A Pragmatist Argument against Substance Dualism

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Mosesquine
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Re: A Pragmatist Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by Mosesquine »

Steve3007 wrote: August 12th, 2018, 10:03 am
Mosesquine wrote:Deduction is meaningful, since it gives general-universal principles. Suppose that physicists found that human bodies are made up of molecules. Then, the physicists can do the following deduction:

Every human body is made up of molecules.
Bergson is a human body.
Therefore, Bergson is made up of molecules.

If there were no deduction, then such a generalization-universalization above would not be.
This is not a generalization-universalization. It's the opposite. You've gone from every human body to just Bergson's. Generalizations come from Induction. They are of the form:

Bergson is made up of molecules.
Loads of other people are made up of molecules.
Until I find one that isn't, I propose that every human body is made up of molecules.

[Insert some logical symbology to represent the above here.]
ThomasHobbes wrote:I agree that small logic tables please similar minds. But most people know Obama will die without consulting one.
I think it's entirely possible that Barack Obama will consult a small logic table before he dies. He may even already have done so.

The first premise (i.e., "Every human body is made up of molecules") is a generalization-universalization. I don't mean the conclusion is so.
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ThomasHobbes
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Re: A Pragmatist Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by ThomasHobbes »

Mosesquine wrote: August 12th, 2018, 10:27 am
ThomasHobbes wrote: August 12th, 2018, 9:30 am I agree that small logic tables please similar minds. But most people know Obama will die without consulting one.

Concretizing trivial matter into serious one is the very purpose of science.
That's called induction.
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Mosesquine
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Re: A Pragmatist Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by Mosesquine »

ThomasHobbes wrote: August 12th, 2018, 10:39 am That's called induction.

Physics is inductive science, and logic is deductive science. Physics, including other inductive disciplines is not sufficient without logic. Logic, as a kind of deductive science, is a helpful supplementary one for such inductive science.
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Hereandnow
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Re: A Pragmatist Argument against Substance Dualism

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But everyone knows, I assume, that pragmatism, the Dewey, James, Peirce then Rorty theory, is strongly reductionist, and it has nothing to do with the materialist vs idealist, for both terms and any other ontology you want to throw into the mix, are reducible to a pragmatic epistemology which provides no basis at all for ontology. It is Wittgenstein's Tractatus that puts this so well: when it comes to terms that reach beyond what language can say, we really must be silent, and pragmatists are well within the the counsel of Wittgenstein, for theirs is an uncompromising commitment to a denial of knowledge claims beyond what experience yields. All propositions have truth value, and truth is never beyond where language can go, which is exclusively within experience. What is it in experience that yields truth? Pragmatics: it is the dynamic of the utterance that anticipates a future event better than all competitors, and that dynamic is algorithmic and can be expressed in a hypothetical "if....then...."
All concepts are reducible to this as well. It is what language is all about, each word we have possessing its own long history of evolving algorithmic pragmatics. Talk about the rain, the clouds above or how terrible the soup is, and you do so in time, and each idea you bring into your utterance has a history, a personal history as well as a societal long run one (what, incidentally, while I think of it, and because it is so interesting, Kierkegaard calls hereditary SIN).
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Re: A Pragmatist Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by Wayne92587 »

It is against the Laws of Nature for two objects, subustances, to occupy the same space and time.

Substance duality is an abomination, unnatural!!
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Re: A Pragmatist Argument against Substance Dualism

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Except bosons of equal energy?
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Consul
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Re: A Pragmatist Argument against Substance Dualism

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Steve3007 wrote: September 15th, 2018, 12:38 pm Except bosons of equal energy?
See: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/loca ... ForInt4Bos
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Mosesquine
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Re: A Pragmatist Argument against Substance Dualism

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The term 'material' is the very word that can be interpreted as 'effective'. Mind-body dualism's weakness is that it makes mind ineffective by its own definition. So, substance dualism is self-defeating.
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Re: A Pragmatist Argument against Substance Dualism

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Mosesquine wrote: October 1st, 2018, 8:02 am The term 'material' is the very word that can be interpreted as 'effective'. Mind-body dualism's weakness is that it makes mind ineffective by its own definition. So, substance dualism is self-defeating.
You can be an epiphenomenalist substance dualist, but all substance dualists I know are in fact non-epiphenomenalist, interactionist ones. (Theists certainly don't regard God, i.e. the divine soul/spirit, as an epiphenomenal, causally powerless being.)
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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Mosesquine
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Re: A Pragmatist Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by Mosesquine »

Consul wrote: October 1st, 2018, 8:40 am
Mosesquine wrote: October 1st, 2018, 8:02 am The term 'material' is the very word that can be interpreted as 'effective'. Mind-body dualism's weakness is that it makes mind ineffective by its own definition. So, substance dualism is self-defeating.
You can be an epiphenomenalist substance dualist, but all substance dualists I know are in fact non-epiphenomenalist, interactionist ones. (Theists certainly don't regard God, i.e. the divine soul/spirit, as an epiphenomenal, causally powerless being.)

Epiphenomenalist version of dualism is the view of mind depending on brain. It's a thought that David Chalmers advocates until his The Character of Consciousness. (I am not sure that he still holds epiphenomenalism.) Epiphenomenalism is still weak in that mind depends on body in its 'effectiveness'. Materialism is a better solution.
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Consul
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Re: A Pragmatist Argument against Substance Dualism

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Mosesquine wrote: October 1st, 2018, 10:48 amEpiphenomenalist version of dualism is the view of mind depending on brain. It's a thought that David Chalmers advocates until his The Character of Consciousness. (I am not sure that he still holds epiphenomenalism.) Epiphenomenalism is still weak in that mind depends on body in its 'effectiveness'. Materialism is a better solution.
There's a difference between substance dualism and property dualism. (The former includes the latter, but the latter doesn't include the former.) Chalmers rejects the former and accepts the latter.

"The dualism implied here is instead a kind of property dualism: conscious experience involves properties of an individual that are not entailed by the physical properties of that individual, although they may depend lawfully on those properties. Consciousness is a feature of the world over and above the physical features of the world. This is not to say it is a separate 'substance'; the issue of what it would take to constitute a dualism of substances seems quite unclear to me. All we know is that there are properties of individuals in this world—the phenomenal properties—that are ontologically independent of physical properties."

(Chalmers, David J. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. p. 125)
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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Mosesquine
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Re: A Pragmatist Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by Mosesquine »

Consul wrote: October 1st, 2018, 10:55 am
Mosesquine wrote: October 1st, 2018, 10:48 amEpiphenomenalist version of dualism is the view of mind depending on brain. It's a thought that David Chalmers advocates until his The Character of Consciousness. (I am not sure that he still holds epiphenomenalism.) Epiphenomenalism is still weak in that mind depends on body in its 'effectiveness'. Materialism is a better solution.
There's a difference between substance dualism and property dualism. (The former includes the latter, but the latter doesn't include the former.) Chalmers rejects the former and accepts the latter.

"The dualism implied here is instead a kind of property dualism: conscious experience involves properties of an individual that are not entailed by the physical properties of that individual, although they may depend lawfully on those properties. Consciousness is a feature of the world over and above the physical features of the world. This is not to say it is a separate 'substance'; the issue of what it would take to constitute a dualism of substances seems quite unclear to me. All we know is that there are properties of individuals in this world—the phenomenal properties—that are ontologically independent of physical properties."

(Chalmers, David J. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. p. 125)

Property dualism is better than substance dualism, but it's still not better than materialism. It still distinguishes non-physical/mental/individual stuffs from physical stuffs. Ontological sameness of mind and body is superior to ontological independence of them. Superiority of materialism to dualism/epiphenomenalism is firmly supported by supervenience thesis/propositional attitudes ascriptions/pragmatism, etc.
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Re: A Pragmatist Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by BigBango »

Property dualism and physical dualism both fail to account for experiential states.

The difference between "physicalism" of any stripe and the theory of dual aspect reality has to do with the direction of the flow of information.

Crick and other brain scientists looked exhaustively for the "neurological physical brain centers" that received neurological information produced by the senses or other neurological activity sent to the brain and essentially just digested it. They never found it. That is, they have never found the "subject" that experiences what happens to its organism. Of course there are brain centers that receive information but what they do is process it and pass it on to other parts of the brain.

The "subject" receives information and it is a sufficient accounting of its existence. It need not process this data merely to hand it off to other brain centers.

Do these facts prove the truth of dual aspect reality over property dualism? Not really. What it does prove is that the "subject" is outside the level of physicality that science is aware of. The "subject" in my theory is part of a lower level fractal reality. Not the pure transcendental subject of Tamminem but the real mental/physical reality that persists from before the Bib Bang.
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Mosesquine
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Re: A Pragmatist Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by Mosesquine »

Dualism fails because of its beyondness of experimental perspectives. It also fails to be supported by being defeated by materialisms.
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Re: A Pragmatist Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by Karpel Tunnel »

Mosesquine wrote: October 3rd, 2018, 10:36 am Dualism fails because of its beyondness of experimental perspectives. It also fails to be supported by being defeated by materialisms.
Then consciousness cannot be an epiphenomenon. It must be causal.
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