An Argument against Substance Dualism

Discuss any topics related to metaphysics (the philosophical study of the principles of reality) or epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) in this forum.
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Gertie
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Re: An Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by Gertie »

Londoner

I think we've reached the point of going round in repetitive circles, so I'll leave it there.
Londoner
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Re: An Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by Londoner »

BigBango wrote: March 27th, 2018, 8:17 pm Greta, please don’t drag us into the matrix. Londoner’s position is just “Solipsism”pure and simple. It is considered a philosophical “surd” that denies not only the possibility of the efficacy of language it also denies that philosophy has any merit. Therefore to argue his position is to have no philosophical grounding on his side with which to argue. Philosophical argument does assume there are some “a priori” truths!
Oh dear.

It isn't a matter of having a 'position', it is a matter of accepting that certain questions cannot be answered. Solipsism isn't something that can be disproved, but like other metaphysical theories that can neither be proved or disproved, it makes no difference. The world we live in remains just as it is. But you seem uncomfortable with that so feel the need to claim knowledge you cannot possibly have. You could have gone down the religious route and had a God who lives in a separate spiritual realm and ''underwrites' our universe from there. Or you can imagine what existed before the Big Bang. Or in a parallel dimension. Since you are making up a story to fill some need in yourself you might as well go for whatever idea you find most comforting.

Regarding language, nothing I have written would have come as a shock to anyone who had read Wittgenstein or any other philosopher of language from the last century so.

I think your approach is encapsulated in your final sentence: Philosophical argument does assume there are some “a priori” truths! Now if we really had some a priori truths then we would not need to 'assume' them, would we? They would necessarily be the case. And is your claim (a) that philosophy assumes that there are some a priori truths somewhere (even though we haven't found any)? Or (b) we do we already have some a prior truths and what we are assuming is that they are valid? If discussing the relationship between our minds and an external world as revealed by perception, we would be looking for a synthetic a priori proposition. If you claim to have an assortment of these available for inspection I wish you would let the world know. But if you just mean 'bachelors are unmarried' then what relevance does that have to the subject?
Tamminen
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Re: An Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by Tamminen »

I am in the world. This “in” is the expression of my relation to the world, meaning that I am conscious of the world. So my being in the world does not consist of the contents of my consciousness, because those contents are usually about the world. The contents of my consciousness express what the world means to me. And our language reflects this relation: our ordinary language games presuppose epistemological realism. Only some philosophical language games try to express something else.

However, this does not mean that the being of the world is independent of subjectivity. The world is a world for a subject, whoever or whatever that subject happens to be. So ontological “idealism” and epistemological realism are not incompatible.
Wayne92587
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Re: An Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by Wayne92587 »

I see reference to duality all around me.

My understanding duality began with my quest to understand Chapter One of Tao Te Ching.
There is variation in all translations of Tao Te Ching.
A duality is not a simple pair of opposites, although that is the common understanding of duality

A duality is a Singularity having a dual, two qualities.

These two come paired but distinct
By their names.
Of all things profound,
Say that their pairing is deepest,
The gate to the root of the world.

we must be always without desires to see the mystery:
If we always have desires we will see its limits:

These two come paired but distinct
By their names.
Of all things profound,
Say that their pairing is deepest,
The gate to the root of the world.


The duality of Man is explained by the use of metaphors that are in opposition to one another.
Man and Woman, Mind and Body, the Spirit and the Flesh.

Duality has been so perverted, distorted, that it is impossible to understand its meaning.

Duality is based upon the physical, the material and the immaterial, the spiritual,

In the duality of mankind, he and she, Man and woman become the duality, a pair of opposites that are always in opposition with one another. Masculinity and Femininity, the Spirit and the Flesh.

Man, Adam was born of the dust of the Earth, Man being used as the metaphor.
Evil, being a creation was born of the air, woman is used as a metaphor for the Immaterial, the spiritual, that which has no material worth, no substance,
The male is a materialist, the Female a Spiritualist.
Wayne92587
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Re: An Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by Wayne92587 »

You people take duality to an absurd extreme.

Duality, applies only to Mankind, he and she,man and woman.

Absolutely Bad Knowledge has a dual quality.

Absolutely Bad Knowledge mistaken to be Absolutely Good Knowledge becomes the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Wayne92587
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Re: An Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by Wayne92587 »

Only Man has the ability to judge the Immaterial,

Duality; only Mankind, he and she have the ability to view the Material and the Immaterial.
Wayne92587
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Re: An Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by Wayne92587 »

It is the material and the Immaterial aspect of Mankind that makes mankind a duality.
Wayne92587
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Re: An Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by Wayne92587 »

The reason that Good can not exist without Evil and that Evil can not exit without Good is because when talking about Good and Evil we are referring to the knowledge of Good and Evil, we are talking about a singularity having a dual quality, Good and Evil being the same thing.

Evil can not exist unless mistaken to be good.
Wayne92587
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Re: An Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by Wayne92587 »

A substance must be transcendental to be a duality, must be able to transcend the darkness.
BigBango
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Re: An Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by BigBango »

Londoner:

I suggest you read Kant. Either his “The Critique of Pure Reason” or his later work “Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics” which attempts to clarify his Critique of Pure Reason”

Not every one of his “apriori truths” has stood the test of time, Euclidean Geometry e.g., but the bulk of his assertions are now generally accepted.

It’s not like his apriori truths are assumed true that raises doubt about them. It is that if they were not true then the world would not be able to be understood as we do, even imperfectly at times.
Londoner
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Re: An Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by Londoner »

BigBango wrote: March 28th, 2018, 4:06 pm Londoner:

I suggest you read Kant. Either his “The Critique of Pure Reason” or his later work “Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics” which attempts to clarify his Critique of Pure Reason”

Not every one of his “apriori truths” has stood the test of time, Euclidean Geometry e.g., but the bulk of his assertions are now generally accepted.

It’s not like his apriori truths are assumed true that raises doubt about them. It is that if they were not true then the world would not be able to be understood as we do, even imperfectly at times.
I suggest you read Kant, rather than do a quick Google.

Evidently you do not understand the difference between 'a priori' and 'synthetic a priori'. I'm not sure you understand 'a priori' (see below).

It may have escaped your attention, but objects in Euclidean geometry are two-dimensional, so they are not part of the world in which we live. A 'truth' in geometry follows from the axioms that define that geometry, not from empirical evidence, so they are tautological. It is true that Kant seems to have thought maths provided synthetic a priori truths, however we now know better; (unlike geometry) we cannot define a set of consistent axioms behind maths and nor can we reduce maths to logic, let alone ordinary language logic.

What is anyone to make out of this mysterious sentence: It’s not like his apriori truths are assumed true that raises doubt about them.? Once again, if they are true 'a priori' then they are not 'assumed true', there can be 'no 'doubt' about them. If their truth was only an assumption and was subject to doubt they would not be 'a priori'.

You conclude with the non-sequitur: It is that if they were not true then the world would not be able to be understood as we do, even imperfectly at times. That starts off as a clumsy gloss of Kant but its conclusion shows you have not understood it. By writing of our understanding of the world 'even imperfectly at times' is to reintroduce the idea that we can have a metaphysical viewpoint, such that we can compare the way we necessarily interpret our sensory experiences to the way things might be in themselves.

In other words, you can say our ideas are 'true' in the sense that they are necessary, that we cannot make sense of phenomena without them. Or you can say they are 'true' in that they respond to some noumenal presence behind phenomena, that we can somehow climb out of our own heads and 'see' things without involving our senses. You mix the two; you persist in comparing the world of perceptions in which we have no choice but to always exist, with a Platonic heavenly realm to which you somehow have access, such that you can compare the two.

(Kant is writing about rationalism; the idea that we can have access to this pure world-behind-phenomena, not through somehow sensing it but though pure reason.)
CIN
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Re: An Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by CIN »

It appears to be an empirically verified fact that when a certain kind of electrochemical event occurs in a certain type of material object (i.e. an organic brain), the object has a mental experience of a certain kind (e.g. a perception of colour or a pain). I say that this is empirically verified because (a) the electrochemical event, so far as we can tell, is invariably accompanied by the experience, and (b) the only entities we can detect are the material of which the brain is made and the energy that passes through it; we have no evidence that anything else is involved.

In a nutshell, it appears to be an empirically verified fact that brains have mental experiences.

Can anyone tell me why this apparent fact (that brains have mental experiences) cannot be simply a brute fact that needs no further explanation? Because if they can't, I see no reason to think that there is any such problem as the mind-body problem, and no reason to take seriously any theory (such as substance dualism) which denies this apparently empirically verified fact.
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Sy Borg
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Re: An Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by Sy Borg »

That everything in the body is an electrochemical event is well known enough. The hard problem is basically trying to understand what kind of patterning of chemical events would result in a sense of experience. One would expect feedback loops and fractal mathematics to be involved.

Still, at this stage we have no idea what kind of dynamic patterning of brain operation produces a sense of experience as opposed to patterning that does not, thus the hard problem remains "hard".
Londoner
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Re: An Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by Londoner »

CIN wrote: March 30th, 2018, 7:13 pm Can anyone tell me why this apparent fact (that brains have mental experiences) cannot be simply a brute fact that needs no further explanation? Because if they can't, I see no reason to think that there is any such problem as the mind-body problem, and no reason to take seriously any theory (such as substance dualism) which denies this apparently empirically verified fact.
My take is that a brute fact is an objective description of the event that is not particular to that event. For example, to explain the working of the brain as 'electro-chemistry' is to explain the event in terms of a wider phenomenon. If asked what we mean we can point to lots of empirical events and say 'that is what I mean by electro-chemistry'. We can all observe them. But if we could only observe a single instance, a particularity, then we could not come up with any general rules.

Suppose we were talking of objects. An apple falls from the tree. We might describe that in terms of 'gravity', but if we did then the fact it is 'an apple' and the fact that what it fell from was 'a tree' would not be relevant. We are only looking for a general rule to do with 'falling objects'. But we don't therefore posit some duality in which the apple separately exists for-science and also for-itself - and then wonder how the two could be connected.

Similarly, I have a particular mental experience. That is a fact, just like 'that an apple fell from a tree' was a fact. But it is not a fact to science because it is a specific event, particular to me. Science cannot describe single events. It can only describe them if it strips them of their individuality and turns them into examples of some abstraction.

I am OK with this. Science works because it deliberately restricts the sort of things it deals with, just like every system. You wouldn't expect to be able to use Euclidean geometry to solve a crossword, so why expect science to explain subjective experience?
Tamminen
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Re: An Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by Tamminen »

I think we should not bring neuroscience to the analysis of the subject, because all experiences have neurological correlates, but the subject is not an experience and therefore has no neurological correlates. The subject is the ontological precondition of experiences and their correlates. Brain events cannot create the subject, nor can the subject get created by self-organizing experiences. The subject is already there, along with its experiences which constitute its concrete existence. We can say that, in a sense, brain events create experiences, but they create them for the subject, so that the experiences are always my experiences, whoever or whatever I happen to be.

If some day we have a scientific theory of everything, it cannot explain the being of the subject.
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