We are talking about mind-matter dualism: substance dualism, where matter is one type of thing and mind is another type of thing, and also property dualism, where everything is made of matter, but mental states involve material objects with extra properties outside of those usually discussed in physics. You appear to be talking about some other kind of “dualism”.
I think extra properties outside of physics conveys a stronger notion than what this view actually tries to explain. Property dualism, such as emergent materialism or epiphenomenalism, doesn’t really think there are any extra properties other than the standard physical ones, it is just that when those physical properties are arranged and interact in a certain way they manifest what we experience as subjective experience and qualia and those phenomena aren’t further reducible in an explanatory sense, even though they are reducible in the standard sense of being arrangements of atoms.
So, why is that therefore an incomplete understanding? I always thought of qualia as included within the same class of questions as, and let me quote Parfit here, “Why anything, why this?” We may never know why there is something rather than nothing in the deep sense, not just in the sense of Larry Krausse saying ‘because of the relativistic quantum field’, but in ‘why the field in the first place’, even if it is the only logical way for a universe to exist given a final TOE, but that does not hinder our ability to figure out how the universe works from a scientific perspective. I feel it is the same when discussing subjective experience and qualia. The universe is here, it evolves, matter interacts and phenomena emerge, and when that process ends up at neural systems, those systems (maybe just a certain subset of them) experience what we call subjectivity. From this subjective vantage point, we can use science to look back at that evolved process and see how the physical material is architected and understand its dynamics and create similar systems , but there may not be a deeper answer to why or what qualia is other than its correlated emergence from the physical instantiations and interactions. That is not anti-reductionist, and it is not anywhere near the same class of thought as substance dualism.
People offer many noble rationales for public education, but the data suggest they were adopted to create patriotic citizens for war.
The basic argument structure is that public education either exists for ‘creating patriotic citizens for war’ or it exist for ‘noble purposes’.
That’s dualism. People who believe in strong reductionism tend to make arguments that are structured that way.
What do I mean by strong reductionism? Weak reductionism is the the belief that a world is determined by the way it works on the lowest level. Strong reductionism is the belief that you can basically ignore the halting problem and understand how a system works by understanding how it works on the lowest level.
But she doesn’t seem to make the bridge between the laws of physics and a full human brain.
loup-vaillant wants to use dualistic thinking for the way the full human brain works. I sat in a lecture in the Free University of Berlin about how the human brain works the professor told me:
“You can’t understand how the human brain works if all you are doing is studying neurons, you actually need to study the full system in action.”
Even when the system might be determined by it’s the way neurons work you can’t understand it on that level.
The stuff that you can then say about the human brain doesn’t tend to be either true or false but useful or not useful given a specific purpose.
loup-vaillant however wants to convince his mother that it makes dualism works on that level. That it makes sense to distinguish between true and false statements.
We are talking about mind-matter dualism: substance dualism, where matter is one type of thing and mind is another type of thing, and also property dualism, where everything is made of matter, but mental states involve material objects with extra properties outside of those usually discussed in physics. You appear to be talking about some other kind of “dualism”.
I think extra properties outside of physics conveys a stronger notion than what this view actually tries to explain. Property dualism, such as emergent materialism or epiphenomenalism, doesn’t really think there are any extra properties other than the standard physical ones, it is just that when those physical properties are arranged and interact in a certain way they manifest what we experience as subjective experience and qualia and those phenomena aren’t further reducible in an explanatory sense, even though they are reducible in the standard sense of being arrangements of atoms.
So, why is that therefore an incomplete understanding? I always thought of qualia as included within the same class of questions as, and let me quote Parfit here, “Why anything, why this?” We may never know why there is something rather than nothing in the deep sense, not just in the sense of Larry Krausse saying ‘because of the relativistic quantum field’, but in ‘why the field in the first place’, even if it is the only logical way for a universe to exist given a final TOE, but that does not hinder our ability to figure out how the universe works from a scientific perspective. I feel it is the same when discussing subjective experience and qualia. The universe is here, it evolves, matter interacts and phenomena emerge, and when that process ends up at neural systems, those systems (maybe just a certain subset of them) experience what we call subjectivity. From this subjective vantage point, we can use science to look back at that evolved process and see how the physical material is architected and understand its dynamics and create similar systems , but there may not be a deeper answer to why or what qualia is other than its correlated emergence from the physical instantiations and interactions. That is not anti-reductionist, and it is not anywhere near the same class of thought as substance dualism.
Robert Hanson wrote recently:
The basic argument structure is that public education either exists for ‘creating patriotic citizens for war’ or it exist for ‘noble purposes’. That’s dualism. People who believe in strong reductionism tend to make arguments that are structured that way.
What do I mean by strong reductionism? Weak reductionism is the the belief that a world is determined by the way it works on the lowest level. Strong reductionism is the belief that you can basically ignore the halting problem and understand how a system works by understanding how it works on the lowest level.
loup-vaillant wants to use dualistic thinking for the way the full human brain works. I sat in a lecture in the Free University of Berlin about how the human brain works the professor told me: “You can’t understand how the human brain works if all you are doing is studying neurons, you actually need to study the full system in action.” Even when the system might be determined by it’s the way neurons work you can’t understand it on that level.
The stuff that you can then say about the human brain doesn’t tend to be either true or false but useful or not useful given a specific purpose. loup-vaillant however wants to convince his mother that it makes dualism works on that level. That it makes sense to distinguish between true and false statements.