Suppose that I cannot doubt whether a given figure is a triangle, but can doubt whether its interior angles add up to two right angles. It does not follow from this that the number of degrees in triangles may be more or less than This is because the doubt concerning the number of degrees in a triangle is a property of me, not of triangles.
The dualist can reply in two ways. First, he or she may argue that, while doubting the body is not a property of bodies, being doubtable is a property of bodies. Second, the dualist may reply that it is always possible to doubt whether the figure before me is a triangle.
Consider, for example, the following parallel argument from Paul Churchland , p. Following Descartes, it ought to be that Ali is not Clay though in fact Clay was a famous heavyweight and identical to Ali.
By way of reply, surely it is possible for an evil demon to deceive me about whether Mohammed Ali was a famous heavyweight boxer. So, the dualist might insist, the case of mind is unique in its immunity from doubt. It is only with reference to our own mental states that we can be said to know incorrigibly.
A third argument in the Meditations maintains that the mind and body must really be separate because Descartes can conceive of the one without the other. Since he can clearly and distinctly understand the body without the mind and vice versa, God could really have created them separately. But if the mind and body can exist independently, they must really be independent, for nothing can constitute a part of the essence of a thing that can be absent without the thing itself ceasing to be.
If the essence of the mind is incorporeal, so must be the mind itself. The general strategy is to identify some property or feature indisputably had by mental phenomena but not attributable in any meaningful way to bodily or nervous phenomena, or vice versa. For example, some have suggested that mental states are private in the sense that only those who possess them can know them directly.
The latter assumes a correlation, if not an identity, between nervous and mental states or events. My linguistic, bodily and neural activities are public in the sense that anyone suitably placed can observe them. Since mental states are private to their possessors, but brain states are not, mental states cannot be identical to brain states.
Rey pp. Others can know my mental states only by making inferences based on my verbal, non-verbal or neurophysiological activity. You may infer that I believe it will rain from the fact that I am carrying an umbrella, but I do not infer that I believe it will rain from noticing that I am carrying an umbrella.
I do not need to infer my mental states because I know them immediately. Since mental states are knowable without inference in the first person case, but are knowable or at least plausibly assigned only by inference in the third person case, we have an authority or incorrigibility with reference to our own mental states that no one else could have.
Since beliefs about the physical world are always subject to revision our inferences or theories could be mistaken , mental states are not physical states. Some mental states exhibit intentionality. Intentional mental states include, but are not limited to, intendings , such as plans to buy milk at the store. They are states that are about, of, for, or towards things other than themselves. Desires, beliefs, loves, hates, perceptions and memories are common intentional states.
For example, I may have a desire for an apple; I may have love for or towards my neighbor; I may have a belief about republicans or academics; or I may have memories of my grandfather. The dualist claims that brain states, however, cannot plausibly be ascribed intentionality. How can a pattern of neural firings be of or about or towards anything other than itself? As a purely physical event, an influx of sodium ions through the membrane of a neural cell creating a polarity differential between the inside and outside of the cell wall, and hence an electrical discharge, cannot be of Paris, about my grandfather, or for an apple.
No physical phenomena exhibits anything similar. Taylor, pp. My belief that it will rain can be either true or false. But, the dualist may urge, as a purely physical event, an electrical or chemical discharge in the brain cannot be true or false.
Indeed, it lacks not only truth, but also linguistic meaning. Since mental states such as beliefs possess truth-value and semantics, it seems incoherent to attribute these properties to bodily states.
Thus, mental states are not bodily states. Presumably, then, the minds that have these states are also non-physical. Churchland, , p. Although each of these arguments for dualism may be criticized individually, they are typically thought to share a common flaw: they assume that because some aspect of mental states, such as privacy, intentionality, truth, or meaning cannot be attributed to physical substances, they must be attributable to non-physical substances.
But if we do not understand how such states and their properties can be generated by the central nervous system, we are no closer to understanding how they might be produced by minds. Nagel, , p. Dualists cannot explain the mechanisms by which souls generate meaning, truth, intentionality or self-awareness. Thus, dualism creates no explanatory advantage.
If the only reasons for supposing that non-physical minds exist are the phenomena of intentionality, privacy and the like, then dualism unnecessarily complicates the metaphysics of personhood. We can ask how much the brain weighs, but not how much the mind weighs. We can ask how many miles per hour my body is moving, but not how many miles per hour my mind is moving. Minds are just not the sorts of things that can have size, shape, weight, location, motion, and the other attributes that Descartes ascribes to extended reality.
We literally could not understand someone who informed us that the memories of his last holiday are two inches behind the bridge of his nose or that his perception of the color red is straight back from his left eye. Another argument for dualism claims that dualism is required for free will. If dualism is false, then presumably materialism, the thesis that humans are entirely physical beings, is true.
We set aside consideration of idealism —the thesis that only minds and ideas exist. If materialism were true, then every motion of bodies should be determined by the laws of physics, which govern the actions and reactions of everything in the universe.
But a robust sense of freedom presupposes that we are free, not merely to do as we please, but that we are free to do otherwise than as we do. This, in turn, requires that the cause of our actions not be fixed by natural laws. Since, according to the dualist, the mind is non-physical, there is no need to suppose it bound by the physical laws that govern the body. So, a strong sense of free will is compatible with dualism but incompatible with materialism.
Since freedom in just this sense is required for moral appraisal, the dualist can also argue that materialism, but not dualism, is incompatible with ethics. Taylor, , p. Rey, , pp.
This, the dualist may claim, creates a strong presumption in favor of their metaphysics. This argument is sometimes countered by arguing that free will is actually compatible with materialism or that even if the dualistic account of the will is correct, it is irrelevant because no volition on the part of a non-physical substance could alter the course of nature anyway.
Man would be free only if there was nothing he could do. Property dualists are not committed to the existence of non-physical substances, but are committed to the irreducibility of mental phenomena to physical phenomena. An argument for property dualism, derived from Thomas Nagel and Saul Kripke, is as follows: We can assert that warmth is identical to mean kinetic molecular energy, despite appearances, by claiming that warmth is how molecular energy is perceived or manifested in consciousness.
Similarly, color is identical to electromagnetic reflectance efficiencies, inasmuch as color is how electromagnetic wavelengths are processed by human consciousness. In these cases, the appearance can be distinguished from the reality.
Heat is molecular motion, though it appears to us as warmth. Other beings, for example, Martians, might well apprehend molecular motion in another fashion. They would grasp the same objective reality, but by correlating it with different experiences. We move toward a more objective understanding of heat when we understand it as molecular energy rather than as warmth.
Consciousness itself, however, cannot be reduced to brain activity along analogous lines because we should then need to say that consciousness is how brain activity is perceived in consciousness, leaving consciousness unreduced. Put differently, when it comes to consciousness, the appearance is the reality. Therefore, no reduction is possible.
Nagel writes:. The idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here. What is the analogue in this case to pursuing a more objective understanding of the same phenomena by abandoning the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favor of another that is more objective but concerns the same thing?
Certainly it appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience by leaving behind the particularity of our human point of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings that could not imagine what it was like to be us. Nagel ; reprinted in Block et. Consciousness is thus sui generis of its own kind , and successful reductions elsewhere should give us little confidence when it comes to experience.
Mentality is a broad and complex property. Some things—in particular, persons and certain biological organisms—can also instantiate mental properties, like being in pain and liking the taste of avocado. Once we admit the existence of mental properties, we can inquire into the nature of the relationship between mental and physical properties.
According to the supervenience thesis , there can be no mental differences without corresponding physical differences. If, for example, I feel a headache, there must be some change not only in my mental state, but also in my body presumably, in my brain.
If Mary is in pain, but Erin is not, then, according to the supervenience thesis, there must be a physical difference between Mary and Erin. Kim, p. Why deny supervenience? If it is possible to have mental differences without physical differences, then mental properties cannot be identical to or reducible to physical properties.
They would exist as facts about the world over and above the purely physical facts. Kim, and following. Without the actual existence of such a world, the argument that mental properties do not supervene on physical properties fails. A second rebuttal avers that absent qualia thought experiments and inverted spectra though experiments only support property dualism if we can imagine these possibilities obtaining. We may think we can conceive of such a world but attempts to do so do not actually achieve such a conception.
If it is, its truth is necessary. If, then, someone thought that they imagined a proof that the thesis is false, they would be conceiving the falsity of what is in reality a necessary truth. This is implausible. But perhaps the physicalist can come up with independent reasons for supposing that the dualist has failed to imagine what she claims. The physicalist can point, for example, to successful reductions in other areas of science. On the basis of these cases she can argue the implausibility of supposing that, uniquely, mental phenomena resist reduction to the causal properties of matter.
That is, an inductive argument for reduction outweighs a conceivability argument against reduction. The argument holds that if the brain and the mind were actually separate, our mental powers would not be comprised. This is a pretty good argument.
However, it also depends upon the presumption that the supernatural does not exist and that God does not have a reason for letting our brain limit our mental function while we are living. Some arguments can be made to refute the strong affirmative evidence, but they are dependent upon an anti-supernatural presumption. Dualism - Learn More! Or Philosophically? Is the Bible True? No one can even lay out a path towards discovering the answer to this problem consciousness. He then adopts a panpsychism approach to solve this.
We have a fundamental property of nature that exhibits itself only through consciousness, and it is impossible to detect its interaction with the rest of physics in any way. Basically Chalmers has produced something he claims to be still physical — but which is effectively identical to a non-physical entity.
I think there are two reasons. The first is not an explicit philosophical point, but more a matter of the intellectual background. In theory there are many possible versions of dualism, but what people usually want to reject when they reject it is traditional religion and traditional ideas about spirits and ghosts.
A lot of people have strong feelings about this for personal or historical reasons that give an edge to their views. I suspect, for example, that this might be why Dan Dennett gives Descartes more of a beating over dualism than, in my opinion at least, he really deserves.
Nobody has much to offer by way of explaining how the second world or the second substance might work certainly nothing remotely comparable to the well-developed and comprehensive account given by physics. Then again, if we could do the maths, why would we call it dualism rather than an extension of the physical, monist story? That leads us on to the other bad problem, of how the two substances or worlds interact, one that has been a conspicuous difficulty since Descartes. When I am looking at a red apple, it seems to me that every bit of my subjective experience of the colour might influence my decision about whether to pick up the apple or not.
Nothing in my mental world seems to be sealed off from my behaviour. If we think there is causal interaction, then again we seem to be looking for an extension of monist physics rather than a dualism.
I think the element of mystery in conscious experience is in fact its particularity, its actual reality. All the general features can be explained at a theoretical level by physics, but not why this specific experience is real and being had by me. This is part of a more general mystery of reality, including the questions of why the world is like this in particular and not like something else, or like nothing.
There only seem to be two styles of explanation available here. One is the purely rational kind of reasoning you get in maths. The other is empirical observation. Neither is any good in this context; empirical explanations simply defer the issue backwards by explaining things as they are in terms of things as they once were.
People like Stephen Hawking try to deploy both methods, using empirical science to defer the ultimate answer back in time to a misty primordial period, a hypothetical land created by heroic backward extrapolation, where it is somehow meant to turn into a mathematical issue, but even if you could make that work I think it would be unsatisfying as an explanation of the nature of my experience here and now.
I conclude that to deal with this properly we really need a different way of thinking. I fear it might be that all we can do is contemplate the matter and hope pre- or post-theoretical enlightenment dawns, in a sort of Taoist way; but I continue to hope that eventually that one weird trick of metaphysical argument that cracks the issue will occur to someone, because like anyone brought up in the western tradition I really want to get it all back to territory where we can write out the rules and even do some maths!
Most people realise that there is no single account of the world that covers everything. Besides concrete physical objects we have to consider the abstract entities; those dealt with in maths, for example, and many other fields.
On the other hand, everything is part of the cosmos, broadly understood, and everything is in some way related to the other contents of those cosmos.
So we can equally say that any sufficiently comprehensive system can, at least loosely, be described as monist too; in the end there is only one world. Any reasonable theory will be a bit dualist and a bit monist in some respects.
That being so, the pure metaphysical question of monism versus dualism begins to look rather academic, more about nomenclature than substance. The real interest is in whether your dualism or your monism is any good as an elegant and effective explanation. In that competition materialism, which we tend to call monist, just looks to be an awfully long way ahead. I have long suspected that conscious experience seems extraordinary, unexpected or even miraculous to some people but not to others.
It does not seem that way to me, so I have never perceived a need for extraordinary supernatural explanations. As for why conscious experience might seem extraordinary to some people but not to others, perhaps it a matter of innate disposition. Regarding what kind of problem consciousness is, I suspect we could lay out a path toward discovering an answer.
The path would probably involve experiments with human subjects that would require those subjects be destroyed either during or after the experiments. Good point, thank you for sharing. As an Artificial Intelligence researcher, I believe the answer lies in science too, but the effort for it has to be increased, which also leads one to believe in the dualism hypothesis.
My view, in that sense, is that of a Remote Mind Hypothesis. For example, if we have social networks and technology today to digitally register a large part of our insights and desires, in theory, we are very close to being able, in the future, to make great discoveries in this direction, crossing only present and past data.
The reason is that we know the world only by cause and effect; and we call physical what effects the physical. Whatever you try to strike a billard ball with is physical by virtue of producing a change in the ball, by moving it. What about emergentism? Consciousness seems to be spread throughout a variety of living creatures, in greater of lesser complexity.
Self-awareness seems to be a higher or more complex form of consciousness. Considering that humans are not the only self-aware creatures, but not all creatures are self-aware, the idea that consciousness is emergent seems likely.
Once past singularities dualities become transitions… …dualism may look like a state but should be worked with as things in observation a third probably transitional state …. Maybe we will find out in the next hundred years or maybe we never will. We want an explanation and we want it now. To do so we propose all kinds if nonsense that is unsupported by the knowledge that we do have.
I believe he needs another category of knowledge, 1. This essentially behaviouristic account is exactly what the intuition behind the argument is meant to overthrow. Such appeals to intuition are always, of course, open to denial by those who claim not to share the intuition. Some ability theorists seem to blur the distinction between knowing what something is like and knowing how to do something, by saying that the ability Harpo acquires is to imagine or remember the nature of sound.
In this case, what he acquires the ability to do involves the representation to himself of what the thing is like. But this conception of representing to oneself, especially in the form of imagination, seems sufficiently close to producing in oneself something very like a sensory experience that it only defers the problem: until one has a physicalist gloss on what constitutes such representations as those involved in conscious memory and imagination, no progress has been made.
Rather, it is new way of grasping something that he already knew. Demonstrative concepts pick something out without saying anything extra about it. Similarly, the scientific knowledge that Harpo originally possessed did not enable him to anticipate what it would be like to re-express some parts of that knowledge using the demonstrative concepts that only experience can give one. The knowledge, therefore, appears to be genuinely new, whereas only the mode of conceiving it is novel.
Furthermore, experiencing does not seem to consist simply in exercising a particular kind of concept, demonstrative or not. When Harpo has his new form of experience, he does not simply exercise a new concept; he also grasps something new — the phenomenal quality — with that concept.
How decisive these considerations are, remains controversial. I said above that predicate dualism might seem to have no ontological consequences, because it is concerned only with the different way things can be described within the contexts of the different sciences, not with any real difference in the things themselves. This, however, can be disputed.
The argument from predicate to property dualism moves in two steps, both controversial. The first claims that the irreducible special sciences, which are the sources of irreducible predicates, are not wholly objective in the way that physics is, but depend for their subject matter upon interest-relative perspectives on the world. This means that they, and the predicates special to them, depend on the existence of minds and mental states, for only minds have interest-relative perspectives.
The second claim is that psychology — the science of the mental — is itself an irreducible special science, and so it, too, presupposes the existence of the mental. Mental predicates therefore presuppose the mentality that creates them: mentality cannot consist simply in the applicability of the predicates themselves.
First, let us consider the claim that the special sciences are not fully objective, but are interest-relative. A mass of matter could be characterized as a hurricane, or as a collection of chemical elements, or as mass of sub-atomic particles, and there be only the one mass of matter. But such different explanatory frameworks seem to presuppose different perspectives on that subject matter. This is where basic physics, and perhaps those sciences reducible to basic physics, differ from irreducible special sciences.
On a realist construal, the completed physics cuts physical reality up at its ultimate joints: any special science which is nomically strictly reducible to physics also, in virtue of this reduction, it could be argued, cuts reality at its joints, but not at its minutest ones.
If scientific realism is true, a completed physics will tell one how the world is, independently of any special interest or concern: it is just how the world is. It would seem that, by contrast, a science which is not nomically reducible to physics does not take its legitimation from the underlying reality in this direct way.
Rather, such a science is formed from the collaboration between, on the one hand, objective similarities in the world and, on the other, perspectives and interests of those who devise the science.
The concept of hurricane is brought to bear from the perspective of creatures concerned about the weather. Creatures totally indifferent to the weather would have no reason to take the real patterns of phenomena that hurricanes share as constituting a single kind of thing. With the irreducible special sciences, there is an issue of salience , which involves a subjective component: a selection of phenomena with a certain teleology in mind is required before their structures or patterns are reified.
The entities of metereology or biology are, in this respect, rather like Gestalt phenomena. Even accepting this, why might it be thought that the perspectivality of the special sciences leads to a genuine property dualism in the philosophy of mind? It might seem to do so for the following reason. Having a perspective on the world, perceptual or intellectual, is a psychological state.
So the irreducible special sciences presuppose the existence of mind. If one is to avoid an ontological dualism, the mind that has this perspective must be part of the physical reality on which it has its perspective. But psychology, it seems to be almost universally agreed, is one of those special sciences that is not reducible to physics, so if its subject matter is to be physical, it itself presupposes a perspective and, hence, the existence of a mind to see matter as psychological.
If this mind is physical and irreducible, it presupposes mind to see it as such. We seem to be in a vicious circle or regress. We can now understand the motivation for full-blown reduction.
A true basic physics represents the world as it is in itself, and if the special sciences were reducible, then the existence of their ontologies would make sense as expressions of the physical, not just as ways of seeing or interpreting it. The irreducibility of the special sciences creates no problem for the dualist, who sees the explanatory endeavor of the physical sciences as something carried on from a perspective conceptually outside of the physical world.
But psychology is one of the least likely of sciences to be reduced. If psychology cannot be reduced, this line of reasoning leads to real emergence for mental acts and hence to a real dualism for the properties those acts instantiate Robinson There is an argument, which has roots in Descartes Meditation VI , which is a modal argument for dualism.
One might put it as follows:. The rationale of the argument is a move from imaginability to real possibility. I include 2 because the notion of conceivability has one foot in the psychological camp, like imaginability, and one in the camp of pure logical possibility and therefore helps in the transition from one to the other. See, for example, Chalmers , 94—9.
This latter argument, if sound, would show that conscious states were something over and above physical states. It is a different argument because the hypothesis that the unaltered body could exist without the mind is not the same as the suggestion that the mind might continue to exist without the body, nor are they trivially equivalent. The zombie argument establishes only property dualism and a property dualist might think disembodied existence inconceivable — for example, if he thought the identity of a mind through time depended on its relation to a body e.
When philosophers generally believed in contingent identity, that move seemed to them invalid. But nowadays that inference is generally accepted and the issue concerns the relation between imaginability and possibility.
No-one would nowadays identify the two except, perhaps, for certain quasi-realists and anti-realists , but the view that imaginability is a solid test for possibility has been strongly defended. There seem to be good arguments that time-travel is incoherent, but every episode of Star-Trek or Doctor Who shows how one can imagine what it might be like were it possible.
It is worth relating the appeal to possibility in this argument to that involved in the more modest, anti-physicalist, zombie argument. The possibility of this hypothesis is also challenged, but all that is necessary for a zombie to be possible is that all and only the things that the physical sciences say about the body be true of such a creature. As the concepts involved in such sciences — e. There is no parallel clear, uncontroversial and regimented account of mental concepts as a whole that fails to invoke, explicitly or implicitly, physical e.
For an analytical behaviourist the appeal to imaginability made in the argument fails, not because imagination is not a reliable guide to possibility, but because we cannot imagine such a thing, as it is a priori impossible.
The impossibility of disembodiment is rather like that of time travel, because it is demonstrable a priori, though only by arguments that are controversial. The argument can only get under way for those philosophers who accept that the issue cannot be settled a priori, so the possibility of the disembodiment that we can imagine is still prima facie open.
A major rationale of those who think that imagination is not a safe indication of possibility, even when such possibility is not eliminable a priori, is that we can imagine that a posteriori necessities might be false — for example, that Hesperus might not be identical to Phosphorus. But if Kripke is correct, that is not a real possibility. Another way of putting this point is that there are many epistemic possibilities which are imaginable because they are epistemic possibilities, but which are not real possibilities.
Richard Swinburne , New Appendix C , whilst accepting this argument in general, has interesting reasons for thinking that it cannot apply in the mind-body case. In the case of our experience of ourselves this is not true. Now it is true that the essence of Hesperus cannot be discovered by a mere thought experiment.
That is because what makes Hesperus Hesperus is not the stereotype, but what underlies it. But it does not follow that no one can ever have access to the essence of a substance, but must always rely for identification on a fallible stereotype.
One might think that for the person him or herself, while what makes that person that person underlies what is observable to others, it does not underlie what is experienceable by that person, but is given directly in their own self-awareness. This is a very appealing Cartesian intuition: my identity as the thinking thing that I am is revealed to me in consciousness, it is not something beyond the veil of consciousness.
Now it could be replied to this that though I do access myself as a conscious subject, so classifying myself is rather like considering myself qua cyclist. Just as I might never have been a cyclist, I might never have been conscious, if things had gone wrong in my very early life.
I am the organism, the animal, which might not have developed to the point of consciousness, and that essence as animal is not revealed to me just by introspection.
But there are vital differences between these cases. A cyclist is explicitly presented as a human being or creature of some other animal species cycling: there is no temptation to think of a cyclist as a basic kind of thing in its own right. Consciousness is not presented as a property of something, but as the subject itself. Yet, even if we are not referring primarily to a substrate, but to what is revealed in consciousness, could it not still be the case that there is a necessity stronger than causal connecting this consciousness to something physical?
To consider this further we must investigate what the limits are of the possible analogy between cases of the water-H 2 O kind, and the mind-body relation. We start from the analogy between the water stereotype — how water presents itself — and how consciousness is given first-personally to the subject. It is plausible to claim that something like water could exist without being H 2 O, but hardly that it could exist without some underlying nature. There is, however, no reason to deny that this underlying nature could be homogenous with its manifest nature: that is, it would seem to be possible that there is a world in which the water-like stuff is an element, as the ancients thought, and is water-like all the way down.
The claim of the proponents of the dualist argument is that this latter kind of situation can be known to be true a priori in the case of the mind: that is, one can tell by introspection that it is not more-than-causally dependent on something of a radically different nature, such as a brain or body. What grounds might one have for thinking that one could tell that a priori?
The only general argument that seem to be available for this would be the principle that, for any two levels of discourse, A and B , they are more-than-causally connected only if one entails the other a priori. And the argument for accepting this principle would be that the relatively uncontroversial cases of a posteriori necessary connections are in fact cases in which one can argue a priori from facts about the microstructure to the manifest facts.
In the case of water, for example, it would be claimed that it follows a priori that if there were something with the properties attributed to H 2 O by chemistry on a micro level, then that thing would possess waterish properties on a macro level. What is established a posteriori is that it is in fact H 2 O that underlies and explains the waterish properties round here, not something else: the sufficiency of the base — were it to obtain — to explain the phenomena, can be deduced a priori from the supposed nature of the base.
This is, in effect, the argument that Chalmers uses to defend the zombie hypothesis. The suggestion is that the whole category of a posteriori more-than-causally necessary connections often identified as a separate category of metaphysical necessity comes to no more than this.
If we accept that this is the correct account of a posteriori necessities, and also deny the analytically reductionist theories that would be necessary for a priori connections between mind and body, as conceived, for example, by the behaviourist or the functionalist, does it follow that we can tell a priori that consciousness is not more-than-causally dependent on the body?
Though we shall see later, in 5. The conceivability argument creates a prima facie case for thinking that mind has no more than causal ontological dependence on the body.
Let us assume that one rejects analytical behaviourist or functionalist accounts of mental predicates. Then the above arguments show that any necessary dependence of mind on body does not follow the model that applies in other scientific cases. This does not show that there may not be other reasons for believing in such dependence, for so many of the concepts in the area are still contested.
For example, it might be argued that identity through time requires the kind of spatial existence that only body can give: or that the causal continuity required by a stream of consciousness cannot be a property of mere phenomena.
All these might be put forward as ways of filling out those aspects of our understanding of the self that are only obliquely, not transparently, presented in self-awareness. The dualist must respond to any claim as it arises: the conceivability argument does not pre-empt them. All the arguments so far in this section have been either arguments for property dualism only, or neutral between property and substance dualism.
In this subsection, and in section 4. The ones in this section can be regarded as preliminaries to that in 4. He famously expresses his theory as follows. Nevertheless, in the Appendix of the same work he expressed dissatisfaction with this account. Somewhat surprisingly, it is not very clear just what his worry was, but it is expressed as follows:.
This Berkeleian view is expressed in more modern terms by John Foster. There is a clash of intuitions here between which it is difficult to arbitrate. There is an argument that is meant to favour the need for a subject, as claimed by Berkeley and Foster.
To say that, according to the bundle theory, the identity conditions of individual mental states must be independent of the identity of the person who possesses them, is to say that their identity is independent of the bundle to which they belong.
Perhaps the identity of a mental event is bound up with the complex to which it belongs. That this is impossible certainly needs further argument. Hume seems, however, in the main text to unconsciously make a concession to the opposing view, namely the view that there must be something more than the items in the bundle to make up a mind.
He says:. Talk of the mind as a theatre is, of course, normally associated with the Cartesian picture, and the invocation of any necessary medium, arena or even a field hypostasize some kind of entity which binds the different contents together and without which they would not be a single mind.
Modern Humeans — such as Parfit ; or Dainton — replace the theatre with a co-consciousness relation. So the bundle theorist is perhaps not as restricted as Hume thought. The bundle consists of the objects of awareness and the co-consciousness relation or relations that hold between them , and I think that the modern bundle theorist would want to say that it is the nexus of co-consciousness relations that constitutes our sense of the subject and of the act of awareness of the object.
The Humean point then becomes that we mistake the nexus of relations for a kind of entity, in a way similar to that in which, Hume claims,we mistake the regular succession of similar impressions for an entity called an enduring physical object. Whether this really makes sense in the end is another matter.
I think that it is dubious whether it can accommodate the subject as agent , but it does mean that simple introspection probably cannot refute a sophisticated bundle theory in the way that Lowe and Foster want. The rejection of bundle dualism, therefore, requires more than an appeal to our intuitive awareness of ourselves as subjects. We will see in the next section how arguments that defend the simplicity of the self attempt to undercut the bundle theory.
There is a long tradition, dating at least from Reid , for arguing that the identity of persons over time is not a matter of convention or degree in the way that the identity of other complex substances is and that this shows that the self is a different kind of entity from any physical body. Criticism of these arguments and of the intuitions on which they rest, running from Hume to Parfit , have left us with an inconclusive clash of intuitions.
The argument under consideration and which, possibly, has its first statement in Madell , does not concern identity through time, but the consequences for identity of certain counterfactuals concerning origin. It can, perhaps, therefore, break the stalemate which faces the debate over diachronic identity. The claim is that the broadly conventionalist ways which are used to deal with problem cases through time for both persons and material objects, and which can also be employed in cases of counterfactuals concerning origin for bodies, cannot be used for similar counterfactuals concerning persons or minds.
Concerning ordinary physical objects, it is easy to imagine counterfactual cases where questions of identity become problematic. Take the example of a particular table. We can scale counterfactual suggestions as follows:. The first suggestion would normally be rejected as clearly false, but there will come a point along the spectrum illustrated by i and iii and towards iii where the question of whether the hypothesised table would be the same as the one that actually exists have no obvious answer.
There will thus be a penumbra of counterfactual cases where the question of whether two things would be the same is not a matter of fact. Let us now apply this thought to conscious subjects. Suppose that a given human individual had had origins different from those which he in fact had such that whether that difference affected who he was was not obvious to intuition. What would count as such a case might be a matter of controversy, but there must be one.
Some philosophers might regard it as obvious that sameness of sperm is essential to the identity of a human body and to personal identity. In that case imagine a counterpart sperm in which some of the molecules in the sperm are different; would that be the same sperm? If one pursues the matter far enough there will be indeterminacy which will infect that of the resulting body. There must therefore be some difference such that neither natural language nor intuition tells us whether the difference alters the identity of the human body; a point, that is, where the question of whether we have the same body is not a matter of fact.
How one is to describe these cases is, in some respects, a matter of controversy. Some philosophers think one can talk of vague identity or partial identity. Others think that such expressions are nonsensical.
There is no space to discuss this issue here. It is enough to assume, however, that questions of how one is allowed to use the concept of identity effect only the care with which one should characterize these cases, not any substantive matter of fact. If there were, then there would have to be a haecceitas or thisness belonging to and individuating each complex physical object, and this I am assuming to be implausible if not unintelligible. More about the conditions under which haecceitas can make sense will be found below.
One might plausibly claim that no similar overlap of constitution can be applied to the counterfactual identity of minds. Why is this so? Can we say, as we would for an object with no consciousness, that the story something the same, something different is the whole story: that overlap of constitution is all there is to it?
For the Jones body as such, this approach would do as well as for any other physical object. The creature who would have existed would have had a kind of overlap of psychic constitution with me. The third answer parallels the response we would give in the case of bodies. But as an account of the subjective situation, it is arguable that this makes no sense.
Clearly, the notion of overlap of numerically identical psychic parts cannot be applied in the way that overlap of actual bodily part constitution quite unproblematically can.
This might make one try the second answer. It is difficult to see why it does not. Suppose Jones found out that he had originally been one of twins, in the sense that the zygote from which he developed had divided, but that the other half had died soon afterwards.
He can entertain the thought that if it had been his half that had died, he would never have existed as a conscious being, though someone would whose life, both inner and outer, might have been very similar to his. He might feel rather guiltily grateful that it was the other half that died.
0コメント