One of the knee-jerk moves made in the philosophy of mind is to confront the proponent of interactionist substance-dualism with the supposedly unanswerable rhetorical question: How is interaction possible between subtances of radically different ontological categories?
Here is how John Searle deploys the canard in a recent book:
. . . dualism in any form makes the status and existence of consciousness utterly mysterious. How, for example, are we to think of any sort of causal interaction between consciousness and the physical world? Having postulated a separate mental realm, the dualist cannot explain how it relates to the material world we all live in. (Mind, Language and Society, p. 47.)
But if "dualism in any form" makes consciousness mysterious, then Searle's own form of dualism does so! Searlean dualism is a modes-of-existence dualism. There are entities that have a subjective mode of existence and those that have an objective mode of existence. Searle's preferred way of putting it is that entities of the former sort have a "first person ontology" while those of the second enjoy a "third person ontology." The being of a pain, for example, is just its being-felt: no (real) distinction between the appearance and the reality of a felt pain can be made. But such a distinction must be made with respect to an objective phenomenon like a flash of lightning.
Searle would appear to be hoist by his own petard.
Note also that Searle's implied claim that there cannot be any causal interaction between irreducibly mental and irreducibly physical substances rests on assumptions about the nature of causation that he does not spell out. But there are theories of causation on which there is no difficulty in principle about mental-physical interaction. Why should a regularity theorist, or a counterfactual theorist, see a difficulty here? I discussed this briefly in a previous post.
Note finally the tendentious and question-begging phrase, "the material world we all live in." If substance-dualism is true, then what we are essentially are mental substances -- in which case we are not so much living in the material world as visiting it.
"Nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there."
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4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.