It's literally like this:
Materialists/Physicalists: "The thoughts in your head come from your conditions and are ultimately the result of your organs and nervous system. Your consciousness is linked to your brain activity and other parts of your body interacting with the physical real world."
Dualists: "Ok but what if there were an imaginary zombie that has the same organs and molecular structure as a living person but somehow isn't alive on some metaphysical level. If this zombie is conceivable, that means it must be metaphysically true somehow."
Materialists: "That's circular and imaginary, isn't it?"
Other dualists: "Ok but what if I were in a swamp and lightning strikes a tree and magically creates a copy of me but it's not actually me because it doesn't have my soul."
Am I reading this stuff wrong or are these actually the best arguments for mind-body dualism
That's where I stand but it's hard to even talk about that when most discussions on the topic wind up being hog wrestling in the reductionistic mud of "love is just chemicals" :reddit-logo: takes. :sadness:
Disclaimer: Love is technically chemicals if we must go there but the implication that it somehow makes love not real or invalid is pure :reddit-logo: :brainworms:
Love is just chemicals the same way a child is just carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous and hydrogen. The "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting and it's pointlessly reductive.
I've sometimes used a puppy as a metaphor: "yes a puppy is a bunch of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, and hydrogen, and is worth less than a dollar of those chemicals in their most elemental forms. Or it's a puppy."
It gets the point across to all but the most :reddit-logo: brained smuglords who will continue to focus on the former as a sort of emotional stake in being as supposedly unemotional as possible, anyway. :very-intelligent:
requesting matching :donald: and :mickey: emotes for the meme
Yeah that's what I'm drawing a distinction between, people give the word "just" a lot of reductive power. Love might be made of chemicals, but those chemicals gain new characteristics when organized in specific ways, to the degree that a new referent/entity comes into existence. Love or consciousness are neither "just" concepts nor "just" the building blocks that comprise them, nor are they essences that exist in some realm alien from the material world they arise from.