The problems of dualism

Dualism works on the principle that there are two distinct forms of reality; the mental and the physical. The most well known form of it is interactionism. Descartes in The Meditations argued that mind and body (or what we can interpret as mental and physical) had to be distinct realms of reality due to their difference in properties. Descartes held that the physical was spatial, temporal, extended, divisible and the mental was not. Thus they must be distinct. Descartes argued that the pineal gland was where the mental and physical came together. Of course nobody thinks that anymore but there are similar ideas of where it all comes together in the brain. Interactionists argue that mind and body interact with each other through some form of causal mechanism. What this is is very unclear and as I will argue later no such explanation will ever fully answer the question. I was contemplating the issue of the mental and physical having separate properties, and realised that this was only the case if one postulated a mental substance or soul; or in more recent times a homunculi; a centre of mind where ‘it all comes together’ so to speak.

I argue that if we quite reasonably take the mental to mean conscious phenomenal experience (and invariably move away from the notion of the homunculi) this is simply not the case. Our experiences are represented in space, time and thus are extended. Similarly we frequently divide our experience into parts. For example we distinguish between different objects. Although ‘the stream of consciousness’ can come as one grand unified experience it rarely does. Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason held that space and time were the necessary a priori conditions of any possible experience. I have to say I side with him strongly and Descartes dualist argument fails as anything more than a superficial bit of pseudo-logic.

Another form of dualism is epiphemonanlism. This version is certainly very counter-intuitive and it certainly doesn’t satisfy me, although it does some. It basically states that the mental realm is a non-functional by-product of the physical interactions. To me this seems to imply that conscious phenomenal experience like feeling pain ‘just happens’. It doesn’t help the conscious entity survive. IT isn’t a selection pressure. The account seems very misleading I think and certainly not satisfying. While it can’t be ruled out surely we should look for a more complete account with fewer holes.

Psychophysical parallelism is a final version which states that the mental and the physical are 2 distinct causally closed systems, i.e. they both ontologically distinct but there is no interaction between the two what so ever. This is even more counter-intuitive and I’m not going to dignify it with much of a response. While again we can’t rule it out it’s truly unsatisfying.

The main problem with dualism is that it always leaves what philosophers call an epistemic gap unexplained. How is the jump made from the physical world to the mental (and vice versa in the case of interactionism? Supporters come along and say things like “Well it happens at the synaptic bridges,” or “well quantum mechanics is responsible.” The fact is any justification that makes reference to any physical system theory is missing the point. There will always be a metaphysical gap that is un-explainable. It’s not a question of whether future research in physical sciences may find out the answer. By definition the gap is non-physical, or at the very least where its going is. Of course once again this lack of explanation doesn’t rule out dualism in itself but we want to find as complete an account as possible!

So what are the alternatives? The obvious one is physicalism; that everything is physical; the mental just doesn’t exist. All of it, the redness of red, the bitterness of a lime, the pain of a cut; its all just particles interacting with each other. In a sense I support such an account but I think the word physicalism is misleading and it definitely isn’t going to be accepted as a theory by the majority of this world. People’s experiences are too unique and rich for them to accept such a cold truth.

Another position is what Chalmers calls type-F monism of which there are various interpretations (one of them is my view which is described below.) An interesting yet puzzling interpretation is that there are proto-phenomenal properties underlying physical reality.

My position is what can be coined non reductive monism. There is only one substance whatever that might be. At times it is best to refer to it as physical and others mental or at least refer to conscious phenomenal experience. It is appropriate at times to make reference to folk mental talk such as beliefs and desires and also to qualitative descriptive words such as red when we refer to experience. At other times we may need to work on a lower level of analysis at the physical level; describing the physical interactions of neurons etc. We are trapped by language in the mind-body debate. We have to realise that ontologically speaking the mental and the physical are the same thing. However in science we have to work on multiple levels of analysis. No level is more right than another, simply more appropriate given the current task. Taking a strong physicalist (at least to me) seems to overlook that. I even have to say that physicalists turn themselves into philosophical zombies by my definition of the mental (phenomenal consciousness). Many argue otherwise, but once again I think it’s a problem of how we define things in the debate, i.e. a problem of language. In one sense my view is ontologically speaking monist; there is only one substance. In another sense my view is a form of property dualism; one underlying substance with various characterizable properties; mental (phenomenal experience), functional, computational, physical.

Another important emphasis I want to finally add is that when studying consciousness, to coin Andy Clark’s term ‘mindware’, we don’t just want to be looking at the causal interactions in the brain. Humans are embodied in an environment, and thus the study should leave the boundaries of the skin and take into account the interactions between body and environment to build the most complete picture. So when people say “What? Yeah but my experience is something different to just neurons firing”; our response can be something like “of course, neuron firing is only part of the picture…” People have a tendency to focus on the brain in their physical accounts, which misses a large part of the picture. I will come back to this idea of extended mind/cognition in a later blog. Until then I hope to have convinced the reader that there is a better alternative to straightforward dualism.