Z M Davis posted something worth responding to in the previous thread:
and substance dualism is untenable until we (say) observe the pineal gland disobeying the laws of physics because it’s being pushed on by the soul
If we observed some behavior in the world that we could not account for with our understanding of natural law, we would revise our understanding, and bring the new phenomenon into the fold. The ‘soul’ in your example might be something beyond our existing knowledge, but it would not be something beyond physics. It would not be of different substance than the rest of the physical world—we were just wrong about the nature of that substance, is all.
Communication, whether in spoken language or written text, is a physical act, and is the result of a chain of physical acts stretching away into causality. Somewhere along that chain is a system within the person communicating that causes him to express particular ideas in specific ways.
If ‘consciousness’ has no influence over the physical world and does not interact with it, it cannot influence the behavior of that system, can it? That means that the statements the system produces about how it experiences ‘consciousness’ are false, because it can’t be experiencing the things it’s claiming to. The only way the person-system can make justified statements about the nature of consciousness is if that nature somehow constrains the behavior of parts of the physical world.
If ‘consciousness’ does have influence over ‘physical’ things and can interact with them, there is a description of how it does so—and that description is a true physics, one that encompasses everything in reality and not just the things we previously considered ‘physical’.
If we consider Chalmers’ claims as potentially true, we are forced to conclude that they are incorrect. The act of making the claims produces a fatal inconsistency. Taking him seriously requires that we reject his arguments as nonsense.
Z M Davis posted something worth responding to in the previous thread:
If we observed some behavior in the world that we could not account for with our understanding of natural law, we would revise our understanding, and bring the new phenomenon into the fold. The ‘soul’ in your example might be something beyond our existing knowledge, but it would not be something beyond physics. It would not be of different substance than the rest of the physical world—we were just wrong about the nature of that substance, is all.Communication, whether in spoken language or written text, is a physical act, and is the result of a chain of physical acts stretching away into causality. Somewhere along that chain is a system within the person communicating that causes him to express particular ideas in specific ways.
If ‘consciousness’ has no influence over the physical world and does not interact with it, it cannot influence the behavior of that system, can it? That means that the statements the system produces about how it experiences ‘consciousness’ are false, because it can’t be experiencing the things it’s claiming to. The only way the person-system can make justified statements about the nature of consciousness is if that nature somehow constrains the behavior of parts of the physical world.
If ‘consciousness’ does have influence over ‘physical’ things and can interact with them, there is a description of how it does so—and that description is a true physics, one that encompasses everything in reality and not just the things we previously considered ‘physical’.
If we consider Chalmers’ claims as potentially true, we are forced to conclude that they are incorrect. The act of making the claims produces a fatal inconsistency. Taking him seriously requires that we reject his arguments as nonsense.