In my various debates with people about the mind-body problem and other philosophical questions, what am I trying to achieve? Well, I am NOT trying to convert them to my views, which are held tentatively in any case. Thus in the case of Malcolm Pollack, an eager and able opponent, I am not trying to get him to abandon his brand of materialism and accept some form of dualism or idealism or anything else.
What I am trying to to do is to get him and others to appreciate the problems in their complexity and difficulty, and to see that some solutions that are quickly dismissed ought not be, and that some solutions that are widely embraced are highly dubious.
Substance dualism, for example, is very often rejected without serious consideration. In some cases, the dismissal is intellectually irresponsible and borders on the slanderous:
Dualism (the view that minds are composed of some nonphysical and utterly mysterious stuff) . . . [has] been relegated to the trash heap of history, along with alchemy and astrology. Unless you are also prepared to declare that the world is flat and the sun is a fiery chariot pulled by winged horses — unless, in other words, your defiance of modern science is quite complete — you won't find any place to stand and fight for these obsolete ideas. (D. Dennett, Kinds of Mind, Basic Books, 1996, p. 24)
If this sort of rubbish came from some two-bit blogger, one could just ignore it. But coming as it does from a prominent philosopher, it deserves censure. Unfortunately, Dennett enjoys wide influence and has misled many on this issue. The passage is rubbish since it contains two factual mistakes. To correct the first: dualism has not been relegated to the trash heap since it is maintained by distinguished philosophers and scientists. Examples here and in the comments thereto. To correct the second mistake: there is nothing in dualism to require any defiance of modern science. Of course, to appreciate this, one must not confuse science with scientism.
So part of what I am doing is showing that positions like substance dualism deserve to be taken seriously. Substance dualism, in other words is reasonably maintained. It cannot therefore be simply dismissed in the manner of Dennett and hundreds of others. ('Hundreds' is not an exaggeration, but you don't want me to prove it.)
To say that a view is reasonable is not to say that it is true. For some versions of materialism are also reasonable. Two positions can be reasonable even if only one of them can be true. A position is reasonable or rationally defensible if one can provide arguments for it that do not commit any formal or informal fallacy and that feature premises that do not conflict with anything we can justifiably claim to know. For example, if there is some well-established scientific fact that is inconsistent with the truth of every form of substance dualism, then I should like to know what that fact is.
Malcolm Pollack comments, "I have not seen any compelling reason to abandon physicalism . . . ." I would say that this comment misses the point since my purpose is not to (rationally) compel the abandonment of physicalism. My goal is more modest: to get Malcolm et al. to appreciate the difficulties involved in materialist positions including such difficulties as explaining phenomenal consciousness, self-consciousness, the diachronic and synchronic unity of consciousness, intentionality, our moral sense, rationality, personal identity over time, and others.
Part of my task is to persuade people to stop being dogmatic about these questions. Perhaps, at the end of the day, the mind just is the brain; but this is far from obvious, and there are good reasons to think that the mind is not identical to the brain. Notice I said good reasons, not compelling reasons. One will be hard-pressed to find a compelling reason, or compelling argument, for any philosophical view. (Note that materialism is a philosophical theory, not a scientific theory. Science, brain science in particular, is neutral on the mind-body problem. If you disagree with this, show me the fact about the brain that favors one of the philosophical alternatives.)
Part of persuading people to stop being dogmatic is persuading them to see that certain widely bruited objections to dualism are easily answered. Here I hope to make some progress with Malcolm. He has endorsed the old canard, recently repeated by Dennett, that mind-brain interaction would violate conservation principles. That, however, is an objection easily answered. (More on this in a moment.) To the extent that Malcolm thinks that it is a compelling objection, one that is decisive against dualism, he is just wrong.
In sum, there are versions of dualism that are reasonably held, and there are versions of materialism that are reasonably held. (Eliminative materialism is NOT reasonably held.) What I oppose is the view of Dennett in the above quotation, namely that the issue has been decided against (substance) dualism. That is part of my general opposition to scientism.
Very eloquently written. I think it unfortunate that people confuse the issue of what they perhaps ought believe with issues of whether inquiry should be continued.
Unfortunately physicalism has become a dogma which cuts off further inquiry rather than encourages it. Even if one largely adopts physicalism or variants on it, I don't think that ought entail simply discounting all other views.
It is interesting to ask why physicalism is so popular. Part of the explanation is sociological. A tremendous number of extremely bright and well-placed philosophers are physicalists, and their PhD students carry the doctrine forward. Before Plantinga and a few others came along, philospohy of religion languished. But now it is vibrant.
And because Malcolm might be feeling a bit lonely, I should confess that if I had to bet a substantial sum on it, I'd put my money on some form of physical monism. I'd do that despite my belief that our current crop of physical concepts is utterly inadequate to the task of explaining consciousness.
Indeed, well put. Too, the post more generally serves to articulate not only the attraction to be found in the manner in which the physicalism/dualism exchange is framed herein, but the manner in which critical dialectical tensions are thoughtfully retained here more generally. I.e., the disciplined refusal to apply reductionist or facile formulations and likewise, to risk stating that same quality in a more positive manner, to acknowledge the necessarily Socratic, tentative quality which needs to be retained at critical junctures if any thoroughgoing integrity is also to be retained within the scope of rational and better reasoned formulations.
That's my own way of thanking both Malcolm and you, Bill, among other commentators, for retaining that focus and discipline and therein acknowledging those proximate borderlands beyond which well reasoned and more considered exchanges are bound to collapse, or lapse into something less profitable. Don't mean to be too elaborate in restating some things, but the excerpted quote focuses on something which is elemental and too often given inadequate attention, imo. (It's also much on my mind, in a different vein, as am just finishing up Michael Mack's "German Idealism and the Jew" - unrelated to the physicalism/dualism question - which I discovered over at Barrett Pashak's site dedicated to Constantin Brunner, thanks to your own mention here. Mack's essay essentially takes off from an analysis of Kant's and Hegel's idealism, an idealism which, if I might state it as such, collapses the dialectical tension between realism/idealism in favor of the latter.)
I second the positive comments about this post. I especially appreciate your insistence that dogma be questioned. I face this often in my professional life and hope I do a decent job at avoiding dogmatic positions. In science there is a constant tension between the understanding that science can never result in absolute certainty and the necessity to assume some amount of confidence in previous findings in order to make progress. My intellectual energies are consumed these days trying to get two manuscripts and a grant proposal written. As a result, I do not have the much energy to focus on the issues you discuss here but I continue to lurk and to learn. So thank you for bolgging. Thank you also to the commentators, the efforts that you all put in makes this site a very interesting place to visit.
Since reading the post last night, I have been mulling over Malcolm’s use of the word compel and your response. I understand your position and my intention is not to criticize it but isn’t there some tension here? I think the goal of most seekers (as opposed to you in your role here as a presenter/facilitator) is to find arguments that are more than just logically coherent. Compelling arguments for one or another position is what is being sought after. So I think Malcolm objective is sound independent of your more modest goal in stimulating these discussions.
Finally, sorry for an off topic comment but I came across a great example of the value of blogging yesterday. A grad student in Georgia, Reed Cartwight, got himself added as an author on a peer reviewed paper as a result of having presented some ideas on his blog a few months back. Makes a fun story.
Andrew
That was another good and thoughtful post, and there is much I'd like to say in response, but big things are afoot here at the PubSub command center today, and duty calls.
Thanks to all for the expressions of support, and thanks again to Bill - not only for providing a forum for this fascinating discussion, but also for the breadth of his philosophical expertise, and his patient willingness to share it with us all.
I'll have a chance to comment here, and to add some overdue posts at my own site, over the weekend.
Thanks for the kind comments. Stop by whenever you have time, but first things first, like finishing those manuscripts and grant proposals.
Interesting about the grad student. This reinforces my contention that weblogs can be serious venues for scholarly/scientific research, and in the future will increasingly be. For the moment, however, they are perceived by many as frivolous. So young people starting their careers have to be careful.
The ideal would be to find compelling arguments for what one believes, but it seems to me that intellectual honesty demands the recognition that they are extremely hard to come by.
2. Disallowing comments from a particular person, or deleting an offensive, off-topic, or otherwise substandard comment, has nothing to do with censorship. People who think otherwise confuse censorship with lack of sponsorship. I am under an obligation not to interfere with anyone's exercise of legitimate free speech rights. But I am not under any obligation to aid and abet anyone's exercise of free speech rights, legitimate or illegitimate.
3. The Comments area is not an open forum for anyone to say anything about any topic. As the name implies, it is primarily for commenting on the author(s)' posts. But to comment on them, one must have read them. And if I have spent three hours on a post, a reader will not understand it in thirty seconds. Secondarily, the Comments area is to facilitate civil discussion between and among commenters as long as the discussion remains on-topic.
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.