysterious way nobody knows how to explain), or that it is some basic property of the world and part of the "why should there be something rather than nothing" problem.

"Perspective" wont solve the problem, because the existence of perspective in the first place it what we're trying to understand.

Or am I missing something subtle here?

The two approaches you mention sound like substance monism (physical reductionism) and the problem of emergence. The first is a position holding that there's only one kind of 'stuff' and that we shouldn't go looking for 'mind' stuff, whereas the second is a particular way of stating the mind/body problem rather than an position of a position. Emergence arises as a problem for the monist who wants to say that only at a certain degree of complexity mindlike things happen, it is also a problem for a dualist who thinks that at a certain degree of complexity actual 'mind' stuff happens. Of course, the dualist doesn't have to bother with the emergence problem unless he/she holds a particular view which denies 'minds' to simple/non-human life forms.

I don't think there's anything cloddish in not finding my argument persuasive, or that you are necessarily wrong.

In fact, I think one of your comments is important:
"the existence of perspective in the first place is what we're trying to understand".

That's an interesting way of putting it. But note that one can respond to the 'perspective' problem in two different ways. One can assume that there is an objective perspective, and then worry about how there is subjectivity, or one can assume that there is subjectivity, and then worry about how there is objectivity. I take both very seriously. The subjective perspective is the only thing we have direct access to, and it's extremely difficult then to establish an objective stand from there. However, I don't therefore assume that talk of objectivity is nonsense (I'm not a relativist and I think there can be objective statements of fact/truths). I find it obvious that there are objectively true statements, and some may be asserted in scientific discourse, it's just very very difficult to explain them philosophically given subjectivity. In this way the problem 'may', for example, wind up being a problem about the meaning of the statements asserted, with respect to the subjective and objective, but not therefore 'just' about language/idiolects.

The phenomenologists had a similar approach, though one needn't be thinking in that tradition to bring out the problem in the way I just did. In fact for Heideggerian phenomenologists, the subjective/objective distinction barely arises at all.

As I say, I think the neurosciences are going to discover incredible things about brain functioning and how it affects our thinking, it just isn't going to be able to explain why that physical process gives rise to a 'seeming like' 'feeling like' subjectivity.

I look upon materialist monism as a working hypothesis that explains the commonly perceived facts of reality THE BEST so I just assume it is true so I can get on with my life.

Cognitive science marches on and all I hear about is experiments which confirm the hypothesis that mind is an emergent process and has no existence independent of the brain. No theory as to the "how" has come forth yet, sure, and may never come forth. I can live with that.

If I ever encounter a theory that fits the perceived facts better, then I will accept it. I am not holding my breath in the meantime.

Case close for me.