If this is the dualist argument, then I wouldn’t find it compelling but just confused about what reductionism does.
In trying to explain mental states, we have actually explained them away and created a theory that has no need for them.
In the reductionist worldview, higher level things can be explained in terms of lower levels. For example, table salt can be explained in terms of the molecules sodium and chlorine, which in term can be explained in terms of electrons and protons, which in turn can be explained in terms of quarks, etc. Having explained table salt in terms of quarks doesn’t mean that its been explained away though; table salt exists just as well as it did before. (There is the argument that categories of things and our frameworks for things don’t really exist, but I don’t think that is what this debate is about.)
Instead, I’m pretty sure the dualists are asserting that there is some aspect of qualia that cannot be captured physically. So their idea is that the experience of qualia may occur via a physical process (neuron activity) but that it possesses some additional non-physical quality.
I suspect that our paradigm of what the world is like has changed so much that we can’t really relate to what the dualist/materialism debate used to be about. I hypothesize that in the past, we thought of “physical things” as the set of things we could touch and manipulate tactilely, but thoughts appeared to be a completely different category. We now all understand that thoughts occur in the brain and are neural activity. (For me, thoughts occur as sounds usually, so when I’m thinking I am activating different memories of sounds that I have, that are in turn associated with and handles for the ideas I’m thinking about. )
I think this view that thoughts = neural activity is pretty mainstream now … I wonder if dualism is really obsolete then?
If this is the dualist argument, then I wouldn’t find it compelling but just confused about what reductionism does.
In the reductionist worldview, higher level things can be explained in terms of lower levels. For example, table salt can be explained in terms of the molecules sodium and chlorine, which in term can be explained in terms of electrons and protons, which in turn can be explained in terms of quarks, etc. Having explained table salt in terms of quarks doesn’t mean that its been explained away though; table salt exists just as well as it did before. (There is the argument that categories of things and our frameworks for things don’t really exist, but I don’t think that is what this debate is about.)
Instead, I’m pretty sure the dualists are asserting that there is some aspect of qualia that cannot be captured physically. So their idea is that the experience of qualia may occur via a physical process (neuron activity) but that it possesses some additional non-physical quality.
I suspect that our paradigm of what the world is like has changed so much that we can’t really relate to what the dualist/materialism debate used to be about. I hypothesize that in the past, we thought of “physical things” as the set of things we could touch and manipulate tactilely, but thoughts appeared to be a completely different category. We now all understand that thoughts occur in the brain and are neural activity. (For me, thoughts occur as sounds usually, so when I’m thinking I am activating different memories of sounds that I have, that are in turn associated with and handles for the ideas I’m thinking about. )
I think this view that thoughts = neural activity is pretty mainstream now … I wonder if dualism is really obsolete then?