1 of 1- Jeremy Taylor
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Immateriality of Mind
Okay, so in response to a previous thread, I thought I'd start another one to discuss and develop issues relating to the immateriality of the mind. Hopefully, at some point we can tidy up the different arguments, objections, and responses. But I thought it might just be best to start in an ad hoc basis and move on from there.
Therefore, I wanted to start with a few issues that came up in the part-time philosophy degree I'm doing at the moment, most especially the philosophy of mind course. The first issue is the causal closure objection to dualism. I'm scratching my head trying to see how this is that serious an objection. Anybody see any reasons for taking it seriously?
Here are some good resources from the dualist perspective:
I thought that the blog post by Bill Vallicella hit the nail on the head here:
A standard objection to interactionist substance dualism is that mind-body interaction violates the principle of the conservation of energy. In my opinion, anyone who finds this objection decisive is not thinking very hard.
Am I being too dismissive?
- Proclus
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Re: Immateriality of Mind
It seems to me that the argument against dualism from the conservation of energy is question begging. The conservation laws in effect say, "If a physical system is closed, then the mass-energy sum of the system must remain constant." The entire question at issue is the truth of the antecedent.
A more interesting argument (I think David Papinau gives a version of it somewhere) goes like this:
1. If interactionist dualism were true, then there should be physical events, presumably in the brain, that add to the net energy of the physical system (I take it because it would involve bits of matter being "pushed" by something other than bits of matter).
2. Search as we may we have yet to find any such events.
3. If such events exist we should expect to have found them by now, so probably, given (2), there are no such events.
4. Therefore, probably interactionist dualism is false (via (3) and modus tollens).
I think the points to attack this argument are (1) and (3). I can imagine ways that an immaterial entity could cause a change in the state of a physical system without adding to the net mass--energy. (For instance, imagine a simple circuit with a battery and an electric motor. Suppose a demon has the ability to instantaneously flip the battery. The state of the system would be importantly different with the motor beginning to turn the other way, but the net energy would be no different.) Such a solution, however, would mean that the current laws of physics do not fully describe the system (duh), and we could simply construct a parallel version of the argument replacing "there should be...that add..." with "there should be...that violate some known physical law." Alternatively, I can easily imagine that such events do occur only in ways beneath what we can observe (either in practice right now or even in principle).
Last edited by Proclus (3/13/2017 10:20 pm)
- Jeremy Taylor
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Re: Immateriality of Mind
Interesting points, Proclus.
Couldn't we also fault 2)? I'm hardly an expert on neuroscience, but I know a small bit about it I doubt we are any position to take much meaningful away from our lack of finding excess energy in the brain. We hardly have a complete enough knowledge of the brain. I doubt there have even been many experiments into this.
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Thread Starter- Proclus
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Re: Immateriality of Mind
Fair enough.
I only meant that to my knowledge no positive data have been gathered to date that point to this. It would be cool if someone could cite some.
- Jeremy Taylor
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Re: Immateriality of Mind
True. It would refute the principle of physical closure. I wonder if certain forms of extreme psychophysical influence might be an example that satisfies Papinau's requirements. There are examples - usually hysterics or those very susceptible to hypnosis - where the subjects seem to have control over aspects of skin or other body parts, where there is no neurological mechanism present. It wouldn't be conclusive because we don't have a full understanding of such phenomena, and we can't rule out energy coming from somewhere, but it does appear that there is no transfer of energy through normal routes.
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Thread Starter- Proclus
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Re: Immateriality of Mind
Good point. Let's put a few of those people in a sealed box and see if we can observe a rise in heat 
Last edited by Proclus (3/15/2017 1:36 pm)
- Jeremy Taylor
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Re: Immateriality of Mind
One problem that seems to face most materialist-leaning accounts of the mind (not strictly materialist, I suppose, since they admit the existence of either mental substances or properties - but they share the physicalist drive to marginalise mental causation) is epiphenomenalism. Only identity theory seems immune amongst materialist accounts (ignoring fringe silliness like behaviourism and eliminative materialism) of the mind.
As Dr. Feser himself has pointed out, the problem is not just epiphenomenalism is unpalatable, but that it seems obviously false. This is because, if it were true, and mental states don't have causal influence, either on the physical or the mental, then we shouldn't even be able to speak about them (a physical act). The fact we discuss qualia or other mental attributes would have to just be chance - an astonishing coincidence. In the case of property dualist versions of epiphenonemalism, it seems even worse, because they make propositional attidues physical and only qualia mental. This splits the belief I'm in pain from the feeling of it completely - the former is not caused by the latter, and would presumably happen whether or not I was truly experiencing a qualitative experience of pain. This makes it hard to see how we would even be confident we really were experiencing any particular qualitative experience (if we were a zombie, for example), as our beliefs would be the same whatever occurred.
I know epiphenomenalists have responded to these points, but their responses don't seem very promising to me, revolving around attempts to split knowledge from causation, so we can somehow know we are experiencing a mental state without that mental state having to have any causal effect.
As far as I can see, any materialist-leaning account of the mind that ends up implying epiphenomenalism is in a bad way: but then most seem to.
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