Definitions and Dualism

Stan Klein

Valerie Hardcastle made the following statement:

Chalmers does more than simply say he is a dualist; he proposes a specific way of working out his dualism. Unfortunately, his way of working it out (as this will be true for all versions of dualism I am familiar with) is not testable. Hence, I claim his theory is nonnatural.

This sound very wrong to me. She says all versions of dualism with which she is familiar are not testable. However, the past 70 years of experiments in physics have shown that the world is dualistic. Stapp and I have argued that the main interpretations of quantum mechanics are dualistic. One can probably think of experiments to distinguish the monistic versions from the dualistic versions. So the issue of duality does seem testable.

Some might ask what is the connection between the Cartesian duality and the Heisenberg duality. I (and others) have pointed out that there are a number of possible connections. My particular bias is that the connections lie in the metaphysics rather than scientific issues, but let's try to avoid that tangle right now (though maybe it is critical to Valerie's point). For now I just wanted to make the point that dualities can be testable.

On the question of whether Chalmer's theory is nonnatural. That sounds like an issue that isn't too important. It just has to do with the definition of the word natural. With Gregg's definition we get one conclusion, with Valerie's definition we get a different conclusion. Why spend so much time arguing about something that just hinges on how one defines a word?

Stan Klein

Keith Sutherland

Because they [definitions] determine the sort of theories that we are prepared to consider within the remit of the scientific study of consciousness. According to Valerie's latest point:

The term "naturalism" in philosophy arises out of the history of Logical Positivism

So now we understand why general relativity was "non-natural" -- Einstein could no more be a naturalist than John the Baptist a Christian! And what about poor old Newton?

John Searle provided a dating of naturalism (at Tucson) which pre-dates Valerie's by several centuries and would accord with the definition given by Gregg Rosenberg and Paul Patton. It was the Enlightenment that naturalized creation; all LP did was to provide an operational definition as to what could be termed a meaningful question. Then the sociologists said "meaningful to who?" and we ended up with the sort of postmodern view of science that most people on this list would probably wish to avoid.

Seeing as you could give a complete account of the contribution of Logical Positivism to the study of consciousness on the back of an envelope, I would have thought that (within the context of this particular discussion group) we should pick the broader of these two competing definitions.

Keith Sutherland
keith@imprint.co.uk

Roland Cook

This discussion apparently got off on the wrong foot somewhere. The common reference to "dualism" is to a mind-body relation or problem is it not? The world, body, etc. are "material" - the mind is immaterial. Physics studies material world objects, processes, etc. But when we speak of the mind we no longer refer to a material entity.

Valerie Hardcastle should know the history of this dualistic "metaphysic" if you can call it that. The dualism appears simply as a confusion of human thought. The world persists and the mind disappears (individually at least), so we automatically divide these into two categories of thought -- the persistent and the transient. Since material objects persist, or undergo transformations, they comprise one aspect of the world; whereas the mind disappears in sleep and flits from one idea to another when awake, and the mind cannot be localized in time, space, etc. as can physical objects.

Shouldn't we be making these distinctions clear in what we mean by "dualism". Once we do we will see that the world is more than dualistic -- it is multi-dimensional in all of its aspects. The material world is multi-dimensional -- the mind is multi-dimensional. Dualism is a medieval conception that should be abandoned. What useful purpose does it serve except to argue about, as Stan Klein says, "... how one defines a word"?

I would challenge anyone using the term "dualism" to describe exactly what they mean by the term, what is included and excluded, and how it is not an "idiot" form of thought, but reeks of some profound wisdom.

Roland Cook