Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 I hope I have made clear to regular readers of this humble mind that I am not a believer in panpsychism.  My own view of the mind-body relation, on the other hand, is a form of emergentism, which ends up in a place quite similar to old-fashioned mind-body dualism and interactionism.  But I did find of interest a recent paper's breakdown of the three broad arguments for panpsychism: the continuity argument, the Hegelian argument, and the Agnostic argument.  In brief that means: 1) Continuity.  All matter must have some element of mind in it because otherwise there would be a radical and incomprehensible discontinuity in the history of matter in the world. 2) Hegelian. Panpsychism offers a sort of dialectical synthesis between materialism and dualism with the upside of each and the downside of neither. 3) Agnostic. No idea of the intrinsically non-experiential [something neither mental nor proto-mental] could even be intelligible to us. The overall point of the p...

  Someone asked at Quora for the best arguments against mind-body dualism. The following is a (slight) re-working of my response there.  The Quorant was not specific about whether he meant "substance dualism" or "property dualism". I will note for the record then, that property dualism was created in part as an answer to some of the standard objections of substance dualism.  I won't define those terms further now, though, because to my own mind there are two powerful arguments that must be rebutted by advocates of EITHER of the dualisms.  These are what I will discuss right now: the argument from evolutionary continuity and that from neurophysiology. First, continuity. If one accepts  the broad biological model that the human species has its origin in random variation from other primates, and the primate genus has its origin in random variations from non-primate mammals, etc. AND if one believes humans are distinctive in having a mind in principle distinct from ...