A few days back (Dec. 26, a day traditionally associated with two turtle doves) I offered two arguments against mind-body dualism and promised a response to each of them. Soon thereafter, I responded to the first of them. I explained why I believe that an argument from naturalistic continuity would not necessarily render impossible an emergence at some period in paleontological history.
BUT [to get to the promised argument against dualism] for well over a century now evidence has been building up that there is indeed causation, and one can make a case that the cause-effect arrow runs in only one direction. Neuronal electrical activity is the cause of whatever I may report about such ideas. In that context I didn't really review the evidence/arguments, but acknowledged that there are plenty of sources if you want to pursue them.
If we believe that neuronal electrical activity is the necessary and sufficient cause of everything we tend to call 'mental,' we are left either with no mind at all (leaving 'mental' only a name for certain behaviors) or we can save distinct mental facts and properties only at the expense of making them inefficacious.
The latter view is the better one. If we try to go all Skinner/Churchland and deny the reality of the 'mindverse' as such, we end up unable to explain what a blind ophthalmologist does NOT understand about sight and the phenomenal color blue. If we allow the phenomenal color "blue" to exist, but we still believe that the cause-effect arrow runs in only one direction, we are left with something sometimes called epiphenomenalism, as in the diagram above.
I don't believe that is an accurate view of mind-brain relations. Why not? While, abstracting from the specifics of neuroscience, I think we need to look here at a very traditional logical argument. This argument maintains that the view that causation can only go in one direction, from body/brain to mind but never the other way, is self-contradictory. I will state it in a single paragraph.
If this view is true, then our brains should not have any information about mental properties, however one understands them -- because a brain can only come to have such information if the mental properties in some sense cause themselves to be known, which contradicts the one-directional premise itself. So if we are in essence brains, throwing off mental properties like an ineffectual foam, we could never know that. In terms of the above diagram, the arrow from Mindverse to Universe has to be reversible or our brains could not contain the notion that there might be something it is like to be me ... or to be a bat.
See the article on epiphenomenalism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for particulars on this argument.
If you want to put a name to this argument: E.C. Benecke will do. He was a philosopher of what I think of as the golden age, and his article making this case appeared in ARISTOTELIAN SOCIETY PROCEEDINGS 1901. Here is the URL. https://academic.oup.com/aristotelian/article-abstract/1/1/18/1834283
[By the way, I haven't been able to find out anything about E.C. Benecke other than the pronoun "he" and the fact that he wrote this article. Efforts to find out more via a search engine general get me to a Robert Benecke of the same era -- a photography pioneer -- not the same guy.]
It seems to me an argument strong enough to lead to the inference that causation in both directions is possible, and that any neurological hypotheses which seek to make it impossible are overly broad. The current state of neuropsychological research is far from excluding that.
For an updated version of the argument on impossibility one can turn to Mark Bradley, here:https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=c29d02aad38c119d10665cbc2bc368225d56fdcc a 2011 publication in the JOURNAL OF CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES.
With Bradley and Benecke's help I believe I have overcome the second of the two arguments against mind-body dualism (in an interactionist form). Once one acknowledges a backward movement of causation in terms of knowing the distinctness of blue, one is hard put to it to put a fence around it. One would have to have a reason for a fence, "there is some of X but not more of X than is necessary to avoid paradox" does not involve reasoning.
We may in fact, then, be a sometimes-efficacious ghost lurking in a "machine." This does not require supernaturalism: the notion of a naturalistic emergence of one from the other is the critical piece here.
Bottom line? It seems prohibitively likely that, at least sometimes, the phrase "I bought the lottery ticket because I hoped for winnings" means what it says, and accurately describes the world.
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