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Dualism Notes

The document discusses monism and dualism, specifically substance dualism and property dualism. Substance dualism holds that there are two types of stuff, mind and body, while property dualism argues that there is one type of stuff but the mind and body have different properties. Property dualism attempts to address the interaction problem with substance dualism by proposing that the mind emerges from physical objects like the brain.

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34 views

Dualism Notes

The document discusses monism and dualism, specifically substance dualism and property dualism. Substance dualism holds that there are two types of stuff, mind and body, while property dualism argues that there is one type of stuff but the mind and body have different properties. Property dualism attempts to address the interaction problem with substance dualism by proposing that the mind emerges from physical objects like the brain.

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humohug
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NOTES ON DUALISM

Monism is the view that there is only one type of stuff in the universe. Usually they mean body-stuff,
but there are some mind-stuff monisms out there (such as Levinas and Berkeley's views).
Physical monism, then, would be that our thoughts, experiences and minds are actually just our bodies
—everything is located in the empirical world (probably our brains). Every thought you have, or
experience, or feeling, can be mapped to an electrical impulse or chemical reaction.

There are two of arguments for dualism:


Cartesian (substance) Dualism says that there is two types of stuff in the world: mind stuff and body
stuff. Usually we think of this as the soul and the body being distinct—just because a body dies, the
soul in many religious traditions continues on (this is not the only way to think of substance dualism,
but it is the most common example). This view is called “Cartesian” dualism because Descartes was a
famous proponent of it—he argued that the empirical world is inherently untrustworthy, but we clearly
still can think. Our thinking, therefore, must not be caused by physical events (otherwise it too would
be untrustworthy!)

The major flaw in substance dualism is interactionism—how the two types of stuff can possibly work
together, if they're so vastly different. Clearly I can think of something and then do it and, just as
clearly, physical events can change what types of thoughts I have. There needs to be something that
links the two types of stuff together, but we don't know even what evidence of that would possibly look
like. It seems like we're just inventing categories (bullshitting!) to explain a theory.

Property dualism is an attempt to rescue dualism from the problem of interaction. There is only one
type of stuff in the world, probably empirical (body) stuff, but the mind and the body have different
properties. The brain does something so different from your hand that we can say the mind is an
emergent property of certain empirical objects—a chair and a couch have interchangeable materials,
but a chair and a computer may not. This goes beyond mere function, though it is certainly informed by
function. Another metaphor is to think of a collection of people in a room—any given student may be
interchangeable in a philosophy 101 class, even though the class is made up of people, because the
concept of “Philosophy 101 class” is a descriptive property that seems to exist independently of the
particular pieces that comprise the concept. This too is true about your body, to such an extent that it
still makes sense to talk about the mind as a different thing from the body, even though it's made of the
same stuff, because the brain has such a specialized job that a brain-event isn't even comparable to
chemical reactions or electrical impulses outside the brain-environment. The mind or soul are in a
dependent relationship with the rest of the body, and will therefore decay the same way all other
empirical objects do but the mind as a category is still special in that it is not merely a physical event.

This view is relatively new in this form, and was famously re-discovered by David Chalmers. Most
monists would argue that is is just monism with some unsupportable assumptions built in. Chalmers
tries to explain property dualism with the idea of a philosophical zombie, a person who has a physical
brain and acts exactly like any other human, but doesn't have the capacity for apperception (self
reflection, self awareness). We cannot actually know whether any person is a p-zombie or not, but that
we think there is some difference between p-zombies and ourselves gets at what it means to say that the
mind is a different property of the brain.

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