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

  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    The way dualists explain it is what if there was a magical copy of you that also can't think. It would go about its existence behaving like you through contrivance, but since it can't think, it's actually just a biological coincidence of random molecules appearing to be you and acting like you.

    This is supposed to disprove the materialist conception of consciousness, because the claim is that if materialism were true, there would be no distinction between you and a coincidental copy that's exactly like you except for your mental states

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I feel like a thought experiment that begins from the premise that physical systems don't actually work or do anything so through random chance a pile of dead wood with no actual biomechanical systems could produce an ongoing perfect mimicry of a person is basically just saying "oh yeah, but what if there was literal magic and physics didn't actually do anything, what about that huh? What if we're just squishy meat ghosts instead, and logs can walk and talk if imagine at them hard enough?"

      One can arrive at any conclusion one desires by just presupposing a world where a hand picked set of rules are true (that's what neoclassical economists do, for example) but that doesn't make those imagined rules true or in any way support their conclusion. Like yes, if magic were real and you could separate out the core of someone's being and allow it to exist and operate independent of their flesh, then you would be existing in a world where you could do that, but seeing as you cannot the only reasonable conclusion is that the condition of "literal magic" is not present.

      • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        You're saying it perfectly. I don't know why I'm offering even a little respect to these premises they came up with. I was told they were the best things dualists have, and they are just magical fantasy scenarios. And yet philosophers like David Chalmers and John Searle are considered geniuses in their field. How do these people have careers if their entire philosophy boils down to belief in literal otherworldly magic?

    • ChestRockwell [comrade/them, any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I mean the only relevant critique is the Hard Problem of Consciousness , which doesn't really contradict materialism as such, just its crudest forms (i.e. feelings of love are just chemicals in the brain durrr hurrrr)

      From the SEP

      The How question thus subdivides into a diverse family of more specific questions depending upon the specific sort or feature of consciousness one aims to explain, the specific restrictions one places on the range of the explanans and the criterion one uses to define explanatory success. Some of the resulting variants seem easier to answer than others. Progress may seem likely on some of the so called “easy problems” of consciousness, such as explaining the dynamics of access consciousness in terms of the functional or computational organization of the brain (Baars 1988). Others may seem less tractable, especially the so-called “hard problem” (Chalmers 1995) which is more or less that of giving an intelligible account that lets us see in an intuitively satisfying way how phenomenal or “what it's like” consciousness might arise from physical or neural processes in the brain.

      • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        This seems more sensible if I'm reading it right. It's saying that "hard science" types of things about consciousness are simple to explain because they have a source, like neurons and parts of the brain. But more difficult would be the more ephemeral parts of what consciousness is like from the point of view of a conscious person? Or am I confused

        • ChestRockwell [comrade/them, any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          That's exactly how I understand it. We can get the "scientific" explanation of how visual stimuli arrive at the brain. But the question of how visual stimuli are perceived and felt - what it means to see a flower in a phenomenal sense rather than a scientific sense - is far harder to "prove" or ground in a material conception of consciousness. Basically, how does my feeling of hunger come about from the stimuli that are causing hunger (which are material and scientific)

            • ChestRockwell [comrade/them, any]
              ·
              2 years ago

              :stalin-feels-good:

              I'll admit my reading might be wrong btw. The way I see it tho is that it's really the question of how the scientific neural stimuli we understand as key to our experience of the world become "consciousness" as we understand it - and there's no clear answer to it.

              Granted I'm very influenced by people like Andy Clark and the idea of "extended mind" (i.e. our minds aren't merely the meat in our brains), so I'm a bit ideosyncratic

    • AlkaliMarxist
      ·
      2 years ago

      That's just circular logic though, no?

      If it was possible for some thing to behave exactly as you do but without thinking then mind-body dualism would have to be true, because something exists with a human body but no mind. If mind-body dualism is bunk, that thing could not exist, it could not appear to think without thinking.

      Mind-body dualism seems like a pretty classic case of motivated reasoning in general, "I want to believe that my mind is not an artifact of my physical body, so I will look for reasons that this might be true".

      • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Yeah it's entirely circular, which is why I don't understand how dualists use it. Their most famous argument is the one about the zombies. It's just "imagine a person without the unexplainable non-physical mind I say they have" and then claiming this is proof a non-physical mind exists, because it's a claim that people with minds and those without minds would be different

        • AlkaliMarxist
          ·
          2 years ago

          It reminds me of Pascal's wager, an argument that is obviously heavily flawed unless you already accept, uncritically, the assertion being argued. That's why I believe motivated reasoning is at work here, these arguments won't convince the critical, but they do allow believers to convince themselves that their otherwise baseless beliefs are actually well reasoned.

          This isn't to say I think dualism is wrong, but more to say that it is non-falsifiable and not well supported by existing evidence.

        • JuneFall [none/use name]
          ·
          2 years ago

          The point why I can understand the want for it is that I have an experience of experiencing/thinking/being/feeling whatever (don't google qualia). This feels separate from the physical world that I do see or feel or hear or imagine. That is all.

          However I do think that there is a material reality that is responsible for everything. In that regard I follow

          Chalmers argues for an "explanatory gap" from the objective to the subjective

          But for his other things, not.