Talk: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. --Ryguasu 03:27 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

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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. --Ryguasu 04:34 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

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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, 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.

Seth Mahoney 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.

--Christofurio 16:58, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

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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.

--Seth Mahoney 00:56, 7 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hi, two points:

1. 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.
2. 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:
   1. 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.
   2. 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.
   3. 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.

Ben Arnold 03:51, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

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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.

--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). 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.

WhiteC 09:37, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

I just split up the article into two sections for much easier reading.--EatAlbertaBeef 13:44, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yes, most definitely. Many thanks. 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.) --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. WhiteC 03:05, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)