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

  • 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