David could benefit from reading Chambers The Conscious Mind , if he has not. Chalmers thinks consciousness supervenes on information processing, but his model is dualistic. David might want to avoid that.
Not up on my Chalmers, but is it really fair to call it dualism? I thought his view was that there is a subjective/physical duality in Nature just as there is a particle/wave duality. That’s not very Cartesian, really.
Chalmers’ view is usually referred to as property dualism, because it says that brains (and perhaps other physical systems) have certain properties (subjective experience, for instance) that are not reducible to fundamental physical properties. This is not really like particle/wave duality, because in that case both particle-like and wave-like aspects of the behavior of matter are unified by a deeper theory. Chalmers doesn’t believe we will see any such unification of mental and physical properties.
Descartes, on the other hand, was a substance dualist. He didn’t just believe that mental properties are irreducible to physical properties; he also believed that the bearer of mental properties is non-physical, i.e. not the brain but the non-physical mind.
So Chalmers is a dualist, according to contemporary philosophical parlance, in that he thinks that our fundamental ontology must include the mental as well as the physical, but he’s not a substance dualist.
He says it’s dualism, and it requires non physical properties. It’s not Cartesianism because minds aren’t detachable, but Cartesianism is a subset of dualism.
David could benefit from reading Chambers The Conscious Mind , if he has not. Chalmers thinks consciousness supervenes on information processing, but his model is dualistic. David might want to avoid that.
Not up on my Chalmers, but is it really fair to call it dualism? I thought his view was that there is a subjective/physical duality in Nature just as there is a particle/wave duality. That’s not very Cartesian, really.
Chalmers’ view is usually referred to as property dualism, because it says that brains (and perhaps other physical systems) have certain properties (subjective experience, for instance) that are not reducible to fundamental physical properties. This is not really like particle/wave duality, because in that case both particle-like and wave-like aspects of the behavior of matter are unified by a deeper theory. Chalmers doesn’t believe we will see any such unification of mental and physical properties.
Descartes, on the other hand, was a substance dualist. He didn’t just believe that mental properties are irreducible to physical properties; he also believed that the bearer of mental properties is non-physical, i.e. not the brain but the non-physical mind.
So Chalmers is a dualist, according to contemporary philosophical parlance, in that he thinks that our fundamental ontology must include the mental as well as the physical, but he’s not a substance dualist.
He says it’s dualism, and it requires non physical properties. It’s not Cartesianism because minds aren’t detachable, but Cartesianism is a subset of dualism.
Ok.