In defense of mind-body dualism

Yesterday, I offered my summary of two powerful-seeming arguments against mind-body dualism in any form. 

My plan was today, to give my reasons for concluding after a lot of deliberation on the point, that neither argument is as powerful as it appears -- and as it HAS appeared, historically, to many powerful minds from whom I have learned a great deal. 

But on further deliberation, that has come to seem too ambitious for a single blog post.  I will wrote today about just the first of them ... here we go. 

About continuity.  TL:DR version:  The emergence of an intangible mind out of evolving life is not a violation of a principle of continuity to whatever degree we actually need and (upon reflection) want such a principle. It is no more of a violation than a variety of other emergences of which we make no such commotion. 

One intriguing and I think under-noticed fact is that the argument from continuity against the development of an intangible mind looks a lot like a variant of the argument against Darwinism on the basis of the "irreducible complexity" of many of life's subsystems. My argument in what follows turns, then, on an analogy between COMPLEXITY in the one context and INTANGIBILITY in the other. 

The similarity has likely been overlooked simply because the continuity argument and the IR argument are used in very different, even opposed, contexts. The term "irreducible complexity" was formulated by Michael Behe by way of questioning the Orthodox model of biological evolution. There are systems (such as the mammalian eye -- an example that goes back to Darwin himself) that seem on their face so complicated -- necessarily complicated in order to add even minimally survival value -- that they could not possibly have evolved gradually, through small random mutations.  They wouldn't have had even minimal survival value in the early stages of such a development. 

One one-thousandths of an eye, however we might conceive of that, will still leave me utterly sightless, and so will bestow no survival value. So it won't become the basis on which a subsequent generation can find itself with two one-thousandths of an eye, etc. Thus we either have a whole eye or we don't.

Behe and those who follow him in this seem to want to introduce God as designer of the eye, although they also do not want to say it that bluntly. 

But physicalists, like the Churchlands, those who would like to reduce all of psychology to biology all of biology to chemistry, etc., can and do use much the same argument for their very different reason. If we think of mind as something separate from the body, even from the intricacies of the nervous system, then it is something that must have entered at some point. At THAT calls either for explanation or, more plausibly, in their view, for rejection. 

I don't know that either side of the Behe/Churchland alliance has ever noticed that they are, logically, in alliance on this point. Perhaps they don't because complexity and intangibility sound like two very different issues. Are they, though?  The mind is a complex fact when viewed with an eye (so to speak) to the tangible realities, precisely because it is only from great complexities that an intangible reality could have emerged. 

But let us stick with the eye for a moment. Yes, there is a passage in which Darwin seems to acknowledge that the eye is an important counter-example to the idea of natural selection of random variations which, he presumed, would involve change by small increments.  BUT the context is, as usual, oft forgotten. Drawing says that only in order to introduce a hypothetical list of such minor variations which could be survival enhancing at each step and which would lead to the full human eye.

And yes, we can not learn the particulars of ancient eyes from fossils. Soft tissue does not leave the necessary imprints. But stress upon that simply makes the IC argument an argument from ignorance. 

A lot of scholarship from Darwin's day to our own confirms the notion that the supposedly irreducible complexity of biological systems is in principle reducible. There are intermediary steps that are either helpful in some way short of or just different from that of the completed system, or there are intermediary steps that are simply neutral as to survival -- just there as potential platforms -- the byproducts of earlier evolutionary steps that Gould called spandrels. So the system does not come about as the consequence of a miracle. It is not a break in the continuity of evolution. 

Likewise, I submit, with mind.  I cannot speak with confidence as to the when of its emergence, but I do believe with some confidence that it arose out of a lot of steps, and perhaps the full glory of it has arisen independently along different evolutionary lines (octopi, Marine mammals, hominids).  Further, there is no reason to see in this any violation of a principle of continuity to whatever degree that we have need of one. 

So the irreducible complexity and its analog, the argument from continuity in mind-body debates, both fall. My own interest is in the mind-body debates. Where does this leave me with the argument from neurology? I trust you can get a glimpse of what I will say when I continue.  Which I will do when I feel the inner prompting.