Edward Feser, Philosophy of Mind, a Beginner’s Guide (One World, 2006) p. 113.
Property dualism would thus appear to lead to absurdity as long as it concedes to materialism the reducibility of the propositional attitudes. If it instead takes the attitudes to be, like qualia, irreducible to physical states of the brain, this absurdity can be avoided: for in that case, your beliefs and judgments are as non-physical as your qualia are, and there is thus no barrier (at the least of the usual mental-to-physical epiphenomenalist sort) to your qualia being the causes of your beliefs about them. But should it take this route, there seems to be much less motivation for adopting property dualism rather than full-blown Cartesian substance dualism: it was precisely the concession of the materiality of propositional attitudes that seemed to allow the property dualist to make headway on the interaction problem, an advantage the is lost if the concession is revoked; and while taking at least beliefs, desires, and the like to be purely material undermines the plausibility of the existence of a distinct, non-physical mental substance, such plausibility would seem to be restored if all mental properties, beliefs and desires, as much as qualia, are non-physical. Moreover, property dualism raises a puzzle of its own, namely that of explaining exactly how non-physical properties an inhere in a physical substance.
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and while taking at least beliefs, desires, and the like to be purely material undermines the plausibility of the existence of a distinct, non-physical mental substance, such plausibility would seem to be restored if all mental properties, beliefs and desires, as much as qualia, are non-physical. Moreover, property dualism raises a puzzle of its own, namely that of explaining exactly how non-physical properties an inhere in a physical substance.
Let's say some mental properties are irreducibly non-physical. Why does their existence require them to inhere in a non-physical substance? The property of appearing red may well inhere in red paint, but red paint is not a non-physical substance.
Because to my mind physicalness requires being governed by physical laws. Can you still call something an electron if it starts not acting like an electron once it becomes part of a brain?
But if you define "physical" in some other way, how do you define it?
Because to my mind physicalness requires being governed by physical laws. Can you still call something an electron if it starts not acting like an electron once it becomes part of a brain?
But if you define "physical" in some other way, how do you define it?
An interactionist property dualist claims that electrons in the actual world behave like electrons would behave in a world in which interactionist property dualism is true. That would be a world in which physical determinism is false, and no individual localized physical causes of subatomic events can be ascertained. That possible world indeed seems to me to be the actual world. Also bear in mind that Hans Halverson recently demonstrated that localized particles are not real, and hence that 'particle talk' has merely pragmatic utility, and is false if construed in an ontologically fundamental way.
The most obvious problem in physics for the last seventy-plus years is that of interpreting the wavefunction 'collapse'. Does it really 'collapse', and if it does in some sense, what causes it to do so? In thinking about that issue in relation to human minds, it's always worth remembering something which is quite easy to forget, which is that the actual wavefunctions of all the particles of all actual human brains are actually not all, er, known.
So, it may be the case, for all we know, that there is a significant number of occasions in which the probability of the particle trajectories occurring which are required for a particular brain (mine, let's say) to be in state A ('choosing vanilla ice-cream soon'), and the probability of the particle trajectories occurring which are required for it to be in state B ('choosing mint chocolate chip ice-cream soon') are each significanty less than, but jointly equal to 1. If I then choose vanilla ice cream, no known law of physics will have been 'violated', even though we cannot identify a specific physical cause of the wavefunction collapsing. So why not assume what appears obvious to consciousness----–—that on a significant number of occasions, what collapses the wavefunction is an irreducibly mental state, such as 'freely deciding to eat vanilla ice cream soon'?
It might be different if we actually knew that the probability of state A occurring was 1 and the probability of state B occurring was 0, such as might be the case if I hated mint chocolate chip inordinately and loved vanilla inordinately. But let's say I like both and don't have any strong preference for one over the other, and the probabilities for A to B are roughly equal. Consciously I experience this as feeling quite open to choosing one or the other. No prior mental state seems to be determining my choice, and no prior material state seems to be determining my choice. Indeed, ex hypothesi, nothing physical is determining my choice, given a relevant wavefunction like the one governing the probabilities of A and B respectively. It is reasonable to conclude that nothing is determining my choice, except my will at that moment.
If I choose vanilla, it would be silly to say 'chance' chose vanilla. No, chance didn't choose vanilla. I did. And I did so without violating the wavefunction that describes all the physical facts about my bodily state at the relevant times. That wavefunction gives, ex hypothesi, roughly equal probabilities at t for brain-states A and B to be observed when 'measured' at t+1. To all appearances I caused the wavefunction to collapse by choosing vanilla. Asking for a specification of an underlying mechanism that 'produced' or ’caused' this choice in fact is to ask for something that's not physically consistent with the physical facts specified by the wavefunction itself, for that does not describe any ’cause' if that term is taken to mean a determining, physical necessitation of what the actually 'measured outcome' will be.
One common source of confusion in this matter is in thinking that all causes determine their effects, a confusion the well-known English philosopher (and my co-religionist) G. E. M. Anscombe identified in a classic paper of 35 years ago entitled, "Causality and Determination". So I think it is fine to think of electrons and other particles as being governed by laws. But in actual fact, physics itself tells us that there is no physical law governing any individual particle that determines its individual behavior. Quantum theory's assignment of probabilities is in effect telling us what would be observed if the only thing affecting the observed outcome is the physical situation alone, leaving out any other non-physical causal influences. To test this, one would have to isolate a human person and repeat the exact same physical situation, which is factually and probably metaphysically impossible.
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