What would count as such a case might be a matter of controversy, but there must be one. Some philosophers might regard it as obvious that sameness of sperm is essential to the identity of a human body and to personal identity. In that case imagine a counterpart sperm in which some of the molecules in the sperm are different; would that be the same sperm? If one pursues the matter far enough there will be indeterminacy which will infect that of the resulting body.
There must therefore be some difference such that neither natural language nor intuition tells us whether the difference alters the identity of the human body; a point, that is, where the question of whether we have the same body is not a matter of fact. How one is to describe these cases is, in some respects, a matter of controversy. Some philosophers think one can talk of vague identity or partial identity.
Others think that such expressions are nonsensical. There is no space to discuss this issue here. It is enough to assume, however, that questions of how one is allowed to use the concept of identity effect only the care with which one should characterize these cases, not any substantive matter of fact.
If there were, then there would have to be a haecceitas or thisness belonging to and individuating each complex physical object, and this I am assuming to be implausible if not unintelligible.
More about the conditions under which haecceitas can make sense will be found below. One might plausibly claim that no similar overlap of constitution can be applied to the counterfactual identity of minds. Why is this so? Can we say, as we would for an object with no consciousness, that the story something the same, something different is the whole story: that overlap of constitution is all there is to it?
For the Jones body as such, this approach would do as well as for any other physical object. The creature who would have existed would have had a kind of overlap of psychic constitution with me. The third answer parallels the response we would give in the case of bodies.
But as an account of the subjective situation, it is arguable that this makes no sense. Clearly, the notion of overlap of numerically identical psychic parts cannot be applied in the way that overlap of actual bodily part constitution quite unproblematically can. This might make one try the second answer.
It is difficult to see why it does not. Suppose Jones found out that he had originally been one of twins, in the sense that the zygote from which he developed had divided, but that the other half had died soon afterwards. He can entertain the thought that if it had been his half that had died, he would never have existed as a conscious being, though someone would whose life, both inner and outer, might have been very similar to his. He might feel rather guiltily grateful that it was the other half that died.
It would be strange to think that Jones is wrong to think that there is a matter of fact about this. If the reasoning above is correct, one is left with only the first option. If so, there has to be an absolute matter of fact from the subjective point of view. But the physical examples we have considered show that when something is essentially complex, this cannot be the case.
When there is constitution, degree and overlap of constitution are inevitably possible. So the mind must be simple, and this is possible only if it is something like a Cartesian substance. His worries concerned the cramping effect that matter would have on the range of objects that intellect could accommodate. Parallel modern concerns centre on the restriction that matter would impose on the range of rational processes that we could exhibit.
Some of these concerns are of a technical kind. But there are other less technical and easier to appreciate issues. I will mention four ways in which physicalist theories of thought seem vulnerable to attack by the dualist.
There has been a rise or revival of a belief in what is now called cognitive phenomenology , that is, the belief that thoughts, of whatever kind — beliefs, desires, and the whole range of propositional attitude state — are conscious in a more than behavioural functional sense. The issue is whether, under this constraint, one can give an account for meaningful communication and understanding at all. This is clearly expounded in Dennett ; see also the entry on the frame problem.
Numbers, it would seem, are abstract objects, yet our intellects operate with them all the time. How does a physical brain interact with an abstract entity? A similar problem could be raised for concepts in general; they are abstract, general entities, not physical particulars, yet they are the meat and drink of thinking.
For a dualist about intellect there does not appear to be the same problem. The immaterial intellect is precisely the sort of thing that can grasp abstract objects, such as numbers and universals — in the Aristotelian context, the immaterial intellect is the home of forms.
There is still the issue of how this intellectual capacity of the immaterial mind relates to sensory consciousness. According to Aristotle, perception is a wholly embodied process, but for modern dualists, sensory consciousness is not material. In order to unify the perceptual and intellectual functions of the mind, traditional empiricists tended to be imagists, in their theory of thought, in order to assimilate the intellectual to the sensory, but this assimilation is rejected by those who believe in a distinct cognitive phenomenology, as mentioned in a above.
The issue of how these two functions of mind are related in dualism is, it seems to me, insufficiently investigated. Armstrong in his is a striking exception to this, accepting an in re theory of universals.
I will not discuss a further, as it is discussed in section 5 of the entry on phenomenal intentionality , An immaterialist response to d can be found in Robinson Both b and c seem to draw out the claim that a material system lacks understanding. Searle imagines himself in a room with a letter box through which strings of symbols are posted in, and, following a book of rules, he puts out symbols which the rules dictate, given the strings he is receiving.
In fact, Searle says, he has been conducting a conversation in Chinese, because the symbols are Chinese script, and the rules those on which a Chinese computer might work, but he has not understood a word. Therefore neither does a computer understand, so we, understanding creatures, are not computers. A blow was struck against the computational theory of thought when, in , Fodor produced his The Mind Does Not Work That Way , in which he made clear his belief that the kind of computationalism that he had been describing and developing ever since the s only fits sub-personal informational processing, not conscious, problem solving thought.
One physicalist response to these challenges is to say that they apply only to the classical computing model, and are avoided by connectionist theories. Classical computing works on rules of inference like those of standard logic, but connectionism is rather a form of associationism, which is supposedly closer to the way in which the brain works. See the entry on Connectionism. But Gary Marcus — see Other Internet Resources and others have pointed out the ways in which these impressive machines are quite different from human thought.
We can learn things with very few trials because we latch on to abstract relationships, whereas the machine requires many — perhaps thousands or millions — of examples to try to catch extensionally what we get by the abstract or intensional relation.
The dualist might sum up the situation on thought in the following way. The case against physicalist theories of sensation is that it is unbelievable that what it feels like to be struck hard on the nose is itself either just a case of being disposed or caused to engage in certain behaviours, or that what it feels like is not fundamental to the way you do react.
Similarly, the dualist about thought will say, when you are, for example, engaged in a philosophical discussion, and you make a response to your interlocutor, it is obvious that you are intending to respond to what you thought he or she meant and are concentrating on what what you intend to say means. It seems as bizarre to say that this is a bye-product of processes to which meaning is irrelevant, as it is to claim the same about sensory consciousness. You are, in other words, as fundamentally a semantically driven engine, as you are a sensorily consciously driven one.
Perhaps, in the case of a sophisticated conversation, the fundamentality of meaning, and of conscious reflection, as a driver is even more obvious than in the case of sensation. A dualist could, it seems, argue that Plato was right in claiming that intellect necessarily has an affinity with the realm of abstract entities, and Aristotle was right to think that no material or mechanical system could capture the flexibility built into genuine understanding.
We have already discussed the problem of interaction. In this section we shall consider two other facets of dualism that worry critics. First, there is what one might term the queerness of the mental if conceived of as non-physical. Second there is the difficulty of giving an account of the unity of the mind. We shall consider this latter as it faces both the bundle theorist and the substance dualist.
Mental states are characterised by two main properties, subjectivity, otherwise known as privileged access, and intentionality. Physical objects and their properties are sometimes observable and sometimes not, but any physical object is equally accessible, in principle, to anyone. From the right location, we could all see the tree in the quad, and, though none of us can observe an electron directly, everyone is equally capable of detecting it in the same ways using instruments.
But the possessor of mental states has a privileged access to them that no-one else can share. This suggests to some philosophers that minds are not ordinary occupants of physical space. Physical objects are spatio-temporal, and bear spatio-temporal and causal relations to each other.
Mental states seem to have causal powers, but they also possess the mysterious property of intentionality — being about other things — including things like Zeus and the square root of minus one, which do not exist. The nature of the mental is both queer and elusive. Ghosts are mysterious and unintelligible: machines are composed of identifiable parts and work on intelligible principles.
But this contrast holds only if we stick to a Newtonian and common-sense view of the material. Think instead of energy and force-fields in a space-time that possesses none of the properties that our senses seem to reveal: on this conception, we seem to be able to attribute to matter nothing beyond an abstruse mathematical structure.
Whilst the material world, because of its mathematicalisation, forms a tighter abstract system than mind, the sensible properties that figure as the objects of mental states constitute the only intelligible content for any concrete picture of the world that we can devise. Perhaps the world within the experiencing mind is, once one considers it properly, no more — or even less — queer than the world outside it.
Whether one believes that the mind is a substance or just a bundle of properties, the same challenge arises, which is to explain the nature of the unity of the immaterial mind. For the Cartesian, that means explaining how he understands the notion of immaterial substance. For the Humean, the issue is to explain the nature of the relationship between the different elements in the bundle that binds them into one thing.
Neither tradition has been notably successful in this latter task: indeed, Hume, in the appendix to the Treatise , declared himself wholly mystified by the problem, rejecting his own initial solution though quite why is not clear from the text. If the mind is only a bundle of properties, without a mental substance to unite them, then an account is needed of what constitutes its unity.
The only route appears to be to postulate a primitive relation of co-consciousness in which the various elements stand to each other. There are two strategies which can be used to attack the bundle theory.
One is to claim that our intuitions favour belief in a subject and that the arguments presented in favour of the bundle alternative are unsuccessful, so the intuition stands. The other is to try to refute the theory itself. Foster , —9 takes the former path.
This is not effective against someone who thinks that metaphysical economy gives a prima facie priority to bundle theories, on account of their avoiding mysterious substances. The core objection to bundle theories see, for example, Armstrong , 21—3 is that, because it takes individual mental contents as its elements, such contents should be able to exist alone, as could the individual bricks from a house.
Hume accepted this consequence, but most philosophers regard it as absurd. There could not be a mind that consisted of a lone pain or red after-image, especially not of one that had detached itself from the mind to which it had previously belonged. Therefore it makes more sense to think of mental contents as modes of a subject.
Bundle theorists tend to take phenomenal contents as the primary elements in their bundle. Seeing the problem in this way has obvious Humean roots. This atomistic conception of the problem becomes less natural if one tries to accommodate other kinds of mental activity and contents.
How are acts of conceptualising, attending to or willing with respect to, such perceptual contents to be conceived? These kinds of mental acts seem to be less naturally treated as atomic elements in a bundle, bound by a passive unity of apperception. William James , vol. James attributes to these Thoughts acts of judging, attending, willing etc, and this may seem incoherent in the absence of a genuine subject.
But there is also a tendency to treat many if not all aspects of agency as mere awareness of bodily actions or tendencies, which moves one back towards a more normal Humean position. But see Sprigge , 84—97, for an excellent, sympathetic discussion.
The problem is to explain what kind of a thing an immaterial substance is, such that its presence explains the unity of the mind. The answers given can be divided into three kinds. There are two problems with this approach. Second, and connectedly, it is not clear in what sense such stuff is immaterial, except in the sense that it cannot be integrated into the normal scientific account of the physical world.
Why is it not just an aberrant kind of physical stuff? Account a allowed the immaterial substance to have a nature over and above the kinds of state we would regard as mental. The consciousness account does not. The most obvious objection to this theory is that it does not allow the subject to exist when unconscious. This forces one to take one of four possible theories. He has half escaped because he does not attribute non-mental properties to the self, but he is still captured by trying to explain what it is made of.
The reason is that, even when we have acknowledged that basic subjects are wholly non-physical, we still tend to approach the issue of their essential natures in the shadow of the physical paradigm. One can interpret Berkeley as implying that there is more to the self than introspection can capture, or we can interpret him as saying that notions, though presenting stranger entities than ideas, capture them just as totally.
Varieties of Dualism: Ontology 2. Varieties of Dualism: Interaction 3. Arguments for Dualism 4. Problems for Dualism 5. The ontological question: what are mental states and what are physical states? Is one class a subclass of the other, so that all mental states are physical, or vice versa? Or are mental states and physical states entirely distinct?
The causal question: do physical states influence mental states? Do mental states influence physical states? If so, how? The problem of consciousness: what is consciousness? How is it related to the brain and the body? The problem of intentionality: what is intentionality? The problem of the self: what is the self? Other aspects of the mind-body problem arise for aspects of the physical. For example: The problem of embodiment: what is it for the mind to be housed in a body?
What is it for a body to belong to a particular subject? Varieties of Dualism: Ontology There are various ways of dividing up kinds of dualism.
Varieties of Dualism: Interaction If mind and body are different realms, in the way required by either property or substance dualism, then there arises the question of how they are related. For more detailed treatment and further reading on this topic, see the entry epiphenomenalism.
I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and can never observe any thing but the perception. Somewhat surprisingly, it is not very clear just what his worry was, but it is expressed as follows: In short there are two principles, which I cannot render consistent; nor is it in my power to renounce either of them, viz.
A natural response to Hume would be to say that, even if we cannot detect ourselves apart from our perceptions our conscious experiences we can at least detect ourselves in them … Surely I am aware of [my experience], so to speak, from the inside — not as something presented, but as something which I have or as the experiential state which I am in … and this is equivalent to saying that I detect it by being aware of myself being visually aware. If the bundle theory were true, then it should be possible to identify mental events independently of, or prior to, identifying the person or mind to which they belong.
It is not possible to identify mental events in this way. Therefore, The bundle theory is false. Lowe defends this argument and argues for 2 as follows. What is wrong with the [bundle] theory is that … it presupposes, untenably,that an account of the identity conditions of psychological modes can be provided which need not rely on reference to persons. But it emerges that the identity of any psychological mode turns on the identity of the person that possesses it. What this implies is that psychological modes are essentially modes of persons, and correspondingly that persons can be conceived of as substances.
He says: The mind is a kind of theatre where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. We can scale counterfactual suggestions as follows: This table might have been made of ice. This table might have been made of a different sort of wood. Any present state of consciousness that I can imagine either is or is not mine.
There is no question of degree here. Perhaps, in the case of a sophisticated conversation, the fundamentality of meaning, and of conscious reflection, as a driver is even more obvious than in the case of sensation A dualist could, it seems, argue that Plato was right in claiming that intellect necessarily has an affinity with the realm of abstract entities, and Aristotle was right to think that no material or mechanical system could capture the flexibility built into genuine understanding.
Problems for Dualism We have already discussed the problem of interaction. Bibliography Almog, J. Hamlyn trans. Armstrong, D. Dualism appeals to the common-sense intuition of the vast majority of non-philosophically-trained people, and the mental and the physical do seem to most people to have quite different , and perhaps irreconcilable, properties.
Mental events have a certain subjective quality to them known as qualia or "the ways things seem to us" , whereas physical events do not. Critics of dualism have often asked how something totally immaterial can affect something totally material the problem of causal interaction. With the knowledge gained from modern science , few, if any, neuroscientists would consider taking a dualist position, and Monistic beliefs like Physicalism are now much more common within the field of philosophy.
Dualism can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle , and also to the early Sankhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy. Plato first formulated his famous Theory of Forms , distinct and immaterial substances of which the objects and other phenomena that we perceive in the world are nothing more than mere shadows. If the degree of consciousness decreases to zero, then the mind is effectively annihilated. Even if, as Plato and Descartes agree, the mind is not divisible, it does not follow that it survives or could survive separation from the body.
Additionally, if the mind is neither physical nor identical to its inessential characteristics , p. Kant argues that two substances that are otherwise identical can be differentiated only by their spatial locations.
If minds are not differentiated by their contents and have no spatial positions to distinguish them, there remains no basis for individuating their identities. On numerically individuating non-physical substances, see Armstrong, , pp. For a general discussion of whether the self is a substance, see Shoemaker, , ch.
After taking up his celebrated method of doubt, which commits him to reject as false anything that is in the slightest degree uncertain, Descartes finds that the entirety of the physical world is uncertain. Perhaps, after all, it is nothing but an elaborate phantasm wrought by an all-powerful and infinitely clever, but deceitful, demon. Still, he cannot doubt his own existence, since he must exist to doubt.
Because he thinks, he is. But he cannot be his body, since that identity is doubtful and possibly altogether false. In sum, I cannot doubt the existence of my mind, but I can doubt the existence of my body. From this I knew that I was a substance the whole essence or nature of which was merely to think, and which, in order to exist, needed no place and depended on no material things. The Argument from Indubitability has been maligned in the philosophical literature from the very beginning.
Perhaps it also belongs to my essence to be something extended. Suppose that I cannot doubt whether a given figure is a triangle, but can doubt whether its interior angles add up to two right angles. It does not follow from this that the number of degrees in triangles may be more or less than This is because the doubt concerning the number of degrees in a triangle is a property of me, not of triangles. The dualist can reply in two ways.
First, he or she may argue that, while doubting the body is not a property of bodies, being doubtable is a property of bodies. Second, the dualist may reply that it is always possible to doubt whether the figure before me is a triangle.
Consider, for example, the following parallel argument from Paul Churchland , p. Following Descartes, it ought to be that Ali is not Clay though in fact Clay was a famous heavyweight and identical to Ali.
By way of reply, surely it is possible for an evil demon to deceive me about whether Mohammed Ali was a famous heavyweight boxer. So, the dualist might insist, the case of mind is unique in its immunity from doubt. It is only with reference to our own mental states that we can be said to know incorrigibly. A third argument in the Meditations maintains that the mind and body must really be separate because Descartes can conceive of the one without the other.
Since he can clearly and distinctly understand the body without the mind and vice versa, God could really have created them separately. But if the mind and body can exist independently, they must really be independent, for nothing can constitute a part of the essence of a thing that can be absent without the thing itself ceasing to be.
If the essence of the mind is incorporeal, so must be the mind itself. The general strategy is to identify some property or feature indisputably had by mental phenomena but not attributable in any meaningful way to bodily or nervous phenomena, or vice versa.
For example, some have suggested that mental states are private in the sense that only those who possess them can know them directly.
The latter assumes a correlation, if not an identity, between nervous and mental states or events. My linguistic, bodily and neural activities are public in the sense that anyone suitably placed can observe them. Since mental states are private to their possessors, but brain states are not, mental states cannot be identical to brain states.
Rey pp. Others can know my mental states only by making inferences based on my verbal, non-verbal or neurophysiological activity. You may infer that I believe it will rain from the fact that I am carrying an umbrella, but I do not infer that I believe it will rain from noticing that I am carrying an umbrella. I do not need to infer my mental states because I know them immediately. Since mental states are knowable without inference in the first person case, but are knowable or at least plausibly assigned only by inference in the third person case, we have an authority or incorrigibility with reference to our own mental states that no one else could have.
Since beliefs about the physical world are always subject to revision our inferences or theories could be mistaken , mental states are not physical states. Some mental states exhibit intentionality. Intentional mental states include, but are not limited to, intendings , such as plans to buy milk at the store.
They are states that are about, of, for, or towards things other than themselves. Desires, beliefs, loves, hates, perceptions and memories are common intentional states. For example, I may have a desire for an apple; I may have love for or towards my neighbor; I may have a belief about republicans or academics; or I may have memories of my grandfather. The dualist claims that brain states, however, cannot plausibly be ascribed intentionality. How can a pattern of neural firings be of or about or towards anything other than itself?
As a purely physical event, an influx of sodium ions through the membrane of a neural cell creating a polarity differential between the inside and outside of the cell wall, and hence an electrical discharge, cannot be of Paris, about my grandfather, or for an apple. No physical phenomena exhibits anything similar. Taylor, pp. My belief that it will rain can be either true or false. But, the dualist may urge, as a purely physical event, an electrical or chemical discharge in the brain cannot be true or false.
Indeed, it lacks not only truth, but also linguistic meaning. Since mental states such as beliefs possess truth-value and semantics, it seems incoherent to attribute these properties to bodily states. Thus, mental states are not bodily states. Presumably, then, the minds that have these states are also non-physical.
Churchland, , p. Although each of these arguments for dualism may be criticized individually, they are typically thought to share a common flaw: they assume that because some aspect of mental states, such as privacy, intentionality, truth, or meaning cannot be attributed to physical substances, they must be attributable to non-physical substances.
But if we do not understand how such states and their properties can be generated by the central nervous system, we are no closer to understanding how they might be produced by minds. Nagel, , p. Dualists cannot explain the mechanisms by which souls generate meaning, truth, intentionality or self-awareness.
Thus, dualism creates no explanatory advantage. If the only reasons for supposing that non-physical minds exist are the phenomena of intentionality, privacy and the like, then dualism unnecessarily complicates the metaphysics of personhood. We can ask how much the brain weighs, but not how much the mind weighs.
We can ask how many miles per hour my body is moving, but not how many miles per hour my mind is moving. Minds are just not the sorts of things that can have size, shape, weight, location, motion, and the other attributes that Descartes ascribes to extended reality.
We literally could not understand someone who informed us that the memories of his last holiday are two inches behind the bridge of his nose or that his perception of the color red is straight back from his left eye. Another argument for dualism claims that dualism is required for free will. If dualism is false, then presumably materialism, the thesis that humans are entirely physical beings, is true.
We set aside consideration of idealism —the thesis that only minds and ideas exist. If materialism were true, then every motion of bodies should be determined by the laws of physics, which govern the actions and reactions of everything in the universe. But a robust sense of freedom presupposes that we are free, not merely to do as we please, but that we are free to do otherwise than as we do. This, in turn, requires that the cause of our actions not be fixed by natural laws.
Since, according to the dualist, the mind is non-physical, there is no need to suppose it bound by the physical laws that govern the body.
So, a strong sense of free will is compatible with dualism but incompatible with materialism. Since freedom in just this sense is required for moral appraisal, the dualist can also argue that materialism, but not dualism, is incompatible with ethics. Taylor, , p. Rey, , pp. This, the dualist may claim, creates a strong presumption in favor of their metaphysics. This argument is sometimes countered by arguing that free will is actually compatible with materialism or that even if the dualistic account of the will is correct, it is irrelevant because no volition on the part of a non-physical substance could alter the course of nature anyway.
Man would be free only if there was nothing he could do. Property dualists are not committed to the existence of non-physical substances, but are committed to the irreducibility of mental phenomena to physical phenomena.
An argument for property dualism, derived from Thomas Nagel and Saul Kripke, is as follows: We can assert that warmth is identical to mean kinetic molecular energy, despite appearances, by claiming that warmth is how molecular energy is perceived or manifested in consciousness.
Similarly, color is identical to electromagnetic reflectance efficiencies, inasmuch as color is how electromagnetic wavelengths are processed by human consciousness. In these cases, the appearance can be distinguished from the reality. Heat is molecular motion, though it appears to us as warmth. Other beings, for example, Martians, might well apprehend molecular motion in another fashion.
They would grasp the same objective reality, but by correlating it with different experiences. We move toward a more objective understanding of heat when we understand it as molecular energy rather than as warmth. Consciousness itself, however, cannot be reduced to brain activity along analogous lines because we should then need to say that consciousness is how brain activity is perceived in consciousness, leaving consciousness unreduced.
Put differently, when it comes to consciousness, the appearance is the reality. Therefore, no reduction is possible. Nagel writes:. The idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here. What is the analogue in this case to pursuing a more objective understanding of the same phenomena by abandoning the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favor of another that is more objective but concerns the same thing?
Certainly it appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience by leaving behind the particularity of our human point of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings that could not imagine what it was like to be us.
Nagel ; reprinted in Block et. Consciousness is thus sui generis of its own kind , and successful reductions elsewhere should give us little confidence when it comes to experience.
Mentality is a broad and complex property. Some things—in particular, persons and certain biological organisms—can also instantiate mental properties, like being in pain and liking the taste of avocado. Once we admit the existence of mental properties, we can inquire into the nature of the relationship between mental and physical properties. According to the supervenience thesis , there can be no mental differences without corresponding physical differences.
If, for example, I feel a headache, there must be some change not only in my mental state, but also in my body presumably, in my brain. Definition of dualism. Examples of dualism in a Sentence the dualism of human nature the dualism of good and evil.
Recent Examples on the Web This reference to the Andean concept of dualism had, for him, become a shorthand explanation for exactly this conundrum. Trump, The New Republic , 12 Aug. First Known Use of dualism , in the meaning defined at sense 1.
Learn More About dualism. Time Traveler for dualism The first known use of dualism was in See more words from the same year. Style: MLA. English Language Learners Definition of dualism.
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