Interactionist Dualism Defended I

Here's a link to a philosophical defense of old-fashioned interactionist dualism, dated 2006 and submitted by a candidate for an M.A. in philosophy at Monash University.

I'll come to Koksvik's argument in another post, but for now I'll review my understanding of the state of play.

Interactionist dualism was famously Rene Descartes' answer to the question of the relationship between mind and body.

There exist a lot of different possible answers to this question, from the materialist reductionism that says in essence that the 'mind' is an illusion, to the Berkeleyan idealism that says in essence that the 'body' is an illusion.

Dualists all by definition say that mind and body are very different things or types of thing, and that they are both real.

Dualists differ among themselves on whether the mind and body really interact. They certainly SEEM to interact! If I skip lunch, the thought "I'm hungry" will be in my mind by 2 PM. Then I might start hunting around for a bag of potato chips. So a bodily fact (empty stomach) seems to cause a thought, and that thought seems to cause a good deal of bodily rustling about.

But ... there are schools of thought among dualists who maintain that though both the empty stomach and the conscious thought regarding hunger are real, the interaction is an illusion. It is wrong to say that we are hungry because our stomachs are empty. Rather, one should say that the two facts are parallel parts of the grand divine plan, and since God is the direct cause of each, they don't cause each other. This sort of dualism is known as parallel dualism or occasionalism.

Another sort of dualism says that causation only works in one direction. Yes, I think "I'm hungry" because of the condition of my stomach. But nothing (not even my search for some potato chips) happens because of that thought. Rather, the search for food is set off automatically by the hungry stomach, mind is unnecessary. In this view, mind is a useless froth thrown out by the body, and all the work is done by matter. (Though, in contrast to materialists, a partisan of this view, an epiphenomenalist, DOES believe that the useless mind is a reality, and so he IS a dualist of a sort.)

Descartes' interactionist dualism was a rejection of all those possibilities. Things are in broad outline as they seem. The body really does cause changes in the mind, and vice versa.

That has come under a lot of critical fire in the intervening centuries, not least by "neutral monists" such as William James (in at least some of his writings) who maintain that there is an underlying metaphysical stuff that is neither matter nor mind, and that both matter and mind are pragmatically useful constructions from out of this stuff.

At any rate: by now, by the early 21st century, it is tough to find defenders of interactionist dualismin the top rank philosophy faculties. That view tends to be parodied by such expressions as "the ghost in the machine." [And that was true long before The Police used that as an album title.]

Best of luck to Koksvik.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog