DanielCC wrote:

If you mean the argument from the unity of consciousnesses then great argument, also tells against Aristotelian accounts (like C.B. Martin's?) which hold phenomenal consciousness can be adequately accounted for on a materialist basis with addition of immanent teleology. I believe William Hasker discusses it somewhere.

 
I thhnk it's related to the unity of consciousness, but maybe it's more than that. I kinda see it as a link between unified consciousness and private access. *I* exist, there is something we call the "self" who experiences consciousness in a unified way, and I am not my brain, or my arms, or something else like that. I am a full indivisible person.

As a hylemorphist I could say I am the unity of my form and matter; I am a singular existing unit of a "human being". This unit accounts for the unity of conscious experience and for the private access argument - in the sense that I am not any part of my body and I am not just the matter, I am the informed unity.

DanielCC wrote:

If you mean the argument from the unity of consciousnesses then great argument, also tells against Aristotelian accounts (like C.B. Martin's?) which hold phenomenal consciousness can be adequately accounted for on a materialist basis with addition of immanent teleology. I believe William Hasker discusses it somewhere.

Hasker has a paper on the topic in the Koon and Bealer collection The Waning of Materialism. It defends the Leibnizian-Kantian argument for the conception of humans as persons / unified selves, argues that this conception is consistent with empirical data which might seem to contradict it, and defends Hasker's emergent dualism.

I lean more in the direction of nondualism, so I've been most strongly influenced by the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and various writings from within Advaita Vedanta. I've been moving away from it recently because ironically, it seems to ultimately run into some of the same problems that materialism does: there's no room there for free will or the individual self, so I suspect that something is off in the analysis. 

Dualism is dead to me, though, so I suppose I'm some sort of non-naturalistic, non-reductionist materialist right now. Or perhaps just a fullblown Mysterian. I would like to wrap my head around hylomorphism about mind at some point, but I'm honestly more optimistic about a workable conception of mind coming out of Eastern than Western thought.

John West wrote:

Hypatia wrote:

Dualism is dead to me

I would be interesting in hearing why some time. Not necessarily right now.

Mostly for conceptual reasons. My intuitions are somehow simultaneously materialistic and idealistic, and it was a Vedantic framework that made the most sense of that, at least for a little while. One of the things that I found most interesting about the Indian approach to consciousness is that they don't really draw a distinction between mind and body in the same way that we do in the West--the mind is viewed as the sensory organ through which the material world is experienced; it's the pure light of awareness beyond conscious thought which is immaterial, but this doesn't seem to be the sort of active, causal substance that screams for a dualistic explanation. 

I don't believe that consciousness can be adequately accounted for on a naturalistic basis, but a lot of the empirical evidence out there leads me to see personal identity itself as materialistic, and I feel like I would be running counter to both cognitive science and personal experience to start appealing to dualism. I do not think it makes much sense that combinations of matter can be aware, but I also don't think it makes much sense that anything exists at all, so I end up skipping dualism and immediately ending up in theological waters. 

I am interested in hylomorphism, since I do usually end up making concessions to Aristotelianism, but I haven't really been able to figure out what's meant by "material" and "immaterial" or even "dualism" at all in this context.