A reader inquires, ". . . could you explain to me how an atheist could be a mind-body dualist?" Yes, and I'll go you one better: I'll also explain how a theist could be a materialist. These explanations must of course be sketchy given the demands of blogospheric brevity. As some wit once said, "Brevity is the soul of blog."
Given these definitions, it seems that that an atheist could also be a mind-body dualist. The dualist is saying something about human persons: they have a mental 'part' and a physical 'part' and these two parts are mutually irreducible. There is nothing in this about the existence or nonexistence of God. It is safe to say that most dualists are theists, and that this has always been the case; but there is nothing in dualism to entail theism or to entail the negation of theism. Hence dualism is consistent with both theism and atheism. Or at least this is the lay of land at first blush.
2. Theism and Materialism. This is a very large topic. One aspect of it is explored in my World Congress of Philosophy paper, Classical Theism and Global Supervenience Physicalism. Another side of the problematic is treated in "Could a Classical Theist be a Physicalist?" Faith and Philosophy, vol. 15, no. 2 (April 1998), pp. 160-180.
Suppose we distinguish between universal materialism and materialism about human persons. The universal materialist claims that everything, or at least everything concrete, is either a material entity or supervenient upon material entities. If this is what is meant by materialism, then no materialist could be a classical theist. The God of classical theism is a purely spiritual, hence immaterial, being. But materialism about persons seems prima facie combinable with theism. Such a materialist claims that a human being is just a very complicated animal organism in principle wholly explainable in material terms. Now could it be true that all of my sensing, perceiving, thinking, etc. is just complex processes transpiring in my brain and central nervous system but that there is a being, God, who thinks without having a brain? On the face of it, this seems like a possibility.
My own view, however, is that, although this makes prima facie sense, deeper analysis reveals that it makes no sense for reasons I present in the Faith and Philosophy article above cited.
2. "Now could it be true that all of my sensing, perceiving, thinking, etc. is just complex processes transpiring in my brain and central nervous system?"
In short, NO, for it's an incoherent notion.
Just insert the elided word: '...complex material processes...'. As in micro-neuro-biochemical processes, which science has revealed are nothing but atoms bumping into each other. Now exactly where in that bustling arena of meaningless atomic motion do I find the 'sensing, perceiving, thinking, etc.'?
Nowhere. Therefore that notion doesn't make 'prima facie sense'. Nothing in that picture of complicated processes but thoughtless protons, electrons, and neutrons, responding 1E26 times per second to the zero-point field, and incidentally, far more slowly to some extremely minor perturbations we call molecular forces.
(I believe Locke raised this objection long ago but I guess it's been ignored ever since.) No room left over for reductionism, eliminativism, or epiphenomenalism. In principle, our mentality is wholly inexplicable in material terms.
In order to construct a dualism that can make scientific predictions, I place the substance-dualism divide at the cellular level, and invoke branching space-time as the ontological interface. Then we can ask 'Could it be true...?' questions with experimental answers, starting with cellular behavior.
Perhaps some array of spiritual natural laws could be posited to deal with these issues, but I don't have any idea what they might be. Descartes at least thought the causality problem was enough to justify arguing directly up to God.
The second part of your question is not clear to me, so let me try the first. I can imagine a philosopher who, mightily impressed by the problem of evil, rejects the existence of God, but mightily impressed by arguments for dualism (and finding materialism incomprehensible) accepts
dualism. Why can't he just say that the existence of minds is a brute fact?
I don't know about your final paragaph, but I agree with the rest.
It seems to me that in metaphysics brute facts should not be multiplied beyond necessity. We should look for an explanation unless it's really clear that something either explains itself or is somehow in principle unexplainable.
Now my mind either began when my body did, or at some earlier or later time, or never began to be at all. If it never came to be then it could be a brute fact, I suppose, as with Aristotle's unmoved movers, which are not the God of the theist but have some of His properties. But it seems that my mind did come to be, given that I can trace its existence back to a certain vague area in the past--memory cannot show us exactly when we began to perform mental activities, because by the time we came to reflect on our own activities we had already been performing them for some time--certainly no earlier than my conception. A reason seems to be required if I want to claim my mind existed before that.
If it came to be, at whatever point in time, there seems to be the question of how it did so, which I claimed earlier could not be as a result of physical events. And if not by a physical process, then how? A metaphysics in which corporeal events have causes but minds just pop into being from nowhere looks deeply wrong to me.
If it did not come to be as a part of the mind-body composite at the same time as the body, then there is the additional question of how the composite is formed. How is the pre-existing (for instance) mind joined to the body to make a whole? I see no reason to think that incarnation or incorporation is within the mind's own power; certainly not in the body's power; then what accomplishes it? (This is just a rephrasing of the second part of the earlier post that was unclear to you; hopefully this is better.)
I don't think that this quite argues up to the God of classical theism, but it does seem to argue up to some spiritual substance at least of greater power and longer duration than my own mind has.
To the materialist, for whom the notion of ghostly immaterial mind-stuff seems a vaporous fantasy, such an objection sounds very much like "I can't understand how this could be, so it can't be."
Must we posit such ethereal entities? Perhaps we just need to wait and see what develops. After all, the notion of waves propagating through empty space seemed just as unimaginable in its time as the notion of our thoughts arising from "mere" matter still does to some of us today, and gave us the equally unsubstantiated concept of the luminiferous ether.
I've seen phrases like "mind stuff" and "soul stuff" in the literature from time to time, but only from materialists criticizing dualism. But are there any dualists (or idealists) who either use the term, or say something that implies it? "Mind stuff" suggests a pretty confused dualist, one who thinks that although there are fatal problems with physical matter, if we replace it instead with non-physical matter all our worries will go away.
You make a good point, and the following passage from R. Chisholm supports it ("On the Simplicity of the Soul" Phil Perspectives 5, p. 168):
And I agree that it is mostly philosophers hostile to dualism such as Dennett and Churchland who speak of 'spook stuff,' 'mind stuff,' and 'soul stuff.' But we should note that R. Swinburne (Evol. of the Soul, 2nd ed. pp. 153 -154, writes "Normally the stuff of which substances are made is merely matter, but some substances (viz. persons) are made in part of immaterial stuff, soul-stuff."
This muddies the waters and gives some aid and comfort to our friend Malcolm. Swinburne's reasons for his talk of soul-stuff need to be examined in a separate post. My own view is that Chiholm is on the right track and Swinburne is not.
What you say above you've said many times before. Suppose something is just plain unintelligible. Then it can't be, and there is no point is waiting and seeing. Example. The claim that there is a natural number n such that there is no m>n is unintelligible to anyone who understands that this series is infinite. So it makes no sense to say that in future there might be a supercomputer that can compute the largest nat'l number. There is no such critter and no computer will ever deliver it -- not even if you had a computer in which signals travel faster than the speed of light, which is impossible acc to current physics.
Can you tell us a story about how mind emerges from meat (so to speak) -- a story that would make the notion intelligible? Before the Michaellson-Morley experiment it was possible to tell a story about how light could propagate without requiring a medium of propagation.
Thanks for your last comment. Maybe I can get to it tomorrow.
I agree with Bill that there seems to be an inconsistency in your view. On the subject of interaction (or causal commerce) between an immaterial soul and the body, you and I agreed that such a thing was unintelligible and therefore should be rejected if at all feasible. But it seems equally unintelligible--not just unimaginable, mind you, but unintelligible--how consciousness and related phenomena could be given a physical explanation. To be consistent, you ought to hold that any such purported explanation should be rejected if at all feasible. None of this "Just because we haven't found an explanation yet doesn't mean we won't find one eventually" unless you allow the interactionist dualist the same excuse.
You are fond of pointing out that with M-B interaction, we haven't even discovered the beginnings of an explanation, but the same is true with mental phenomena. We've discovered many physical correlates, but haven't even begun to understand how these correlates could actually be the mental phenomena.
Thanks for the details about yourself. They help me 'contextualize' your remarks. And good luck on the dissertation. (Friendly advice: do your best on it, but don't think of it as a magnum opus, or you'll never get done; think of it as a 'union card.')
What exactly do you mean by universal hylomorphism? I can think of two construals:
A. Every being is composed of form and matter.
B. Every being is subject to the form/matter distinction.
(A) is plainly false. Prime matter is not composed of form and matter, and pure forms are not composed of form and matter. Are forms and parcels of matter beings? I would say yes. (B) may well be true since all it says is that every being can be thought of in terms of the form/matter distinction. Thus if we think of God as pure form (or as forma formarum, form of all forms) then we are thinking of him in terms of the form/matter distinction. But it seems you mean something else:
C. Every being except God is composed of form and matter whether corporeal matter or spirtual matter.
But (C) leaves something to be desired. First, why call this 'universal hylomorphism' if God is an exception to it? After all, even if God is ipsum esse subsistens, he is still a being, an ens. Second, talk of spiritual matter seems perilously close to talk of immaterial matter -- a contradictio in adjecto. You also say the two are "metaphysically identical." That's puzzling.
Can you clarify this?
Thanks for that penetrating observation. The trad. objection to dualist interactionism is that it is unintelligible -- How can there be causal commerce across the ontological chasm separating the irreducibly mental from the irreducibly physical? -- and that this unintelligibility entails the falsity of dualist interactionism. Malcolm will presumably not let me get away with saying that we must wait and see, that future scientific and philosophical inquiry may well explain how the commercium comes about. So why should I let him get away with saying that what seems plainly unitelligible -- that meaning and mind are in or emerge from highly organized brain-meat -- will be rendered intelligible by future science?
On the other hand, if Malcolm says it is just a brute fact that mind is brain, then I can say it is brute fact that M-P interaction occurs. This leads on to a more general question: Must we admit some brute facts, or can everything be explained?
Well, Bill, what I say I may indeed have said many times before, but always in response to what I've read here many times before, namely that we can simply dismiss materialistic accounts of mind because they are "unintelligible" - which I think could just as well simply be due to our enormous ignorance of what mind really is, and of what matter is capable of.
As for my saying we ought to just "wait and see", you all seem to assume - Bill says so explicitly - that I wouldn't allow a dualist to suggest the same. Actually, I'd have no problem with that at all; I'd be glad, in fact, to see such a softening of what seems to me to be the usual dualist rigidity. (Of course, though, I'd be curious to know what sort of research program was underway to investigate dualistic M-B causality, etc.) But I have never insisted that dualism is simply false, in contrast to the way so many here seem to regard materialistic monism. To be sure, I have grave doubts that a dualistic account of mind is the right one - and have suggested many reasons for those doubts, which are known to all, and which I won't rehearse here. But our stances are asymmetrical; whereas I maintain a skeptical agnosticism about M-B dualism, with confidence in science's capacity to undergo startling, revolutionary shifts as new understandings of the natural world are gained, all I ever hear from the dualist camp is stark rejection, and hubristic, complacent confidence that we already know enough about matter and mind to be absolutely certain that the two are irreconcilably distinct. Do you think we have nothing left to learn?
As for the ether, just what stories were knowledgeable 19th-century physicists telling about how light could propagate through empty space? As far as I know the existence of the ether was almost universally accepted as fact, because the notion of wave propagation through a perfect vacuum was as "unintelligible" in those days as mind's arising from matter seems to be in ours.
Also, I have no special allegiance to the word "stuff"; I simply use it to mean "whatever it is that you dualists think minds are made of, that isn't itself matter but can nevertheless set material bodies in motion, in some yet-unaccounted-for-way". If "stuff" has picked up too much baggage, I'm happy to use some other word.
Finally, I note with sorrow "...aid and comfort to our friend Malcolm." I am stabbed to the very vitals. Aren't friends the ones you want to give aid and comfort to?
I agree that the assymmetry exists, though I think it stems from a more fundamental one.
While one can argue "wait and see" as to whether scientific evidence will be found to support a physicalist account of the mind, science will never verify the hylomorphist account. The reason is that form informs matter with the principle of order, order being the sine qua non of scientific observation.
Because, according to the hylomorphist, form is what makes science possible and so is a priori to it, there is no "wait and see" as to whether science will prove the irreducibility of mind to matter. Therefore, it is reasonable for the hylomorphist to ground his confidence in metaphysics. Where else can he? For the physicalist to complain of this confidence in the absence of scientific verification is to beg the question.
Regards, Bill T
I think it is time for a friendly parting of the ways. (Actually, I've believed this for a long time.) I find your comments tiresome and completely unhelpful. Above, you raised once again the tired spook-stuff objection that I disposed of a year and a half ago, here. It is as if the points I make make no impression on you whatsoever. You persist in thinking that dualists think the mind is made of some stuff thereby demonstrating your inability to think outside the materialist box. You cannot conceive how there could be something that is not material in nature, and so you think that any reference to abstract objects or to irreducibly mental items is some form of superstition, a reference to something "vaporous" and "ghostly," some kind of fine or "ethereal" matter beyond the ken of empirical science.
But the main thing is this. You and I disagree on quite a few fundamentals, and where there is disagreement on fundamentals, there can be no fruitful discussion.
So I am asking you to not leave any more comments here.
As you wish, though as a former Gauleiter, and recipient of the rare green box, I am saddened, of course.
To all: it's been a pleasure.
M
thanks for the kind words and advice. I'm sorry to be so late in answering your questions, but here goes:
A. Every being is composed of form and matter.
(A) is plainly false. Prime matter is not composed of form and matter, and pure forms are not composed of form and matter. Are forms and parcels of matter beings? I would say yes.
Please note that earlier I said that according to the theory every substance must be composed of matter and form, not every being; matter and form are beings in some sense or other but they are not substances, at least when they are understood correlatively, as being the elements of substances. Universal hylomorphism says that even spiritual substances must have a formal and a material element.
Your option (B) is plausible but too weak to explain what's going on here.
C. Every being except God is composed of form and matter whether corporeal matter or spirtual matter.
But (C) leaves something to be desired. First, why call this 'universal hylomorphism' if God is an exception to it? After all, even if God is ipsum esse subsistens, he is still a being, an ens.
It's universal insofar as it applies to the universe of finite or created substances. Also, depending on how you understand the word, it's not immediately clear whether God is to be regarded as a substance. If by substance you simply mean subsistent being, ens subsistens, then yes. But if you mean that subject which underlies accidents, then no.
The latter meaning is part of why the theory arose. It's not clear that Aristotle's Prime Movers have any accidents, or are subject to change in any meaningful sense. Certainly this isn't the case with Plato's Ideas. But human souls, and "separated" substances in the sense of angels and the like, are supposed to have accidents and to be subject to change, at least changes in and accidents of the intellect and the will. The notion of matter was formulated in order to explain how change can take place in bodies while still allowing for continuity of the subject of change. The same thing is taken to apply to spiritual substances--if they change, something changes while something stays the same; in other words, a subject is needed as well as an essential form. Changes of understanding and volition are not essential or substantial changes; the form in that sense doesn't change; what underlies the change then is the subject, the spiritual matter which supports both the ingenerable and incorruptible essence and the changible accidents. Also, since God alone can be pure act, creatures must be composed of potency and act, and matter is the potency principle. The scholastics who accept this appeal both to Augustine's descriptions of creation in Confessiones, De Civitate Dei, De Genesi ad Litteram, as well as to Boethius' assertion that all creatures must be understood as composed of quo est and quod est. The most thorough-going and voluminous version of the theory is the 11th century Jewish writer Avicebron's treatise Fons Vitae. Aquinas tries to get around the arguments by saying that spritual creatures are composed of esse and essentia, of course, but while this gets around the potency/act problem, it doesn't seem to address the subject of change issue.
Second, talk of spiritual matter seems perilously close to talk of immaterial matter -- a contradictio in adjecto. You also say the two are "metaphysically identical." That's puzzling.
Not immaterial matter, but incorporeal matter. The matter underlying spirits would be incorporeal in the sense of lacking extension, discrete parts, natural place, etc.; but still material insofar as matter is the metaphysical principle of potency and the subject receptive of form. Corporeal and incorporeal matter are taken to be metaphysically identical in the sense that at root each is the same prime matter, i.e. pure potency however understood. What they claim then is that corporeal properties, dimensive quantity etc., are not essential to matter, but are in fact the most primitive formal elements of bodies; that before its proper substantial form every body is endowed with a forma corporeitatis. (This is why an acceptance of spiritual matter is almost always accompanied by the related doctrine of the plurality of substantial forms in complex bodies.)
Spiritual substances lack the form of corporeity and instead have an intellectual, incorporeal form not subject to the same conditions as bodies. But the distinction between corporeal and spiritual matter is really a distinction of form, insofar as the one happens to be the matter underlying a bodily form and the other that underlying a spiritual form.
This is necessarily a very brief summary and I've left out a lot of nuances, and of course there are different versions of this theory. I hope it hasn't been entirely unclear.
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.