
In philosophy of mind, dualism is a set of beliefs which begin with the claim that the mental and the physical have a fundamentally different nature. It is contrasted with varying kinds of monism, including materialism and phenomenalism. Dualism is one answer to the mind-body problem. Pluralism (philosophy of mind) holds that there are even more kinds of events or things in the world. Note that other fields have their own meanings for "dualism". See dualism. ==Types of ontological dualism== Ontological dualism makes dual commitments about the nature of existence as it relates to mind and matter. Substance dualism asserts that the mind and matter are fundamentally distinct kinds of substances, while property dualism suggests that the ontological distinction lies in what properties mind and matter differ as in emergentism. Yet a weaker type of ontological dualism is predicate dualism which claims the irreducibility of mental predicates to physical predicates. Cartesian dualism is a kind of substance dualism, a great difficulty with which is the explanation of the interaction between mind and matter, if mind is to be immaterial. ==Types of interaction dualism== Regardless of whether ontological dualism is correct, one may wish to inquire how the mental interacts with the material. Interaction dualism can be distinguished based on if and how mind and matter are thought to causality interact. In dualistic interactionism (also Cartesian dualism, as it was René Descartes' position), arguably the most popular and widespread version, mental events can cause physical events and vice versa. Thus when Johnny touches a hot stove and burns his skin (physical events), he experiences pain (a mental event). Conversely, when Jessica decides her dog needs exercise (a mental event), she takes it for a walk (a physical event). This is arguably most people's common sense view of the relationship between mind and matter. Epiphenomenalism allows causality to flow only in one direction, claiming that physical events have mental effects, but not vice versa. So although the mental cannot be reduced to the physical, mental events are side-effects, or by-products, of physical processes. Usually, the mind is seen as being a by-product of the brain and its neurons. The contrary position, that physical events are somehow by-products of mental events, is relatively unpopular and does not have a standard name. According to a rather different theory called parallelism, mental events and physical events are perfectly coordinated by God; so that when a mental event such as Sally's decision to walk across the room occurs, simultaneously Sally's body heads across the room, in the absence of any cause-effect relation between mind and body. Mental and physical events are just perfectly coordinated by God, either in advance (as per Gottfried Leibniz's idea of pre-established harmony) or at the time (as in the Occasionalism of Nicolas Malebranche). ==Arguments for dualism== One argument for dualism, especially dualistic interactionism, is that it is a very common sense ''view''. Some developmental psychologists claim to have shown that dualism is commonsensical for very young children as well. This is obviously not "proof", but it suggests we should at least demand a reason for abandoning dualism. A second argument is that the mind is (or resides in) the immortal soul. Traditional Christianity actually believed in the binding of the soul and body in one's redemption. Only in more recent branches off of Christanity was the idea that your body will die and then your soul will go to heaven, or hell. If you believe in this idea then you believe in dualism. Another idea in contrast to dualism is if you accept phenomenalism, which holds that everything is, ultimately, mental. But in any event you absolutely cannot hold that the soul is reducible to anything physical. If events in your soul ''were'' reducible to events in your brain, then when your brain stopped functioning, your soul would cease to exist. This is not necessarily the case, as some views of the universe admit the possibility that the laws of physics are not static. See the book ''The Physics of Immortality'' (ISBN 0385467990). Note that although this religious account may motivate or reinforce a religious person's belief in dualism, it may well seem altogether unconvincing to dualism's skeptics. To use this argument to convert, say, a card-carrying materialist to dualism, it seems necessary to first establish that people do, in fact, have immortal souls. And yet the card-carrying materialist is one of the last kinds of people who are going to admit to this. A third argument for dualism goes like this: if dualism is false, we should be able to reduce mind to matter, or vice versa, or to reduce both to a neutral third substance. Notably Buddhist philosophy argues this point, but says everything reduces to "emptyness" or Shunyata rather than a "substance". A final argument, to be explored in depth, is that the mental and the physical seem to have quite different and perhaps irreconcilable properties. First, mental events are not publicly observable. When I touch the hot stove, you may see me whip back my hand and say "Ouch!" but you are not feeling my pain. Unless you're Mr. Spock, or God, you can't as it were get inside my mind and take a look at what's going on in there. And of course it's not just because my mind is hidden beneath my skull. If you knew just where to look in my brain, you wouldn't be able to see thoughts and feelings jiggling around in there. That's just not how it works. So unlike physical events, like fireworks displays, mental events are private, not publicly observable. Second, mental events are often said not to be spatially located. Where is my pain supposed to be? Maybe you could say in my fingertips, because they hurt. But is that where the ''feeling'' is? Does it really make sense to say that the ''feeling'' is in my aching fingertips? That sounds a little funny, anyway. A better example would be an emotion like happiness. When I say I'm happy, can I locate my happiness in my head, or does it exist all my body, or something? Doesn't that sound odd? It would seem better to say that my happiness isn't the sort of thing that ''can'' be located in a particular place. Third, more generally, mental events do not seem to have various physical properties which physical events have. For one thing, mental events do not involve anything having mass, or physical motion. We can't weigh a thought. We can't say that a feeling has a velocity of 10 miles an hour. To say such things is to talk nonsense. Now you might say: that's only because mental events are ''events''. You can't say that physical events have mass or velocity either. Point well enough taken; that's true, no event, per se, has mass or velocity. But physical events do ''involve'' objects which have mass and velocity. Mental events do not have any components which have mass and velocity. For example, when I think, "I like ice cream," I have a concept of ice cream; and my concept of ice cream has no mass and velocity. Nothing involved in my appreciation for ice cream would appear to have any such physical properties. This is a point to which we will have to return. But on the face of it, this seems pretty obvious. Fourth, mental events have a certain ''subjective'' quality to them, which physical events obviously do not. I mean, for example, what a burned finger feels like, what sky blue looks like, what nice music sounds like, and so on. I'm going to expand on this fourth point at some length. Recently, philosophers have been calling the subjective aspects of mental events ''qualia'', and they also call them ''raw feels''. There is something ''that it's like'' to feel pain, to see a familiar shade of blue, and so on; there are ''qualia'' involved in these mental events. And the claim is that qualia seem particularly difficult to reduce to anything physical. Just think of what that would involve. You'd be saying: ''feeling the top of my hand right now'', this "raw feel" I'm experiencing right now, is ''itself'' nothing more than a physical event. In fact, there is an article by an American, Thomas Nagel, that came out in the late 1970s called "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" In this article Nagel argued roughly as follows. You are familiar with the fact that bats use a certain kind of sonar, right? They emit high-pitched shrieks which allow them to fly around in dark caves; they can tell how far away the walls are based on how their shrieks echo around in the cave. Bat sonar allows bats to perceive distance, shape, size, and so on, in a way similar to, but obviously different from the way vision works for us. Now Nagel invited us to ask, "So what ''is'' it like to be a bat, flying around in the dark using bat sonar?" Surely bats do have experiences; we just don't know what they are. Suppose we were to take apart a bat brain and figure out how the neural apparatus for bat sonar works. No doubt biologists have actually done so, dissected bat brains and so forth. But in understanding how the bat brain works, do those biologists learn ''what it is like to be a bat''? Well of course not. They're mucking around in the grey matter of bats. In order to know what it's like to be a bat, and to have bat sonar, why, you'd have to be a bat. So argued Nagel. So what's the point of all this? The point is that if indeed there are "bat qualia," then there are peculiar mental events of a sort that only bats have, and we cannot learn what they are like even if we have a detailed understanding of physical events going on in the bat brain. Or to put it even more simply: there is a strange "bat sonar experience" we'll never have. We won't have it even if we learn what physical events in bat brains are associated with bat sonar. So that's excellent evidence that mental events cannot be reduced to physical events; mental events must be regarded as quite a different sort of thing from physical events. Really, you can make the same point without even bringing up weird cases like bat sonar. Just think of your own unique feelings. Do you think that a psychologist could, simply by digging around in your brain and doing tests on your grey matter, ever learn what that feeling was like? In summary, there are at least four major differences between the mental and the physical, which make it difficult to understand how one might ''reduce'' the mental to the physical. Mental events: *Are not publicly observable *They do not seem spatially localized *It is difficult to identify their physical properties (such as mass and velocity) precisely *There seems to be an irreducibly subjective aspect to them These appear to be powerful reasons to think that the mind and the body are two totally different categories of being. That is the basic argument for dualism. ==Arguments against dualism== Varieties of dualism in which mind can causally affect matter have come under strenuous attack from different quarters, especially starting in the 20th century. How can something totally immaterial, people ask, affect something totally material? That's the basic problem. We can analyze the problem here into three parts. First, it is not clear ''where'' the interaction would take place. Burning my fingers causes pain, right? Well, apparently there is some chain of events, leading from the burning of skin, to the stimulation of nerve endings, to something happening in the nerves of my body that lead to my brain, to something happening in a particular part of my brain; ''and then'', I feel pain. But the pain is not supposed to be spatially located. So what I want to know is, where does the interaction take place? If you say, "It takes place in the brain," then I will say, "But I thought pains weren't located anywhere." And you, as a dualist, might stick to your guns and say, "That's right, pains ''aren't'' located anywhere; but the brain event that immediately leads to the pain ''is'' located in the brain." But then we have a very strange causal relation on our hands. The cause is located in a particular place but the effect is not located anywhere. Well, you might say, that might be puzzling but it's not a devastating criticism. (''Problems with the above paragraph: 1) some dualisms maintain that the mind resides in a particular place, say, in the pineal(?) gland. In this case the arguments about the mental being "nowhere" look less strange. 2) it seems a little blurred -- is the problem locating the mind or the mental events or both? 3) it should at least be emphasized that things don't necessarily have to be in the same place to interact, as we see with the "attraction at a distance" in gravity.'') So look at a second problem about the interaction. Namely, ''how'' does the interaction take place? Maybe you think, "Well, that's a matter for science -- scientists will eventually discover the connection between mental and physical events." But philosophers have something to say about the matter, because the ''very idea'' of a ''mechanism'', which explains the connection between the mental and the physical, would be very strange, at best. Why do I say it would be strange? Compare it to a mechanism that we ''do'' understand. Take a very simple causal relation, such as when the cue ball strikes the eight ball and causes it to go into the pocket. Here we can say that the cue ball has a certain amount of momentum as its mass moves across the pool table with some velocity, and then that momentum is transferred to the eight ball, which then heads toward the pocket. Now compare that to the situation in the brain, where we want to say a decision causes some neurons to fire and thus cause my body to move across the room. The decision, "I will cross the room now," is a mental event; and as such it does not have physical properties such as force. If it has no force, then how on earth could it cause any neuron to fire? Is it magic? Honestly, how could something without any physical properties have any physical ''effects'' at all? Here you might reply, as some philosophers have indeed replied, as follows. You might say: "Well sure, there is a mystery about how the interaction between mental and physical events can occur; but the fact that there is a mystery doesn't mean that ''there is'' no interaction. Because plainly there is an interaction and plainly the interaction is between two totally different sorts of events." Now I expect that some of you may want to say this. But the problem with it is that it does not seem to answer the full power of the objection. So let me explain the objection more precisely. Let's take as our example my decision to walk across the room. We say: my decision, a mental event, immediately causes a group of neurons in my brain to fire, a physical event, which ultimately results in my walking across the room. The problem is that if we have something totally nonphysical ''causing'' a bunch of neurons to fire, then there is no ''physical'' event which causes the firing. That means that some physical energy seems to have appeared out of thin air. Even if we say that my decision has some sort of mental energy, and that the decision causes the firing, we still haven't explained where the ''physical'' energy, for the firing, came from. It just seems to have popped into existence from nowhere. A fundamental principle of physics is involved, the conservation of energy. According to this principle, "In all physical processes, the total amount of energy in the universe remains constant." Or in a form you may have heard before: in any change anything undergoes, energy is neither created nor destroyed. This is a basic principle you probably learned about in high school physics. So the point is that nerve firings, which are allegedly caused by a totally nonphysical decision, would appear to violate the Principle of the Conservation of Energy. Now, dualistic interactionists have tried to answer these objections, and other such objections, but most philosophers these days are not impressed by their answers. It has come to the point where, in fact, there aren't very many interactionists around, and there haven't been many for decades. When I say this, I don't mean to imply that dualistic interactionism is false. All I mean to imply is that many philosophers today think it is false, and perhaps also that, if you want to hold onto interactionism yourself, you should try to come up with some effective replies to these objections. (''Another very interesting route to take for the aspiring substance dualist might be to question the causal closure of the physical domain. Briefly: there seem to be events on the quantum level which lack a physical cause; if they lack a physical cause, then either they have a nonphysical cause or they are uncaused; in either of these cases, the physical domain is not causally closed. But it remains true that there are very serious objections to substance dualism which must be met.'') ==Biological naturalism== John R. Searle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, has pioneered an approach to mind-body issues that is dualistic in some respects, monist in others. He calls it "biological naturalism." Searle's views sound like dualistic interactionism. He believes that consciousness "is a real part of the real world and it cannot be eliminated in favor of, or reduced to, something else" whether that something-else is a neurological state of the brain or a software program. He contends, for example, that the software known as Deep Blue ''knows'' nothing about chess. He also believes that consciousness is both a cause of events in the body and a response to events in the body. On the other hand, Searle doesn't treat consciousness as a ghost in the machine. He treats it, rather, as an emergent property of the brain as a whole. (See holism). The causal interaction of mind and brain can be described in naturalistic terms, thus: events at the micro-level (perhaps at that of individual neurons) cause consciousness. Changes at the macro-level (the whole brain) constitute consciousness. Micro-changes cause and then are impacted by holistic changes, in much the same way that individual football players cause a team (as a whole) to win games, then the individuals gain confidence from the knowledge that they are part of a winning team. ==See also== *Johannes Jacobus Poortman ==External links== *[http://artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/dualism.html Dictionary of philosophy of mind entry] *[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/ Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy] Philosophy of mind Metaphysics
The "Arguments against dualism" section is now a little weird, because it's almost entirely about Cartesian dualism. It'd be nice to integrate some more universal objections. --User:Ryguasu 03:27 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC) ---- I have a piece by Jerry Fodor that seems to imply that dualism, especially Cartesian dualism, was basically the only way people in "the West" looked at the mind-body problem until the 1920s, when behaviorism came on the scene. Can anyone confirm this? It's probably true, though I find it hard to believe, given how surrounded I am by monists. --User:Ryguasu 04:34 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC) ---- Ryguasu, there have been many more thoughts and positions on the mind-body problem pre-1920, some dualist, some monist, and some ascribing to a dual-aspect theory. It is one of the richest fields of philosophy. --Tom Chance, 11:02 Oct 14, 2003 (GMT) == Analogy: Mental:physical::software:hardware == Consider feelings and thoughts as patterns in the electric/chemical messages. They have very similar properties to languages or binary codes used in computers. To translate code into action, you just need sensors programmed to respond to certain codes. A switch mechanism in computer or electrical circuit may be triggered by a sensor which reacts to code. No doubt a "finger HOT" message causes a very primitive/frantic burst from nerve endings. Muscles respond to frantic bursts of electrical energy as evidenced by cleching muscles in electrocution, or impulses used for cardiac arrest. Of course information cannot be measured in terms of mass and velocity. The meaning of an encrypted stream of data may be a fraction short of impossible to deode, but we rely on it's existence when we pay for something over the net... What's so difficult to comprehend? Eugene Blom Alice Springs :Eugene: what you're describing sounds a lot like Functionalism (sociology), one of the approaches to the mind/body problem, and probably one of the most popular in recent times. It has all sorts of issues for philosophers who don't accept determinism and other problems as well, but is of course the basis for the AI movement, and can at least be a useful way to look at minds, whether or not it represents their reality. :User:Sethmahoney 20:39, 27 Oct 2003 (UTC) :My two cents Eugene -- I don't see the mind/body dichotomy as analogous to software/hardware. One reason is the aging process itself. Computer hardware might be said to age, but that's indifferent to the software. The software is information, which doesn't properly-speaking age at all and which could be easily transferred to alternative hardware if the earlier unit becomes unreliable, burns out circuits, or whatever. :But my mind ages with my body, in respects both good and bad (I get warier of dangers, which is good -- I also get tired more easily than I did when young -- which is bad). Furthermore, and a closely related point, no one has yet devised a reliable way to transfer the mind of yours truly to some younger body as this one becomes unreliable. We ARE our history, in ways that aren't true for AI creations, and this makes the type of solution to the mind/body problem you propose very problematic. --User:Christofurio 16:58, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC) ---- Descartes and dualism - was in the article, isn't anymore because it was in the "arguments for dualism" section, which it is not. It should be in the article though! If the original author or someone else wants to start a section briefly discussing Descartes' dualism or maybe as an add-on to the intro section where it talks about Cartesian dualism, stick it there. How can mind and body, two drastically different kinds of things, interact with each other? Descartes relies upon theology to answer this question. Above and beyond creating mental substance and physical substance, there is a third kind of creation. According to Descartes, God creates a union between these two different substances, a union that constitutes human nature. --User:Sethmahoney 00:56, 7 Mar 2004 (UTC) Hi, two points: #The discussion about how mind and body can interact seems to dismiss the idea based on the principle of conservation of energy. But my understanding is that quantum physicists have a model that involves randomness at the subatomic level. Couldn't patterns in the random fluctuations of electrons be a conduit for communication between the mind and the body? No new energy required. #The biggest argument for dualism that I know is the experience of life. The physical universe could exist, in its infinite complexity, without observers. Computers, planetary systems, weather formations, human legs, all these systems interact and react to their surroundings, but we don't ascribe to them the conciousness we apply to ourselves. There are three counterarguments I've heard to this: ##The human brain exhibits conciousness because of its level of complexity. Other things are less concious in proportion to their complexity. This counterargument relys on being able to judge complexity. To say we are more complex than a cloud is a strange thing if you believe the world is a purely physical mix of atoms and quarks. ##Everything is concious. Well my conciousness has boundaries, and structure. Mine is the conciousness of a certain part of my brain. The bit that performs the "higher thought" routines. If everything has conciousness, there would be no boundaries between the conciousnesses and there would equally be a "me" out there that has the conciousness of half my higher thought routines, and a large slab of my skull. Alternatively, maybe "me" is just one electron in one neuron somewhere and every other quark has its own experience of the world. Well, you'd get a very fragmented perception of the world if you only percieved through a single neuron. My world is too detailed for this to be true. ##Nothing is concious. Counterexample: I'm concious. I can't prove I'm concious to anyone else, but it's self-evident to me. People say "you're tricked into believing your own conciousness"... but that implies there's a me to trick. User:Ben Arnold 03:51, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I think an intersting thing to consider is the physiology in all of this. In a nerve cell to create a sensation like burning your finger requires the stimulus to reach the threshold potential. Then an action potential is created and the heat on the finger is felt. If it is not hot enough to get past the threshold potential then nothing is felt. What does dualism say about this? Another interesting aspect of physiology of nerves is the lag time before any type of action potential is created. When you burn your finger there is a certain amount of time where nothing happens. The burning is happening for maybe a fraction of a msec but it is indead taking place. Physiology explains it because there is not enough stimulus for depolarization to occur. What does dualism say of lag time? Why would an emotion have to have some type of physical event to occur if it is mental? User:Akeldamma 23:17, 20 Jan 2005 (CST) :Do not forget dualism is about explaining consciousness. If there is no consiousness, dualism is superfluous. Then there are only physical events, emotion is just one of these and the relationship to other physical events is obviously physical also. The problem is that we know about emotion and pain by experiencing them and this experience does not seem to have the quality of a physical object. If we solve this problem by assuming we simply err in our judgment, we create a new one: error itself seems impossible to account for in purely physical terms. Your use of words as "sensation" and "felt" seem to indicate at least a naive acceptance of these realities. So you yourself are probably a quality dualist. Substance dualism is absurd. Quality dualism is merely problematic in the sense every philosophical position is: it is so as a virtue. The real problem is not ''that'' physical objects have some mental quality - that could hardly be otherwise within any coherent version of the underlying ontological ''monism'' - but why ''this'' particular object should only have ''that'' mental quality. --User:MWAK 13:11, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC) == Section in Italics == I'm doing some research on dualism right now, and I'd be glad to pitch in on "arguments against," but I was wondering about the paragraph in italics in that section of the article. I'm assuming that was a note Larry made to himself in the text? If it is, there's a very clear error. The author points out that "some dualisms maintain that the mind resides in a particular place, say, in the pineal(?) gland," the latter being a clear reference to Descartes, who thought that the soul was non-extensional, and thus was in no place in the body, but ''interacted'' with the body through the pineal gland. There may be other examples of dualism for which the description is accurate, but the reference to the pineal gland should be removed whenever this text is edited (unless someone knows of a specific theory this would accurately describe). User:Anthony Mohen 19:32 PM, 7 Feb 2005 (EST) == Attempt to Clean Up == I've started changing the tone of the article to try to make it less pro-dualism, putting in some links to cognitive psychology, etc. (The pineal gland bit might be historically interesting.) I think the article could use subheadings and division into a) definition(s) of dualism, explanations, etc. b) a brief history of philosophical dualism and c) the different arguments for and against (particular types of) dualism. So, I'll start there unless someone thinks of a better organization scheme. I've got a feeling this will take awhile, too, and ANY HELP AT ALL WOULD BE APPRECIATED. User:WhiteC 09:37, 31 May 2005 (UTC) : I just split up the article into two sections for much easier reading.--User:EatAlbertaBeef 13:44, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC) :: Yes, most definitely. Many thanks. User:WhiteC 02:46, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC) :::Apologies to those who have worked on the article since May 23 2005. It was vandalized by an anonymous editor working from a University IP address. That is why the article was in such sad shape. I reverted it to the most recent good version. So now you can redo those edits which improve the artice, and there will hopefully be less lost material and restructuring needed. You can check the article histories if you need to retrieve any material that may have been lost. (I had made some of those lost edits earlier today before I figured out what had happened.) --User:Blainster 02:53, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC) ::::Ah, well that looks a lot better. Most of my edits were attempts to fix things that no longer need to be fixed. Maybe this won't take anywhere near as long as I thought :-) But I think the article could still use something about Platonic dualism (forms) and the Cave example. User:WhiteC 03:05, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
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Dualism (philosophy of mind)
In philosophy of mind, dualism is a set of beliefs which begin with the claim that the mental and the physical have a fundamentally different nature. It is contrasted with varying kinds of monism, including materialism and phenomenalism. Dualism is one answer to the mind-body problem. Pluralism (philosophy of mind) holds that there are even more kinds of events or things in the world. Note that other fields have their own meanings for "dualism". See dualism. ==Types of ontological dualism== Ontological dualism makes dual commitments about the nature of existence as it relates to mind and matter. Substance dualism asserts that the mind and matter are fundamentally distinct kinds of substances, while property dualism suggests that the ontological distinction lies in what properties mind and matter differ as in emergentism. Yet a weaker type of ontological dualism is predicate dualism which claims the irreducibility of mental predicates to physical predicates. Cartesian dualism is a kind of substance dualism, a great difficulty with which is the explanation of the interaction between mind and matter, if mind is to be immaterial. ==Types of interaction dualism== Regardless of whether ontological dualism is correct, one may wish to inquire how the mental interacts with the material. Interaction dualism can be distinguished based on if and how mind and matter are thought to causality interact. In dualistic interactionism (also Cartesian dualism, as it was René Descartes' position), arguably the most popular and widespread version, mental events can cause physical events and vice versa. Thus when Johnny touches a hot stove and burns his skin (physical events), he experiences pain (a mental event). Conversely, when Jessica decides her dog needs exercise (a mental event), she takes it for a walk (a physical event). This is arguably most people's common sense view of the relationship between mind and matter. Epiphenomenalism allows causality to flow only in one direction, claiming that physical events have mental effects, but not vice versa. So although the mental cannot be reduced to the physical, mental events are side-effects, or by-products, of physical processes. Usually, the mind is seen as being a by-product of the brain and its neurons. The contrary position, that physical events are somehow by-products of mental events, is relatively unpopular and does not have a standard name. According to a rather different theory called parallelism, mental events and physical events are perfectly coordinated by God; so that when a mental event such as Sally's decision to walk across the room occurs, simultaneously Sally's body heads across the room, in the absence of any cause-effect relation between mind and body. Mental and physical events are just perfectly coordinated by God, either in advance (as per Gottfried Leibniz's idea of pre-established harmony) or at the time (as in the Occasionalism of Nicolas Malebranche). ==Arguments for dualism== One argument for dualism, especially dualistic interactionism, is that it is a very common sense ''view''. Some developmental psychologists claim to have shown that dualism is commonsensical for very young children as well. This is obviously not "proof", but it suggests we should at least demand a reason for abandoning dualism. A second argument is that the mind is (or resides in) the immortal soul. Traditional Christianity actually believed in the binding of the soul and body in one's redemption. Only in more recent branches off of Christanity was the idea that your body will die and then your soul will go to heaven, or hell. If you believe in this idea then you believe in dualism. Another idea in contrast to dualism is if you accept phenomenalism, which holds that everything is, ultimately, mental. But in any event you absolutely cannot hold that the soul is reducible to anything physical. If events in your soul ''were'' reducible to events in your brain, then when your brain stopped functioning, your soul would cease to exist. This is not necessarily the case, as some views of the universe admit the possibility that the laws of physics are not static. See the book ''The Physics of Immortality'' (ISBN 0385467990). Note that although this religious account may motivate or reinforce a religious person's belief in dualism, it may well seem altogether unconvincing to dualism's skeptics. To use this argument to convert, say, a card-carrying materialist to dualism, it seems necessary to first establish that people do, in fact, have immortal souls. And yet the card-carrying materialist is one of the last kinds of people who are going to admit to this. A third argument for dualism goes like this: if dualism is false, we should be able to reduce mind to matter, or vice versa, or to reduce both to a neutral third substance. Notably Buddhist philosophy argues this point, but says everything reduces to "emptyness" or Shunyata rather than a "substance". A final argument, to be explored in depth, is that the mental and the physical seem to have quite different and perhaps irreconcilable properties. First, mental events are not publicly observable. When I touch the hot stove, you may see me whip back my hand and say "Ouch!" but you are not feeling my pain. Unless you're Mr. Spock, or God, you can't as it were get inside my mind and take a look at what's going on in there. And of course it's not just because my mind is hidden beneath my skull. If you knew just where to look in my brain, you wouldn't be able to see thoughts and feelings jiggling around in there. That's just not how it works. So unlike physical events, like fireworks displays, mental events are private, not publicly observable. Second, mental events are often said not to be spatially located. Where is my pain supposed to be? Maybe you could say in my fingertips, because they hurt. But is that where the ''feeling'' is? Does it really make sense to say that the ''feeling'' is in my aching fingertips? That sounds a little funny, anyway. A better example would be an emotion like happiness. When I say I'm happy, can I locate my happiness in my head, or does it exist all my body, or something? Doesn't that sound odd? It would seem better to say that my happiness isn't the sort of thing that ''can'' be located in a particular place. Third, more generally, mental events do not seem to have various physical properties which physical events have. For one thing, mental events do not involve anything having mass, or physical motion. We can't weigh a thought. We can't say that a feeling has a velocity of 10 miles an hour. To say such things is to talk nonsense. Now you might say: that's only because mental events are ''events''. You can't say that physical events have mass or velocity either. Point well enough taken; that's true, no event, per se, has mass or velocity. But physical events do ''involve'' objects which have mass and velocity. Mental events do not have any components which have mass and velocity. For example, when I think, "I like ice cream," I have a concept of ice cream; and my concept of ice cream has no mass and velocity. Nothing involved in my appreciation for ice cream would appear to have any such physical properties. This is a point to which we will have to return. But on the face of it, this seems pretty obvious. Fourth, mental events have a certain ''subjective'' quality to them, which physical events obviously do not. I mean, for example, what a burned finger feels like, what sky blue looks like, what nice music sounds like, and so on. I'm going to expand on this fourth point at some length. Recently, philosophers have been calling the subjective aspects of mental events ''qualia'', and they also call them ''raw feels''. There is something ''that it's like'' to feel pain, to see a familiar shade of blue, and so on; there are ''qualia'' involved in these mental events. And the claim is that qualia seem particularly difficult to reduce to anything physical. Just think of what that would involve. You'd be saying: ''feeling the top of my hand right now'', this "raw feel" I'm experiencing right now, is ''itself'' nothing more than a physical event. In fact, there is an article by an American, Thomas Nagel, that came out in the late 1970s called "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" In this article Nagel argued roughly as follows. You are familiar with the fact that bats use a certain kind of sonar, right? They emit high-pitched shrieks which allow them to fly around in dark caves; they can tell how far away the walls are based on how their shrieks echo around in the cave. Bat sonar allows bats to perceive distance, shape, size, and so on, in a way similar to, but obviously different from the way vision works for us. Now Nagel invited us to ask, "So what ''is'' it like to be a bat, flying around in the dark using bat sonar?" Surely bats do have experiences; we just don't know what they are. Suppose we were to take apart a bat brain and figure out how the neural apparatus for bat sonar works. No doubt biologists have actually done so, dissected bat brains and so forth. But in understanding how the bat brain works, do those biologists learn ''what it is like to be a bat''? Well of course not. They're mucking around in the grey matter of bats. In order to know what it's like to be a bat, and to have bat sonar, why, you'd have to be a bat. So argued Nagel. So what's the point of all this? The point is that if indeed there are "bat qualia," then there are peculiar mental events of a sort that only bats have, and we cannot learn what they are like even if we have a detailed understanding of physical events going on in the bat brain. Or to put it even more simply: there is a strange "bat sonar experience" we'll never have. We won't have it even if we learn what physical events in bat brains are associated with bat sonar. So that's excellent evidence that mental events cannot be reduced to physical events; mental events must be regarded as quite a different sort of thing from physical events. Really, you can make the same point without even bringing up weird cases like bat sonar. Just think of your own unique feelings. Do you think that a psychologist could, simply by digging around in your brain and doing tests on your grey matter, ever learn what that feeling was like? In summary, there are at least four major differences between the mental and the physical, which make it difficult to understand how one might ''reduce'' the mental to the physical. Mental events: *Are not publicly observable *They do not seem spatially localized *It is difficult to identify their physical properties (such as mass and velocity) precisely *There seems to be an irreducibly subjective aspect to them These appear to be powerful reasons to think that the mind and the body are two totally different categories of being. That is the basic argument for dualism. ==Arguments against dualism== Varieties of dualism in which mind can causally affect matter have come under strenuous attack from different quarters, especially starting in the 20th century. How can something totally immaterial, people ask, affect something totally material? That's the basic problem. We can analyze the problem here into three parts. First, it is not clear ''where'' the interaction would take place. Burning my fingers causes pain, right? Well, apparently there is some chain of events, leading from the burning of skin, to the stimulation of nerve endings, to something happening in the nerves of my body that lead to my brain, to something happening in a particular part of my brain; ''and then'', I feel pain. But the pain is not supposed to be spatially located. So what I want to know is, where does the interaction take place? If you say, "It takes place in the brain," then I will say, "But I thought pains weren't located anywhere." And you, as a dualist, might stick to your guns and say, "That's right, pains ''aren't'' located anywhere; but the brain event that immediately leads to the pain ''is'' located in the brain." But then we have a very strange causal relation on our hands. The cause is located in a particular place but the effect is not located anywhere. Well, you might say, that might be puzzling but it's not a devastating criticism. (''Problems with the above paragraph: 1) some dualisms maintain that the mind resides in a particular place, say, in the pineal(?) gland. In this case the arguments about the mental being "nowhere" look less strange. 2) it seems a little blurred -- is the problem locating the mind or the mental events or both? 3) it should at least be emphasized that things don't necessarily have to be in the same place to interact, as we see with the "attraction at a distance" in gravity.'') So look at a second problem about the interaction. Namely, ''how'' does the interaction take place? Maybe you think, "Well, that's a matter for science -- scientists will eventually discover the connection between mental and physical events." But philosophers have something to say about the matter, because the ''very idea'' of a ''mechanism'', which explains the connection between the mental and the physical, would be very strange, at best. Why do I say it would be strange? Compare it to a mechanism that we ''do'' understand. Take a very simple causal relation, such as when the cue ball strikes the eight ball and causes it to go into the pocket. Here we can say that the cue ball has a certain amount of momentum as its mass moves across the pool table with some velocity, and then that momentum is transferred to the eight ball, which then heads toward the pocket. Now compare that to the situation in the brain, where we want to say a decision causes some neurons to fire and thus cause my body to move across the room. The decision, "I will cross the room now," is a mental event; and as such it does not have physical properties such as force. If it has no force, then how on earth could it cause any neuron to fire? Is it magic? Honestly, how could something without any physical properties have any physical ''effects'' at all? Here you might reply, as some philosophers have indeed replied, as follows. You might say: "Well sure, there is a mystery about how the interaction between mental and physical events can occur; but the fact that there is a mystery doesn't mean that ''there is'' no interaction. Because plainly there is an interaction and plainly the interaction is between two totally different sorts of events." Now I expect that some of you may want to say this. But the problem with it is that it does not seem to answer the full power of the objection. So let me explain the objection more precisely. Let's take as our example my decision to walk across the room. We say: my decision, a mental event, immediately causes a group of neurons in my brain to fire, a physical event, which ultimately results in my walking across the room. The problem is that if we have something totally nonphysical ''causing'' a bunch of neurons to fire, then there is no ''physical'' event which causes the firing. That means that some physical energy seems to have appeared out of thin air. Even if we say that my decision has some sort of mental energy, and that the decision causes the firing, we still haven't explained where the ''physical'' energy, for the firing, came from. It just seems to have popped into existence from nowhere. A fundamental principle of physics is involved, the conservation of energy. According to this principle, "In all physical processes, the total amount of energy in the universe remains constant." Or in a form you may have heard before: in any change anything undergoes, energy is neither created nor destroyed. This is a basic principle you probably learned about in high school physics. So the point is that nerve firings, which are allegedly caused by a totally nonphysical decision, would appear to violate the Principle of the Conservation of Energy. Now, dualistic interactionists have tried to answer these objections, and other such objections, but most philosophers these days are not impressed by their answers. It has come to the point where, in fact, there aren't very many interactionists around, and there haven't been many for decades. When I say this, I don't mean to imply that dualistic interactionism is false. All I mean to imply is that many philosophers today think it is false, and perhaps also that, if you want to hold onto interactionism yourself, you should try to come up with some effective replies to these objections. (''Another very interesting route to take for the aspiring substance dualist might be to question the causal closure of the physical domain. Briefly: there seem to be events on the quantum level which lack a physical cause; if they lack a physical cause, then either they have a nonphysical cause or they are uncaused; in either of these cases, the physical domain is not causally closed. But it remains true that there are very serious objections to substance dualism which must be met.'') ==Biological naturalism== John R. Searle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, has pioneered an approach to mind-body issues that is dualistic in some respects, monist in others. He calls it "biological naturalism." Searle's views sound like dualistic interactionism. He believes that consciousness "is a real part of the real world and it cannot be eliminated in favor of, or reduced to, something else" whether that something-else is a neurological state of the brain or a software program. He contends, for example, that the software known as Deep Blue ''knows'' nothing about chess. He also believes that consciousness is both a cause of events in the body and a response to events in the body. On the other hand, Searle doesn't treat consciousness as a ghost in the machine. He treats it, rather, as an emergent property of the brain as a whole. (See holism). The causal interaction of mind and brain can be described in naturalistic terms, thus: events at the micro-level (perhaps at that of individual neurons) cause consciousness. Changes at the macro-level (the whole brain) constitute consciousness. Micro-changes cause and then are impacted by holistic changes, in much the same way that individual football players cause a team (as a whole) to win games, then the individuals gain confidence from the knowledge that they are part of a winning team. ==See also== *Johannes Jacobus Poortman ==External links== *[http://artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/dualism.html Dictionary of philosophy of mind entry] *[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/ Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy] Philosophy of mind Metaphysics
Dualism (philosophy of mind)
The "Arguments against dualism" section is now a little weird, because it's almost entirely about Cartesian dualism. It'd be nice to integrate some more universal objections. --User:Ryguasu 03:27 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC) ---- I have a piece by Jerry Fodor that seems to imply that dualism, especially Cartesian dualism, was basically the only way people in "the West" looked at the mind-body problem until the 1920s, when behaviorism came on the scene. Can anyone confirm this? It's probably true, though I find it hard to believe, given how surrounded I am by monists. --User:Ryguasu 04:34 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC) ---- Ryguasu, there have been many more thoughts and positions on the mind-body problem pre-1920, some dualist, some monist, and some ascribing to a dual-aspect theory. It is one of the richest fields of philosophy. --Tom Chance, 11:02 Oct 14, 2003 (GMT) == Analogy: Mental:physical::software:hardware == Consider feelings and thoughts as patterns in the electric/chemical messages. They have very similar properties to languages or binary codes used in computers. To translate code into action, you just need sensors programmed to respond to certain codes. A switch mechanism in computer or electrical circuit may be triggered by a sensor which reacts to code. No doubt a "finger HOT" message causes a very primitive/frantic burst from nerve endings. Muscles respond to frantic bursts of electrical energy as evidenced by cleching muscles in electrocution, or impulses used for cardiac arrest. Of course information cannot be measured in terms of mass and velocity. The meaning of an encrypted stream of data may be a fraction short of impossible to deode, but we rely on it's existence when we pay for something over the net... What's so difficult to comprehend? Eugene Blom Alice Springs :Eugene: what you're describing sounds a lot like Functionalism (sociology), one of the approaches to the mind/body problem, and probably one of the most popular in recent times. It has all sorts of issues for philosophers who don't accept determinism and other problems as well, but is of course the basis for the AI movement, and can at least be a useful way to look at minds, whether or not it represents their reality. :User:Sethmahoney 20:39, 27 Oct 2003 (UTC) :My two cents Eugene -- I don't see the mind/body dichotomy as analogous to software/hardware. One reason is the aging process itself. Computer hardware might be said to age, but that's indifferent to the software. The software is information, which doesn't properly-speaking age at all and which could be easily transferred to alternative hardware if the earlier unit becomes unreliable, burns out circuits, or whatever. :But my mind ages with my body, in respects both good and bad (I get warier of dangers, which is good -- I also get tired more easily than I did when young -- which is bad). Furthermore, and a closely related point, no one has yet devised a reliable way to transfer the mind of yours truly to some younger body as this one becomes unreliable. We ARE our history, in ways that aren't true for AI creations, and this makes the type of solution to the mind/body problem you propose very problematic. --User:Christofurio 16:58, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC) ---- Descartes and dualism - was in the article, isn't anymore because it was in the "arguments for dualism" section, which it is not. It should be in the article though! If the original author or someone else wants to start a section briefly discussing Descartes' dualism or maybe as an add-on to the intro section where it talks about Cartesian dualism, stick it there. How can mind and body, two drastically different kinds of things, interact with each other? Descartes relies upon theology to answer this question. Above and beyond creating mental substance and physical substance, there is a third kind of creation. According to Descartes, God creates a union between these two different substances, a union that constitutes human nature. --User:Sethmahoney 00:56, 7 Mar 2004 (UTC) Hi, two points: #The discussion about how mind and body can interact seems to dismiss the idea based on the principle of conservation of energy. But my understanding is that quantum physicists have a model that involves randomness at the subatomic level. Couldn't patterns in the random fluctuations of electrons be a conduit for communication between the mind and the body? No new energy required. #The biggest argument for dualism that I know is the experience of life. The physical universe could exist, in its infinite complexity, without observers. Computers, planetary systems, weather formations, human legs, all these systems interact and react to their surroundings, but we don't ascribe to them the conciousness we apply to ourselves. There are three counterarguments I've heard to this: ##The human brain exhibits conciousness because of its level of complexity. Other things are less concious in proportion to their complexity. This counterargument relys on being able to judge complexity. To say we are more complex than a cloud is a strange thing if you believe the world is a purely physical mix of atoms and quarks. ##Everything is concious. Well my conciousness has boundaries, and structure. Mine is the conciousness of a certain part of my brain. The bit that performs the "higher thought" routines. If everything has conciousness, there would be no boundaries between the conciousnesses and there would equally be a "me" out there that has the conciousness of half my higher thought routines, and a large slab of my skull. Alternatively, maybe "me" is just one electron in one neuron somewhere and every other quark has its own experience of the world. Well, you'd get a very fragmented perception of the world if you only percieved through a single neuron. My world is too detailed for this to be true. ##Nothing is concious. Counterexample: I'm concious. I can't prove I'm concious to anyone else, but it's self-evident to me. People say "you're tricked into believing your own conciousness"... but that implies there's a me to trick. User:Ben Arnold 03:51, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I think an intersting thing to consider is the physiology in all of this. In a nerve cell to create a sensation like burning your finger requires the stimulus to reach the threshold potential. Then an action potential is created and the heat on the finger is felt. If it is not hot enough to get past the threshold potential then nothing is felt. What does dualism say about this? Another interesting aspect of physiology of nerves is the lag time before any type of action potential is created. When you burn your finger there is a certain amount of time where nothing happens. The burning is happening for maybe a fraction of a msec but it is indead taking place. Physiology explains it because there is not enough stimulus for depolarization to occur. What does dualism say of lag time? Why would an emotion have to have some type of physical event to occur if it is mental? User:Akeldamma 23:17, 20 Jan 2005 (CST) :Do not forget dualism is about explaining consciousness. If there is no consiousness, dualism is superfluous. Then there are only physical events, emotion is just one of these and the relationship to other physical events is obviously physical also. The problem is that we know about emotion and pain by experiencing them and this experience does not seem to have the quality of a physical object. If we solve this problem by assuming we simply err in our judgment, we create a new one: error itself seems impossible to account for in purely physical terms. Your use of words as "sensation" and "felt" seem to indicate at least a naive acceptance of these realities. So you yourself are probably a quality dualist. Substance dualism is absurd. Quality dualism is merely problematic in the sense every philosophical position is: it is so as a virtue. The real problem is not ''that'' physical objects have some mental quality - that could hardly be otherwise within any coherent version of the underlying ontological ''monism'' - but why ''this'' particular object should only have ''that'' mental quality. --User:MWAK 13:11, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC) == Section in Italics == I'm doing some research on dualism right now, and I'd be glad to pitch in on "arguments against," but I was wondering about the paragraph in italics in that section of the article. I'm assuming that was a note Larry made to himself in the text? If it is, there's a very clear error. The author points out that "some dualisms maintain that the mind resides in a particular place, say, in the pineal(?) gland," the latter being a clear reference to Descartes, who thought that the soul was non-extensional, and thus was in no place in the body, but ''interacted'' with the body through the pineal gland. There may be other examples of dualism for which the description is accurate, but the reference to the pineal gland should be removed whenever this text is edited (unless someone knows of a specific theory this would accurately describe). User:Anthony Mohen 19:32 PM, 7 Feb 2005 (EST) == Attempt to Clean Up == I've started changing the tone of the article to try to make it less pro-dualism, putting in some links to cognitive psychology, etc. (The pineal gland bit might be historically interesting.) I think the article could use subheadings and division into a) definition(s) of dualism, explanations, etc. b) a brief history of philosophical dualism and c) the different arguments for and against (particular types of) dualism. So, I'll start there unless someone thinks of a better organization scheme. I've got a feeling this will take awhile, too, and ANY HELP AT ALL WOULD BE APPRECIATED. User:WhiteC 09:37, 31 May 2005 (UTC) : I just split up the article into two sections for much easier reading.--User:EatAlbertaBeef 13:44, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC) :: Yes, most definitely. Many thanks. User:WhiteC 02:46, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC) :::Apologies to those who have worked on the article since May 23 2005. It was vandalized by an anonymous editor working from a University IP address. That is why the article was in such sad shape. I reverted it to the most recent good version. So now you can redo those edits which improve the artice, and there will hopefully be less lost material and restructuring needed. You can check the article histories if you need to retrieve any material that may have been lost. (I had made some of those lost edits earlier today before I figured out what had happened.) --User:Blainster 02:53, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC) ::::Ah, well that looks a lot better. Most of my edits were attempts to fix things that no longer need to be fixed. Maybe this won't take anywhere near as long as I thought :-) But I think the article could still use something about Platonic dualism (forms) and the Cave example. User:WhiteC 03:05, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
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