Tags / 44 quotes from 4 sources
#dualism
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Consciousness as a fundamental force
gravity. In other words, consciousness in this theory is a fundamental force in the universe, instead of a phenomenon caused by lower-level physics. We say that gravity, for example, is a fundamental force in the universe and that it is not really composed of even more…
Computationalism as a form of dualism
Hardly any cognitive scientists are dualists in the Cartesian sense. While the Cartesians believed that the mind represented the world, they also believed it was separate from the brain and made of nonmaterial substance. However, the idea that human thought is computational is…
Hofmann on the West's spiritual crisis
Hofmann strongly believed that there was a spiritual crisis in Western civilization, and argued that society must shift from “the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new consciousness of an all-encompassing reality, which…
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
Strong AI as a closet dualism
For Searle, to argue anything else means you must believe in a form of dualism, the position that the mental realm has no causal connection with the physical realm. According to Searle, this is precisely the position many AI researchers take. They believe that their models have…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
The mental versus the physical
Now this simple contrast between our experiences and the world that exists independently of our experiences invites a characterization, and in our traditional vocabulary the most natural characterization is to say is that there is a distinction between the mental, on the one…
Dualists and materialists make the same mistake
People who accept the reality and irreducibility of the mental tend to think of themselves as dualists. But to others, accepting an irreducible mental component in reality seems like giving up on the scientific world-view, so they deny the existence of any such mental reality…
The standard views in philosophy of mind are false
I write out of the conviction that the philosophy of mind is the most important subject in contemporary philosophy and that the standard views—dualism, materialism, behaviorism, functionalism, computationalism, eliminativism, epiphenomenalism—are false.
Experts and the public disagree about dualism
The philosophy of mind has a special feature that distinguishes it from other branches of philosophy. In most philosophical subjects there is no sharp division between what the professionals believe and the opinions of the educated general public. But on the issues discussed in…
Descartes divides the territory between science and religion
Cartesian dualism was important in the seventeenth century for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that it seemed to divide up the territory between science and religion. In the seventeenth century the new scientific discoveries seemed to pose a threat to…
The ghost in the machine
Each mind is an immortal soul. Bodies, as physical entities, are determined by the laws of physics; but minds have free will. Each of us as a self is identical with his or her mind. As living human beings we are composite entities, comprising both a mind and a body, but for…
Bodies known only by inference from ideas
Bodies, on the other hand, cannot be known directly but only indirectly by inferring their existence and features from the contents of the mind. I do not directly perceive the table in front of me; but, strictly speaking, I perceive only my conscious experience of the table, my…
Causal interaction between mind and body
What exactly are the relations between the mental and the physical, and in particular how can there be causal relations between them? It seems impossible that there should be causal relations between two completely different metaphysical realms, the physical realm of extended…
For Descartes no material object is conscious
The problem for Descartes was not the general question of how a mental substance can arise out of neurobiology, because for him it cannot. His question was rather how specific mental contents such as feeling a pain can arise from the impact of an injury to my body. We think the…
Other minds and the external world
The skepticism about other minds that follows from Cartesian dualism is just a special case of a much more general kind of skepticism: skepticism about the existence of the external world.
We perceive only the contents of our minds
It is important to understand that on Descartes’ view we do not directly perceive objects and states of affairs in the world. What we directly perceive, that is, perceive without any inferential processes, are the contents of our own minds. So if I hold up my hand in front of…
Free will in a causally closed world
Do I genuinely have free will, or is it only an illusion? The question comes in a very sharp form for Descartes, because if my free will is a feature of my mind, how can it have any effect on the physical world, if the physical world is entirely determined? This problem is an…
Is my body essential to my identity
But is this body really essential to my identity? It seems at least possible to imagine that I might, like Gregor Samsa in the story by Kafka, wake up in a completely different body. But if the same body is not what makes me me, then what does make me me? What is the relation…
Descartes denies that animals have minds
If every mind is a spiritual or mental substance, and if minds are indestructible, then it seems that if animals have minds, every animal has an immortal soul. But if it turns out that every dog, cat, mouse, flea, and grasshopper has an immortal soul, then, to put it mildly…
Not like a pilot in a ship
In a famous passage Descartes said we should not think of the mind as lodged in the body like a pilot in a ship, but we should really think that it is somehow suffused throughout the body. If I bump into something I do not observe my body banging into another object in a way…
Substance dualism and religious faith
Because of the failures of Cartesian-style dualism, especially the failure to get an adequate or even coherent account of the relationship between the mind and the body, it is widely assumed that substance dualism in any form is out of the question. This is not to say that no…
Dualism versus the conservation of energy
It seems impossible to make substance dualism consistent with modern physics. Physics says that the amount of matter/energy in the universe is constant; but substance dualism seems to imply that there is another kind of energy, mental energy or spiritual energy, that is not…
Three ways of making mental substance fit the world
It is not easy to make the idea that the mind is a separate substance consistent with the rest of what we know about the world. Here are three ways of trying to do it, each with a different conception of the mind. First, divine intervention. Physical science is incomplete. Our…
Property dualism
There is a weaker version of dualism called “property dualism,” and that view is fairly widespread. The idea is this: Though there are not two kinds of substances in the world, there are two kinds of properties. Most properties, such as having an electrical charge, or having a…
The insight that drives dualism
My guess is that dualism, in spite of being out of fashion, will not go away. Indeed in recent years dualism, at least property dualism, has been making something of a comeback, partly due to a renaissance of interest in consciousness. The insight that drives dualism is…
Neither dualism nor materialism is acceptable
We end this chapter in a depressing intellectual state: neither dualism nor materialism is acceptable and yet they are presented to us as the only possibilities. Furthermore we know independently that both what dualism is trying to say and what materialism is trying to say are…
The true and false parts of materialism and dualism
Materialism tries to say truly that the universe is entirely made up of physical particles that exist in fields of force and are often organized into systems. But it ends up saying falsely that there are no ontologically irreducible mental phenomena. Dualism tries to say truly…
The illusion of dualism
Once again it seems to me the illusion of dualism is generated by misunderstanding a very real distinction. There really is a distinction between those irreducible features of the world that have a first-person or subjective ontology and those that do not. But it is a deep…
Three arguments against dualism
The refutation of dualism is harder. Let us define dualism as the view that there are two distinct metaphysical ontological realms in the universe, one mental the other physical. This is harder to refute, because whereas materialism postulated the nonexistence of something we…
How is intentionality possible at all
I. HOW IS INTENTIONALITY POSSIBLE AT ALL? This problem is supposed to be as difficult as the problem of consciousness, so the sorts of solutions that are supposed to solve it are much like the solutions proposed for the problem of consciousness. The dualistic solution is to say…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
The soul as the pearl of self
However, there is one possible candidate for the pearl of self that we have so far ignored: the soul. Many people believe that a human being, in addition to having a physical body, also has a non-physical part which does not depend on oxygen and food and which can persist long…
The computer that thought it was res cogitans
There was a wonderful cartoon that circulated around university departments when I was an undergraduate that dramatised this fallacy beautifully. A thought bubble emerges from a computer. ‘I think,’ it says. In the next frame, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Cogito ergo sum, in…
Ryle's category mistake
But why is this apparently simple error so common? A convincing explanation was offered by Gilbert Ryle in his 1949 classic The Concept of Mind. Ryle accused dualists of making what he called a ‘category mistake’. They started from the correct idea that thoughts, feelings and…
Team spirit and the ghost in the machine
My favourite of Ryle’s many examples is the person who understands that playing cricket requires team-spirit, but thinks that contributing team-spirit is an activity additional to batting, bowling and fielding, rather than being tied up with the manner of doing all of them.3…
Persons are not the same as their bodies
As he summarises it, ‘My argument has been that knowledge of what has happened to a person’s body and its parts will not necessarily give you knowledge of what has happened to the person, and so, that persons are not the same as their bodies.’
Swinburne: physicalism doesn't face the data
‘The trouble with physicalism,’ Swinburne told me, ‘is that it doesn’t face the data, and the data first of all is the mental life. We have thoughts and feelings and so on and the occurrence of these does not entail the occurrence of goings on in the brain or conversely.’ The…
A complete account is more than a physical one
It should be clear that this argument simply repeats the kind of category mistake identified by Ryle. So it is true, as Swinburne says, that a physical account of the world is not a complete account of the world. But it does not follow that the world is comprised of more stuff…
Brains and bodies suffice for consciousness
To this we need to add another compelling fact: if you have a sufficiently complex brain and body, you will be conscious. Combined with the first fact, most people would conclude that brains and bodies are both necessary and sufficient for human consciousness: you can’t think…
Soul as light bulb, brain as socket
‘What I have argued,’ he writes, ‘… is that without a functioning brain, the soul will not function (i.e. have conscious episodes) – not that it will not exist.’9 Swinburne uses the analogy of a light bulb to explain this. ‘The soul is like a light bulb and the brain is like an…
Swinburne's dualism laid bare
Swinburne is not the only serious thinker to advocate the existence of non-material souls, of course. But he is one of the most eminent, and his account is one of the most systematic and thorough. His writings lay bare the logic of dualistic souls, and once exposed, its…
Time to bury the immaterial soul
To switch metaphors, if the soil is not proving to be fertile, it is better to plant elsewhere than to continue in the hope that persistence will bear fruit. In all my years of reading and thinking about soul and self, I’ve yet to come across a single argument that is left…
Descartes: not a sailor in a ship
a philosopher of Descartes’ undoubted genius is not going to completely miss the fact that this ego is very much embodied. In a passage often quoted by those seeking to defend Descartes against the charge of ignoring the body, he writes: ‘Nature also teaches me, by these…
Mind and body are not different orders
Descartes’ error was to think that mind and body are of different orders, not that mind exists.
Christians without dualist souls
Having dismissed the idea that we have immaterial souls, you might assume that there is nothing left to be said for the Christian idea of a life to come. However, I was surprised to discover that many Christians, including Pope Benedict XVI, do not believe in the dualist soul…
Bodily resurrection without dualism
If we reject dualism and believe that bodily resurrection is necessary for an afterlife, do we have any good reasons to think it will happen? The idea is clearly a hard sell in the contemporary world. You might well ask, ‘Is this not all completely absurd, quite contrary to our…