From Edward Feser's Philosophy of Mind: A Short Introducion, presenting an argument for dualism he attributes to W. D. Hart, based on the conceivability of disembodied existence.
Imagine waking up one day and staggering groggily to the bathroom sink to splash some water on your face. As you gaze into the mirror, you notice, to your great horror, that where normally there would be two eyes staring back at you., you see instead two dark and vacant eye sockets—with the eyeballs completely missing! Frantic, you reach into the sockets to verify that they are empty and, sure enough, feel nothing but the stumps of the optic nerves. This would, of course, be impossible in real life. But you can certainly conceive of it happening, without contradiction—you can vividly imagine having an unsettling experience of this sort, in a way that you cannot conceive of a circular square or 2 = 2 adding up to 5. If you can conceive of this, you can also conceive that, being intrigued by your ability to see without eyeballs, and wondering if any other vision-related parts of your body are missing, you get out a hacksaw and remove the top of your skull, only to reveal an empty cavity where your brain should be. And if that’s conceivable, you can take the next step and imagine that instead of seeing empty eye sockets staring back at you, what you see is your own headless body—in which case you’d be conceiving of seeing without a head. Finally, following this exercise to its final, logical conclusion, you can imagine that what you see in the mirror is not even a headless body, but nothing more than the wall behind you and no body at all. Wondering whether someone has installed a trick mirror or if you’ve become a vampire, you look down at your torso, arms, and legs, but find that you can’t see them, only the floor under you, as you realize that your attempt to touch them has failed—there’s nothing there to touch! You would now be conceive of seeing without a body. But seeing is a mental process, as is the frenzied thinking you’d now be engaging in; which means that what you’ve conceived of is your mind existing apart from a body or brain. So again, it’s conceivable that the mind exists apart from the brain—in which case they are not identical.
Edward Feser, Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction, pp. 25-26.
4 comments:
Hasn't it always been conceivable that "the mind exists apart from the brain"? Is this his only point? Just checking. Wanted to see if I missed something.
If the mind is identical to the brain, then the mind is necessarily identical to the brain. If the conceivability of the mind's existence apart from the brain entails the metaphysical possibility that the mind and brain are not identical, then the mind and brain are non-identical, since identity claims are necessarily true, and their denials necessarily false.
If only conceivability were a reliable guide to possibility...
I can conceive of life floating about the physicochemical organization of my dead pet frog. Therefore, life is not physicochemical organization, but something superadded to matter.
Good stuff! I'm convinced.
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