Mind-brain dualism is the view that brain and mind are derived from entirely different kinds of things — physical stuff and mind-stuff. Dualism assumes that both kinds of stuff exist in the universe and that science has simply not yet detected and discovered the mind-stuff. Dualism feels intuitively correct to most people, as it fits with our subjective experience. But it is completely contradicted by science.
It seems to me to be very difficult to deny that consciousness is non-physical. Regardless of whether brains produce consciousness or not, it seems straightforwardly obvious that consciousness itself lacks mass or any other physical properties. This is in stark contrast to the neural correlates of consciousness. It's also very difficult to deny the existence of a mental substance. For is it intelligible to say there could be, for example, a pain without any entity undergoing that pain? Or that there can be thoughts without a thinker? So, contrary to what Ralph Lewis claims, I'm not sure if it is correct to say any assumptions are being made here. Rather, substance dualism seems to be derived from our immediately lived experience. It is for this reason that substance dualism is the commonsensical position that we are all born believing. Even most of those who emphatically reject an afterlife implicitly accept this commonsensical position.
But is substance dualism contradicted by science? Although it is true that science has not detected either this self or its conscious experiences, the failure here neither suggests anything about their existence nor does it point to a defect of science or contradict it. Science only detects the measurable or quantifiable aspects of reality. Hence, it can detect neurons firing, but it cannot detect the conscious experiences correlated with this neuronal activity. But this doesn’t mean that selves and their conscious experiences don't exist, nor that science is wrong, rather science is simply the wrong tool for the job. Compare this to the fact that a metal detector will fail to detect wood or plastic. We certainly wouldn't conclude that wood and plastic don't exist, nor that the metal detector is working incorrectly.
He also says:
There is no aspect of the mind, the personality, or the self that is not completely susceptible to chemical influences or physical diseases that disrupt neuronal circuitry.
So, how is it that scientists are so certain that dualism is false? Quite simply, because for dualism to be true, all of science would have to be false.…Dualism so fundamentally contradicts the foundations and entire accumulated evidence of modern science that in order for it to be true, we would have to start rebuilding modern science from the ground up. If dualism turned out to be true, it would also be a complete mystery or fluke as to how most of our advanced technologies (including all of our electronics) work at all, since their design and engineering are based on the very principles that would necessarily be entirely invalidated if dualism were true.
I'm going to go into a bit more detail here since this is a serious charge to make. For, if true, it places advocates of dualism firmly in the anti-science camp. But why on earth do certain materialists believe this?
From reading around, and especially reading the arguments of the physicist Sean M. Carroll (whom the author appeals to in a footnote), it seems they are convinced that science entails that the physical world is closed. This is the thesis that physical causation wholly accounts for all change in the world, including all of our voluntary behaviour and even the direction our thoughts take. This is what all forms of materialism hold, and at least interactive substance dualism contradicts this since, contrary to the materialists, those who subscribe to it believe consciousness, in and of itself, is causally efficacious. So since substance dualists usually believe in the existence of mental causes in addition to physical ones, they are committed to denying that our current laws can be completely accurate. Does this entail most of our modern technology wouldn't work, as Lewis and others claim?
Firstly,
we should remind ourselves that this contravening of physical causal
closure only occurs with the impact of consciousness on processes within
the brain. This impact will likely be minuscule, most likely on the quantum scale, and hence will be undetectable. After this initial impact by consciousness, we might suppose the usual chains of physical causes and effects
apply, cascading this initial minuscule change to larger and larger effects resulting in our voluntary behaviour. But, apart from any changes precipitated by our own voluntary activity, why on earth do they imagine that the rest of
physical reality would be affected? After all, the vast preponderance of the Universe is far removed from this initial change precipitated by
consciousness.
Hence, thirdly, and regardless of whether one subscribes to an afterlife or not, it needs to be pointed out that we immediately experience our own causal efficacy whenever we make any voluntary movement, or even when we entertain a chain of thought. And in case people don't find that convincing, I argue in this blog post in the first two sections that it is simply incoherent to suppose consciousness has no causal impact and, furthermore, that this causal impact necessarily has to be over and above physical causation.
Fourthly, our current
physics leaves out the existence of consciousness in its description of
reality (see the hard problem of consciousness) and a fortiori, it also leaves out any causal role that consciousness plays. So, this entails our
current theories simply cannot be completely accurate, at least when applied to living brains.
Ralph Lewis seems very certain of himself in the dismissal of an afterlife. But, at least in this article, it does not seem to me that he has brought up anything particularly problematic regarding either interactive substance dualism or an afterlife.
It seems to me that the resistance of most mainstream scientists to any form of dualism, or indeed ESP, spirituality, UFO’s and etc. is not grounded in a basis of supposed logical fallacies or indeed any profound intellectual analysis. This resistance is in fact a species of neurosis, in the strictly Freudian category. Scientists are first of all people, with all the added mental vagaries that such a status involves. As a group they, like most other groups, subconsciously exhibit a need for security and re-assurance - they are made very uncomfortable if they feel that their fixed and stable world-view is threatened. And like most such groups, part of the defence mechanism is the denial of such vulnerabilities.
ReplyDeleteOf course, this is not the case for all scientists - there are always the few leading edge ones like Einstein, Schroedinger, Heisenberg and Bohm who were/are sufficiently secure to entertain other possibilities, as well as some who are not subject to such anxieties and have genuine reservations about the possibilities of phenomena outside scientific boundaries.
But the most germane ‘fact’ about such phenomena as ESP and ‘mind’ processes is that they are not scientifically investigable - they are not repeatable and cannot be initiated at will, despite the efforts of Dr Rhine and others to make them so. What science has to come to terms with is the basic fact that some part of reality is, and always will be, outwith the scope of science, despite being very a very basic and meaningful part of our experience. Not much progress is being made in this direction by mainstream science. Perhaps they need some group psychoanalysis.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that the dream model (which I detail in my comment below) is more or less correct. If so, then it follows that reports by lucid dreamers like Robert Waggoner may well have something to it that they're able to intentionaly heal people in waking life.
DeleteThe dynamics behind that, if true, are very interesting to put it mildly. Yes, it makes intuitive sense that the more individuals are in a shared dream the less influence each one has to shape it according to their will - but why should simply entering into a lucid dream of your own allow you to bypass those limitations and heal a person?
Don't take this too seriously (this is mostly me just having a bit of fun) but it's almost as if the 'rules' of this world slipped in a loophole that's the equivalent of a blaring red siren screaming "THIS IS YOUR CLUE THAT YOU'RE LIVING IN A DREAM"
Regardless, I think this is a fascinating avenue if science ever chose to pursue it. If lucid dreamers really *can* heal people, what else might they be capable of?
“it's almost as if the 'rules' of this world slipped in a loophole that's the equivalent of a blaring red siren screaming "THIS IS YOUR CLUE THAT YOU'RE LIVING IN A DREAM"
DeletePrecisely. I have had a number of personal experiences which lead me to believe that all is not as Newton (and Dawkins) would have it. The whole world of the mind - drug experiences, ley lines, dreams, meditation, lucid dreams, ESP, shamanism, UFO’s, spirituality, perhaps even the little codes we follow when passing each other in the street, are not amenable to science, although they can be analysed and discussed in a normal descriptive fashion. These areas are explored by the likes of Paul Deveraux, Rupert Sheldrake and others.
However, science is never going to accept that we are 'living in a dream'. We really have to put science into a box where it can get on with splitting atoms and formulating ever more extravagant theories about the Universe, and invent a new non-science approach to the more important aspects of life. Maybe resurrect Socrates!
While I certainly don't take Ralph Lewis' position here, my personal issue w/ substance dualism is essentially the combination problem - in other words trying to make sense out of how, for lack of a better term, spirit and/or consciousness interacts w/ the physical in such a tightly correlated way as to make one think they're the same thing.
ReplyDeleteThis isn't an insigificant issue, but I would propose that a fairly novel (although not new) interpretation of Idealism makes this problem go away. It's actually quite intuitive once you grasp it.
The position is that rather than proposing a fundamental ontology of that which we call "physical" (for which there is no coherent definition, IMO), let us instead look to our own experience of dreams, in other words mental constructions from the contents of our own minds. Here we find an experience that virtually everyone can attest to - a world that, however briefly lived in, allows us to fly, walk through walls and defy the laws of physics in ways seemingly only limited by our respective imaginations.
More to the point though, dreams also allow us to do exceptionally ordinary things such as appearing as though we've a physical body, touching objects & behaving more or less as we otherwise would in waking life. Dr Steven LaBerge has studied this phenomenon for many decades and, according to him, the dream world can be appropriately argued to be a difference of *quantity* rather than substantive quality. In other words the main difference is how many people are in it, not of mental content itself.
So yes, I think following from this basic observation of daily life we can take the Idealist position of only a single substance at the foundation of Reality (in other words a single Mind) and, without needing to add any additional bells or whistles, argue that this Dreamer is the one conjuring up this entire universe. Therefore so-called "physical reality" is simply one large shared dream amongst countless alters of the One - which also explains why our mental abilities here are so drastically limited when compared to our respective dreams. Because the contents of *this* particular dream are shared by so many, our 'authority' (a crude way to put it, I admit) is divvied up to comparatively small things that manifest like the placebo effect or shaping neuroplasticity through dedicated meditation.
In fairness, some might reasonably push back against the idea that a dream could be shared by so many - but I would submit, once again, empirical evidence (https://psychotherapy.psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.2004.58.2.139) in that patients of DID (dissociate identity disorder or multiple personalities) only show themselves to one another within the dream itself. The one Subject fractals into many and converse w/ each other within the dream world(s) of what is, fundamentally, a single mind.
Once again, all this requires is a difference of quantity rather than quality.
W/ all of this said, I would submit that the dream model makes the idea of an "afterlife" considerably more intuitive, even easy. It requires nothing more or less than a higher-order dream world for us to wake up into once the physical body dies. Near-death experiences, of course, fit nicely into this model and seem to be telling us precisely that.