Sober is here urging a standard objection, endlessly repeated by Dennett, Searle, et al., that is supposed to blow the substance dualist out of the water. To be clear, what we are talking about is interactionist substance dualism. One can be a substance dualist in the philosophy of mind without being an interactionist by being either a parallelist or an occasionalist. Note also that one can be dualist in the philosophy of mind without being a substance dualist by being a property dualist. Note finally that one can be a dualist without being a dualist in the philosophy of mind. If, to save bytes, I write 'dualist,' that's elliptical for interactionist substance dualist in the philosophy of mind.
Now what exactly is the objection? It seems to be this. If mind and body belong to mutually irreducible ontological categories, and yet minds and bodies interact causally, then this violates conservation principles. For example, if my intention to paint the bathroom is an irreducibly mental state that causes the states of the brain that control the motions of my limbs, then there is presumably a transfer of energy into what is supposed to be a closed physical system in violation of the principle of conservation of energy.
The trouble with this objection is that it blatantly begs the question against the dualist by presupposing a transfer theory of causation that makes dualist interaction impossible from the outset. Obviously, there could be a violation of conservation principles only if causation is being viewed as the transfer of some physical magnitude.
But it is not at all clear that causation can be identified with such transfer even among physical causes and physical effects. As Curt Ducasse once wrote:
. . . if "energy" is meant to designate something experimentally measurable, then "energy" is defined in terms of causality, not causality in terms of transfer of energy. That is, it is not known that all causation, or, in particular, causation as between psychical and physical events, involves transfer of energy. (Curt Ducasse, "In Defense of Dualism" in Sidney Hook, ed., Dimensions of Mind, Collier 1961, pp. 88-89)
We should also note that there are theories of causation that do not identify the causal link with any transfer of a physical magnitude. An empirically minded philosopher might subscribe to a version of the Regularity Theory, the gist of which is this:
Event-token e (directly) causes event-token f =df (i) e and f are spatiotemporally contiguous; (ii) e occurs earlier than f; (iii) e and f are subsumed under event-types E and F that are related by the de facto generalization that all events of type E are followed by events of type F.
On this theory, what distinguishes a causal event-sequence from a non-causal one is essentially nothing more than the former's instantiation of a regularity. Causation 'in the objects' is just regular succession, just one event after another. Accordingly, nothing gets transferred or transmitted from cause to effect. On this theory of causation, the above objection to mental-physical and physical-mental causation collapses.
Of course, there are powerful objections to the Regularity Theory. But there are other theories on which mental-physical and physical-mental causation are unproblematic. On a counterfactual theory,
e causes f =df if e had not occurred, f would not have occurred.
Here too, there is no need for any transfer of a physical magnitude and hence no threat to conservation principles.
But suppose that, in the physical world, causation is a process that involves physical contact and the transfer of energy, momentum, or whatever from the cause to the effect. If causation is such a physical process, then it will be a spatiotemporally continuous one and one can attempt to trace the mechanism whereby the cause brings about the effect. But mental-physical causation is direct: there is no intervening mechanism. To demand that there must be one in the mental-physical case as in the physical-physical case is just to rule out by fiat mental-physical causation.
Why then should there be any problem with a mental state directly causing a physical state? Once one has a specification of the relevant causal properties and the covering law, one is on the way to understanding mental-physical causation. Admittedly, though, the connection remains mysterious. But the issue is whether Sober et al. have proven its impossibility. My point is that they haven't.
In sum, the above objection unwarrantedly assumes that causation must in every case involve transfer of some physical magnitude. But it may be that causation never involves such transfer, or it may be that it involves such transfer only in the physical-physical cases. To make the above objection stick, therefore, one must do a lot of work; one must articulate a tenable transfer theory of causation. What one cannot do is simply repeat the canard given at the outset.
Now that modern physics denies physical determinism, I don't see how there can be any problem with mental-to-physical interaction. Quantum-level events are indeterminate, so what problem would there be if mental states were able to somehow effect these quantum states? If the mind can control quantum states, then it can control nerve-firing and by that control the brain and by that control the body.
I'm not really putting this forward as my theory, just as an obvious solution to the problem of how the mind could possibly interact with the body without violating any physical laws.
From my perspective, a much more serious challenge to interactionist substance dualism is posed by the likelihood that once all the physical processes are sorted out, there's nothing left in the physical realm to be explained by appeal mental causes. Unless there's some recalcitrant physical phenomenon for which we can't find appropriate physical precursors, there wouldn't seem to be any reason to invoke mental-physical causation.
We know well enough why physical-physical causation takes place where it does. It takes place at the point at which the objects, processes, events (whatever) touch. Action at a distance seems unintelligible, for there could be no possible explanation for why the distant cause should act here instead of there.
In the case of mental-physical causation, we have a related problem. It isn't that we have action at a distance. But still the cause does not touch the effect. Thus it seems unintelligble why the cause should latch on to just this object (or whatever) and no other. Why should my mind control my body and not yours? Why don't our minds switch the bodies they control? It seems that no answer is possible.
I think that's the point exactly. The model Dave Gudeman suggests - that macroscopic behavior might be influenced is some way by manipulating events at the quantum level (i.e. forcing one waveform reduction instead of another, which then would be coupled to the "classical" world in any number of unproblematic ways) is the notion behind the Hameroff-Penrose model of consciousness.
But I agree, as you suggest, that the most pressing challenge to dualism, at least in terms of the problem of the mental "driving" the physical, would be that if we find that a purely physical account (once elucidated in enough detail) turns out to be sufficient to account for all the observed behavior. Certainly one would not be surprised to find that such was the case for, say, an ant (and ants, we have already agreed in previous discussions here, exhibit intentionality, as when one leaves a trail for another). That leaves, then, only the mystery of subjectivity, which might be purely epiphenomenal; the question of how the immaterial mind "causes" the action of the body would simply go away.
I don't follow here. This looks very much to me like a simple statement of the issue in question (or part of the issue), and the suggestion that it seems to you likely that one side is wrong. Surely the dualist could simply respond in reverse: "It seems unlikely that it's logically possible for logical inferential chains to be identified with blind mechanistic causal chains." In fact, it seems to me that one is a statement of a real conceptual problem, and the other a mere lack of confidence in one side of the issue.
I would dispute that ants leave trails for one another in the intentional sense. Dr. Vallicella's concession was in the sense of ants leaving a trail embodying a meaning to be grasped by another. But we have no evidence that ants leave pheromone trails in order for some significance to be grasped by another, nor do we have any evidence that ants who encounter pheromone trails grasp such a meaning. One could just as easily say that if there were a complete explanation of the ants' behavior without regard to any concept of intentionality (and I think that this can be done by modeling ants as biological machines that never make decisions taking into account statistical variations), that wouldn't prove that they do or don't have intentionality, because we can't "get in the ants' heads" as it were.
I think that you are right that the question is subjectivity, but I doubt that it will go away simply by labeling it "epiphenomenal." The fact that we have the subjective experience of causing things to happen is the root of the difficulty. That is the phenomenon that is inexplicable, not the behavior itself. We can explain different ways of obtaining the same action, but we can't explain our subjective sense of causation.
In any event, I have never seen the problem with action at a distance. If we require that the causal relation be pictured in a certain way, then sure, there’s a problem. But why impose a requirement like that?
Bob’s objection rests on what he calls “a fairly robust inductive argument” for the conclusion that there will be no nomological danglers left once science, from physics to physiology, has completed its task. I see the induction, but I don’t think it’s robust at all. Science, as Sir Peter Medawar memorably observed, is the art of the soluble. It has made spectacular progress in the past 400 years in no small part because scientists have focused on issues where it is plausible that progress can be made and left aside thornier issues. When we try to make the induction cover the things that science hasn’t tried to tackle, the situation recalls the old joke about the drunk who drops his keys in the alleyway but looks for them out under the streetlight because it’s easier to see out there. The shift in the reference class scotches the argument; we cannot extrapolate the track record in selected tractable cases to a prediction about a confessedly intractable one.
Where, Bob wants to know, might the danglers be? I don’t think this is a particularly pressing issue for Cartesians -- unless they’re tricked into saying “The pineal gland!” The correct answer is that, given our state of knowledge about the brain, they might be almost anywhere. And foreseeable progress in neuroscience isn’t going to bring it down to the level where, molecule by molecule, moment by moment, we can test for small violations of local conservation principles.
This amounts to the argumentYou are begging the question by beginning with (1).
We need a name for this fallacy. Hey, Bill, what's the latin for "arguing from the assumption that future events will prove me right?"
The electron does not touch the electron on which it acts. But of course it does not act directly upon it. Rather it creates around itself a field, and the field directly interacts with the field of the second electron. The fields touch. Moreover, field are not instantaneously set up. Rather they propagate at the speed of light. Thus properly understood we have no action at a distance.
Of course Bell's theorem might require that we posit action at a distance. But if so, it's not action of the usual sort. Perhaps we can persuade Bill to blog on the matter . . .
My objection had nothing to do with our ability to picture causality in a certain way. Rather it had to do with the impossibility that we explain why a cause acts where it does. Perhaps you'll say that this is just a brute fact, but I think this the wrong place to look for bruteness. Bruteness is inevitable, but we shouldn't posit it just anywhere. Some things seem to require explanation.
I think it is just as difficult to explain (completely within physical-physical interaction) why one moves out of the way when he or she sees an oncoming vehicle. For the car is not touching the person when he or she moves. One might say that, not the car, but the vision of the car causes, physically (that is, deterministically), one to move. But would that make suicide-by-oncoming-car impossible?
Of course I am not being philosophically rigorous here. But I think all Dr. Vallicella was noting derives from the supposition that "the mental" exists, and that it is distinct from "the material." If one admits as much, Dr. Vallicella seems to be saying, it does no good to subsequently question the existence of the mental simply because one cannot comprehend how interaction between it and the material world would occur (and is likely not to comprehend because one has an understanding, not necessarily of causation, but rather, only of physical-physical causation).
I didn't offer an objection to interactionist substance dualism so much as point out what I think is the main challenge confronting that position. You might think the induction in question lacks robustness, but can you point to even a single plausible counterexample? That's the burden of proof that I think substance dualists must shoulder. What unambiguously physical effects do you think might require non-physical causes?
BTW, I think physics ventured beyond the illumination of streetlights long ago. As I've said in the course of other discussions here, gravity is very strange in a world of colliding billiard balls.
Dave -
If I ever asserted (or even accepted)(1), then you might have some grounds for charging me with begging the question. Since I haven't (and don't), your naming ceremony might be a bit premature. I won't even try to reconstruct the fallacious reasoning by which one might conclude that I endorse anything like the silliness you attribute to me.
Good question, Franklin. Why should heating this piece of metal cause it, rather than some other piece of metal, to expand? This answer is clear. But why should Jones' getting mad cause his face to get red as opposed to Smith's face?
Could a dualist get away with saying that a mind controls only that body to which it stands in the embodied by relation? But why do I have this body rather than some other one? Perhaps that is just a brute fact like the fact that heating cases expansion rather than contraction.
You ask:A simple example would be my writing this note. We can chase it back some distance, but at the point where we reach anything essentially involving the mental we're at a point where physics really hasn't done anything of significance and neuroscience hasn't yielded anything that distinguishes between physicalism and interactive dualism.
You may object that this is an instance of the very subject at issue. Very well. Show me one place where physics has dealt with unambiguously mental phenomena.
Franklin,
I see I could have been clearer in the way I put that. Do fields touch? They interpenetrate, but that's not touching in the sense in which I took you to be speaking.
As for venturing beyond the streetlights, I was speaking about the realm of purely physical phenomena. Physics hasn't told us jack about the mind per se, though neuroscience has given us some information about the physical side of the mind-brain interface. I do agree that gravity is a problem -- for everyone.
You write:What seems to require explanation is, in this instance, very much a matter of the perspective from which one begins. I don't see any reason that the dualist must shoulder a special burden just here. There is no impossibility in the concept, and that (as you said yourself) was the original intuition. The idea that the mind-matter causal relation may be a brute fact is naturally distasteful to a physicalist. But this is not an argument.
Yes, it might be brute. But it doesn't seem a place at which, as it were, the mind can rest. It seems like an arbitrary brutemess, the sort of bruteness that one hopes would not have to be posited.
Take the example of "Water is H20". It is brute, for it expresses the very essence of water. Why is water H20? Well, that's just what water is! The mind can rest content here. There's something brute here, but it doesn't seem arbitrary. But the interaction of this mind with this body an no other does seem arbitrary. Perhaps the universe does not conform to our desire for intelligibility, but I will fight tooth and nail before I admit to it.
Well, as regards interpenetration: there's no mystery to interaction in such a case. If one thing is precisely where another is, then it seems that their interaction is precisely what we should expect.
You're right that I have no argument here. I can think of no reason to suppose that action is impossible when the causal relata do not touch (and do not interpenetrate). But it still seems impossible to me.
It seems impossible to me that one thing should be in two places at one time. But I have no argument for this, and the fact that I have no argument does not incline me in the least to retract my claim to knowledge. Some things just seem true to me, and in this regard I expect that I'm in no way special. It just seems true to me that action where there's no (to use a bit of topology) boundary shared in common is impossible. I have no argument for this but think that fact insignificant.
One can know things for which one has no argument, for we know things and yet cannot possibly provide an argument for every premise on which we rely.
In fact, this is a more general problem with the kind of argument Bill describes. The argument seems to assume that because we have mathematical descriptions of mechanical events, that we have therefore "explained" those events. But Newton's laws of motion never explained anything, nor did Maxwell's equations, nor did Einstein's theories. They only described and quantified.
If we had any examples of measurable mental-physical interaciton, something similar to fields would no doubt work to describe the phenomenon. And it would be no better explained for that.
Much of what we usually think of as the causal role(s) of mental states and processes can be modeled by computational processes the relevant causal structure of which is pretty well understood in physical terms. The hard problem, of course, is subjectivity. But what sort of causal role does subjectivity play? I think it's the lack of a plausible answer to that question that underlies Malcolm's reference to epiphenoma.
I can think of no more incisive response than this: fields are real. For instance, it's known that they propagate at a certain speed, the speed of light. Nothing to which we can assign a speed is unreal.
Light is electromagnetic radiation. Wikipedia has this to say about electromagnetic radiation:
Light is thus a composite entity whose parts are fields of a certain sort. Thus to deny the reality of fields is to deny the reality of light. Do you really wish to claim that light is not real? What a strange metaphysic that would be! It would seem just as plausible to deny the existence of chairs, or of persons.
Ants leave trails marking the location of food, and other ants, encountering this trail, follow it and collect the food. Bees, upon discovering food sources, do complex dances indicating its location to other bees, who then act upon the information thus transmitted. It seems that you are suggesting that this behavior is somehow just coincidental; are you in fact denying that the dance of a bee, or the marking of an ant, is "for" the transmission of that information (i.e. that the markings are "about" the food and its location), or that the bees and ants who "read" them and act upon their instructions are deriving meaning ("there is food at location X") from them (albeit most likely without being conscious of doing so)? (It seems that way from your remark about "evidence"). But if you do agree that this complex behavior is in fact the purposeful adaptation that it overwhelmingly appears to be, isn't all of that transmission of meaning, conventionally, exactly what intentionality is? Certainly it qualifies at least as well as the trail-marker example given by Bill.
Or are you, instead, defining intentionality as something that can only exist in a system that can "make decisions taking into account statistical variations"? This is a new angle, as far as I know, and there is of course no reason why a purely mechanical apparatus, such as a computer, or presumably the brain of an ant, couldn't be set up to do that sort of thing.
Or, if you insist that intentionality requires consciousness, then either we must ascribe consciousness to ants and bees (not to mention explaining why intentionality must be linked to consciousness in this way), or else we must deny that these actions of bees and ants - which certainly seem to be conveying genuine meaning - in fact represent intentionality, in which case we need a clearer definition (and a good reason for excluding the phenomena at hand).
You write:Really? Please rush me a copy of the well-understood model of the computational process that underwrites my choice of these words in this post. Then I'll be impressed. That's the role that subjectivity plays -- or rather, one of many roles. Otherwise it looks like we're back to the sort of problem I mentioned in my initial contribution to this thread. We have some models of easy things (easy from the standpoint of observational and mathematical tractability, not from the standpoint of the sophistication required to formulate the theories, of course) but not of hard things, and we're tempted to hubris when we dwell on the former to the exclusion of the latter.
Tim, you offer writing a note as an example of mental-physical causality. But the epiphenomenalist would respond that while it may seem that your mental action is in the driver's seat, that may just be a subjective illusion, and in fact we can point to a physical chain of events that leads to the note being written. Of course this makes us wonder, as Chalmers points out, why, if we could operate exactly as we do without any subjectivity, why we have it at all! But that unanswered question, while admittedly perplexing, is not sufficient to refute epiphenomenalism, and experimental observation does seem to show that the onset of motor activity in subjects precedes the conscious awareness of the decision to act.
Franklin, if the light impinging upon our retinas sets in motion a train of nueral activity that causes us to jump, that in no way would preclude suicide-by-car, because the mediation between the retinal stimulus and the motor response - our disposition to jump out of the way - depends on the immensely complex state of our brains, which could go either way.
Bill, I assume you were just being jocund about why heat makes metal expand rather than contract - which is of course explicable at much deeper levels - being merely a brute fact, though perhaps your point is that if you go deep enough ALL of the world becomes a brute fact, at least for now.
I wrote:
Anticipating your objection, I admit that I cannot point to the specific sequence of neural firings, etc. that lead to the note being written. There is no good reason to suppose that such an understanding is in principle unattainable, however, and experiments have certainly shown that particular subjective mental states are inducible by stimulating certain tiny regions of the brain, etc., and that, going in the other direction, very specific regions are activated for very specific mental content, such as the activity of a particular group of cell corresponding to the recognition of a particular face, and so on. It seems not unreasonable at all to suppose that this research will continue productively, and that an understanding at the level of observing your brain activity and being able to determine, from that observation alone, what you are writing might well be achievable. Certainly there is no reason to rule it out, which is really the point.
Bill also asks, "Could a dualist get away with saying that a mind controls only that body to which it stands in the embodied by relation?" I don't see how. Introducing this relation doesn't explain anything; it only raises a new, equally troubling question: "Why does this soul stand in the embodied by relation to that body?"
I wasn't trying to refute epiphenomenalism; I was trying to show that a certain line of argument against interactive dualism is unpersuasive. You correctly anticipated my response to your post, but as far as I can see all that you're left with is that, as far as you can tell, it is possible that physicalism could give a complete causal story regarding my writing of the note. Is this bare epistemic possibility an objection to interactive dualism? Is it all that's left of the original objection? It doesn't seem any more cogent than Franklin's unargued intuition -- or any more dangerous to dualism.
I don't know to what you refer when you say "That's the role that subjectivity plays." Is it the production of some physical effect? That's what's at issue.
Perhaps it will help to situate my comments -- I don't claim that physics, especially not as we presently know it, can explain subjectivity. But I'm unpersuaded by arguments implying that no reasonable development of physics could explain it. I incline toward a dual-aspect theory, but I am open to the sort of substance dualism Bill champions.
Yes, I would say that what I aim for in here is to argue for the point that physicalism is very much alive and well (an embattled point of view around these parts). Though my own intuitions lean toward a non-dualist account (and I do share Bob's sentiment that the subjective impression we have of the "purely" mental driving our physical actions is something we have good reason to be skeptical of, especially in light of the experimental observations I mentioned), I'm happy to agree that the condescending dismissal of all dualistic models by Dennett et al. are premature at best, and that the fact of the matter is that every model, so far, leaves a great deal to be desired. Dualism seems to mean that we must reject our customary notions of causality (the point of Bill's post), while physicalism seems unable, so far at least, to make a satisfying account of consciousness.
Perhaps it is too much to hope that ongoing physical and neurological research will solve the mystery of consciousness, but at the very least they will continue to elucidate the "material" side of things, which may in turn add constraints on what philosophical models are defensible.
If one is asking why it is the case that this mind interacts with this body (a very valid question) then it seems to me that the reply which Dr. Vallicella's suggest ("a mind controls only that body to which it stands in the embodied by relation") is adequate. Dallas Willard's response to a question about the soul's relation to the brain (subsequently printed as an article, "Grey Matter and the Soul") illuminates this further. In essence, the response is: the mind and body are a part of a unit—a person. Thus to ask why it is the case that this mind interacts with this body would be similar, though not identical, to asking why it is the case that this CPU interacts with this screen. It is because they are parts of the same unit—in this case, a computer.
The subsequent question you raise, Spur, seems to be different from the original question. You ask, then, "Why does this soul stand in the embodied by relation to that body?" The answer to the former question was, in essence, "Because they are one unit." This subsequent question now basically asks, "Why are they one unit?" I do think that is a difficult question to answer for the dualist, but not for the dualist who happens to be a theist (for reasons that are probably obvious).
If, however, one is asking how this mind interacts with this body then that seems to be an altogether different issue having an answer to which most dualists will admit not knowing. But in this case the answer is simply not known rather that merely "brute."
(Note: Berkeleyan Idealism is a possible way to solve, or rather, avoid this issue altogether.)
Why should mind/body interaction be any different? If we had a measurable example of such interaction, we would presumably be able to construct equations to describe the events. What justification could you have for demanding more than this? Why would such events stand in need of the sort of metaphysical explanation that is lacking in the rest of physics?
I'm really at something of a loss at trying to figure out what else you would want in terms of an explanation, and it almost seems as though you (by "you", I mean the people who think there is something to Sober's argument) are criticising dualism on the gounds that it is dualism. Mental events are subject to an entirely different sort of explanation than are physical events; we explain mental events in terms of preferences, beliefs, memories, etc, rather than in terms of matter and energy. This is a central point of dualism, yet the demand for an explanation of the interaction seems to suggest a union of the two sorts of entities, mental and physical, in a way that would disprove dualism. In other words, you seem to be arguing against dualims on the grounds that it can't produce a non-dualist explanation of interaction.
How might we have a measurable example of mental-physical interaction if the mental is non-spatial? We would be presented with some physical phenomena, perhaps one within a brain, without a sufficient physical explanation. We might, if we are at all inclined to dualism, posit a mental cause. But that cause would itself be non-measurable and thus non-detectable. To posit a mental cause is to engage in metaphysics, not science.
As for the explanation of mental-physical causation. My complaint is not that dualists can't produce a non-dualist account of interaction. Rather its that their account seems to involve a certain objectionable sort of arbitrariness. Compare. Let's say that we discover a new type physical phenomena wholly unlike anything encountered before. A certain theoritician - let us call him "Gudeman" - develops a mathematical model of the phenomena that posits a class of unobservable entity that he playfully calls 'slurms'. Slurms, Goodman says, come in pairs except on the fourth Tuesday of April, for on that day and that day alone they form classes of 23. A second theoritican - let us call him "Mason" - reads Goodman's work and objects. Mason says to Goodman that the bit about the 4th Tueday of April and classes of 23 seems objectionably arbitrary. Goodman replies that Mason has been really quite unfair to the Slurm theory. Goodman says that Mason's objection requires of the slurm theory that it produce non-slurmian explanations. Goodman adds that all theories much leave certain phenomena unexplained and that in this regard slurm theory is no worse than any theory one might care to consider.
I expect my point will be obvious. Some unexplained theoretical posits seem objectionable. The slurmian hypothesis is one example. Others don't. I don't know how to draw the boundary between them, but I'm convinced that it must be drawn. Part company with me on this and you must say that just any sort of unexplained theoretical posit must be tolerated.
Now, of course this is no argument for my claim that mental-physical interaction is an unexplained theoretical posit of the objectionable sort. I know of no argument for this, but yet it seems to me on reflection to be so.
I think you've got the order of explanation backwards. If the question is, "Why does this mind interact with this body?", it isn't adequate to reply simply that this mind bears the embodied by relation to this body, because the fact that this mind interacts with this body is what explains why this mind stands in the embodied by relation with this body.
Suppose I ask why a certain billiard ball A moves another billiard ball B instead of one of the other balls on the table. It would be unacceptable for you to answer, "Well, A moves B instead of one of the others precisely because A stands in the moves relation with B, yet not with any of the other balls." An acceptable answer would rather be something like: "A moves B because A makes contact with B and pushes it, whereas it doesn't make contact with any of the other balls."
You mention Willard's line about units. What does it mean to say that mind and body form a unit? If that just means that they are intimately linked, then the answer you ascribe to him is no good as an answer to the question, "Why does this mind interact with that body?" Likewise, if the question is, "Why does this CPU interact with this screen?", it's no good to answer that they are parts of the same unit (computer), because that answer gives rise to the equally troubling question why this particular CPU and that particular screen form a unit. To the contrary, an adequate answer would appeal to the fact that this CPU is connected to that screen by a cable, through which signals are sent and received.
I think my analysis was correct. Contrary to what you said in your last post, it seems to me that the fact that this mind interacts with this body is not what explains why this mind and this body are in the embodied by relation. To suggest otherwise says, in essence, that the fact that this mind interacts with this body explains why this mind and this body are able to interact—which is like answering, "Because they are interacting" to the question, "Why are these able to interact?" In short, if some asks, "Why are this mind and this body in the embodied by relation?" it would seem that "Because they are interacting" does no good as a response. In fact, it is very probable that the person asking the question would already realize that. A more acceptable response (I think) would be something like, "Because someone put them there."
I don't think your billiard ball example was analogous to my response. First of all, ball A is able to move balls other than ball B. That is not the case, or at least does not seem to be the case, in the instance of mind-body relations. Secondly, ball A is just like ball B in that they are both balls. But a mind is not a body. The second issue is minor. The major difference is the first incongruence I noted. Neither of your responses makes considerations for that incongruence all the way through. (For your example, this incongruence must be considered all the way through because as a simple, unqualified example it is contrary to mind-body relations where it is assumed not only that this mind interacts with this body but that it interacts only with this body.) It is not simply the case that A moves B, as though that is all ball A does and is capable of doing. I realize that you do take such things into consideration in your example but taking them into consideration much more seriously—that is, all the way through—your first, "unacceptable" response seems to become tantamount to your second, "acceptable" response. For it is the case that when A moves B rather than some other ball, A moves B because at that moment it stands (as your first response says) in the "moves relation with B," which is to say (as your second response does) it "makes contact with B." Unless you're meaning "moves relation" to be something foreign, the difference is just a matter of semantics.
Again I disagree with what you say. You say the response, "Because they form a unit" is no good as an answer to the question, "Why does this mind interact with that body?" You don't say why it is no good as an answer other than that it "gives rise to [an] equally troubling question." But that is no good reason to reject an answer. If someone asks, "Who through that ball?" and I say, "My dad did," it would be odd to reject that answer simply because one would be able to ask, "Who is my dad?" This is sort of the (incorrect) stance often taken against the theistic response to the existence of the universe. To the question "Who made the universe?" it is answered, "God did." Some reject that answer simply because they can ask the question "Who made God?" But the simple fact that they can ask another (to them) "equally troubling question" doesn't disqualify the answer.
Your suggestion that one ought to appeal to the fact that the CPU is connected to the screen through a cable simply answers the question, "How do they interact?" which, as I explained in my last post, is an altogether different question. Either that or it's still simply saying, though in a roundabout way, that they are a unit.
I explained this better, I think, in my last post but I will go over it again briefly. If someone asks, "Why does this mind interact with this body" and they find "Because they are a unit" to be an unsatisfactory answer then one must not really be asking what he has asked. The questioner, then, can (realistically) only mean either one of two other questions: (1) "Why are this mind and this body one unit?" or (2) "How is this mind interacting with this body?" But those are very different questions from the one he has asked.
Kevin,
Once I started writing a paper, "The Dasein-Body Problem." Heidegger thinks he can dissolve the mind-body problem, but he himself arguably has a problem explaining how Da-Sein im Menschen relates to the Mensch.
I didn't think Heidegger addressed the mind-body problem at all. I think Merleau-Ponty at least point us in the right direction by examining how active embodiment is inherent in and probably necessary for every cognition. Beyond that, we also have Levinas in his discussion of my encounter with the Other, which is both constitutive for identity (as us embodiment) and the ground of traditional ethics (though I would argue that the later Heidegger's views on the transcendence of beings [i.e. being as 'the nothing'] has many more similarities to Levinas' thought than he realized). I would not claim that Heidegger has "dissolved" anything in relation to the mind-body problem, but I think that he has something interesting to say that has implications for the question itself.
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.