Property Dualism, De Selby and a Neuroscientist Named Fred.

A few quick few words (hopefully) on a plausible kind of Dualism. Opinions formed reading John R. Searle.

So what is property dualism?

To begin, the original brand of dualism (Cartesian) was a theory of mind which suggested that what we experience as consciousness is not a physical property of the universe. Hence the duality.., Mind separate from body. As can be surmised, this fits with all kinds of theological arguments and was prevalent in many guises for a long time.

Property dualism came along and reframed this intuition in light of the 20th century’s acceptance that the brain is a biological mechanism. Consciousness still had to be something ‘over and above’ mere biology. This savvy dualism proclaimed the existence of a singular physical realm that had two properties, one physical, the other an irreducible mental property. So we can say that the lynchpin of this argument is that this ‘mental property’ of matter is irreducible to physical components while being manifest in them. This weird little effect coined by Donald Davidson is called ‘supervenience’ (I think it’s like intervention except with ‘super’ hack-sawed onto the front). For property dualism it means that all the molecules and bits and pieces that make up your brain amount to the phenomenal property of consciousness which then has the power to supervene upon what it is manifest in, namely in the magical result: agent causation (you consciously making something happen).

Generally property dualism amounts to two divergent world views. One which finds the universe causally closed. Outside of pure philosophical sophistry this means only physical things can make things happen in the physical world therefore the magic mental properties in your mind can’t actually make things happen i.e. causally closed. The other kind of property dualism sees the physical domain as causally open. Meaning that what feels like self-awareness allows you to make things happen.

Now for the criticism:

(Because I’ve been consistently thinking in terms of a materialist consciousness it’s actually taken me ages to force my head through the wringer and actually accept property dualism’s arguments without just thinking ‘this is quasi religious muck, maybe I’ll make some tea..’. In the end however I’ve started to see the merits in particular with the ontology of consciousness and the irreducibility of same.)

Why ‘dualism’ specifically? Why not trio-ism or quadrology? Why break consciousness into ontological categories at all? Its only duality in consequence to the linguistic hangover from enlightenment philosophy. To me it seem to come from a time when the universe was constituted of four elements and humours took care of your mental wellbeing (Makes me think of De selby in The Third Policeman , ‘accretions of black air as an explanation of darkness’). Our modern property dualist thinks ‘well I intuitively know my consciousness is special but I can equally see that neuron firings can amount to motor skills, therefore I must amend the philosophy of the mind (Cartesian Dualism) that conforms to the former while tweaking it in reaction to the latter’. It’s actually a little annoying that philosophy is still banging about with this kind of language, doffing its cap to a historic education. In the intervening period the other sciences got to quarks and bosons while philosophy still plays scrabble with the same old concepts and words. The worst part is that these scrabble players are often geniuses but because of the language they use, philosophical consensus upon theories of mind always run into dialectic dead ends.

Once I finally get round to biting my indignant (materialist) tongue we can get to the real bones of the theory. Consciousness has no causal super powers that can’t be assigned to neurobiological factors. BUT this reduction does not lead to a proof where the neuroscientist (let’s call him Fred) can say that the patient who’s he’s just scanned is conscious in the same way that Fred feels he is. Fred’s patient could still be a Chalmersesque Zombie. This means consciousness is causally reducible but it appears to be ontologically irreducible. Fred knows that being Fred can’t be reduced into something that can be communicated and phenomenologically experienced by someone other than Fred.

Now if we take a leaf out of Dennett’s work we might stray into hypotheticals. Imagine we could quantify all the information (as it occurs during a singular moment) in Fred’s brain; imagine too that we could quantify the very neural architecture of Fred at that very moment. Now imagine that we upload this transcendental string of binary into a suitably large computer of silicon switcheroos (or whatever). Dennett would say that what we have is a mirror image of Fred courtesy of an ontological reduction. Maybe we could even run the program and have carbon based Fred talk to silicon based Fred; they would both at least retrospectively understand on an existential level what it was like to be Fred before the moment of replication.

Can you guess what happens next? Turns out Carbon based Fred is a property dualist and what does he go and do, but doubt silicone based Fred has any qualia! Bang! Dialectic dead end. Dennett’s argument is screwed, maybe unfairly but screwed none the less. If Fred doesn’t believe the new Fred then consciousness is ontologically irreducible. In fact if you are dualistically inclined at all this whole thought experiment is useless. The fact that carbon based Fred can be right or wrong kind of proves ontological irreducibility. On a curious aside it’s actually frighteningly like superposition (or even transubstantiation depending on your taste).

In Wittgenstein-ish terms you can’t experience pain in someone else’s body. In order to do it you’d have to get inside their head which is made of their neurobiology and nerves so you would in fact be them. So Instead you carry over your own Neurobiology in some kind of transplant but then your reception of the pain would be processed the way you process pain; the premise is absurd.

So it seems if you accept the terminology you have to accept ontological irreducibility. But if we try to retrace the steps of the argument up to a conclusion of property dualism you realise it doesn’t work that way. The whole thing was built from the top down. Irreducibility does not lead to any kind of metaphysics or duality. For the sake of comprehension lets say that the qualia of ontological irreducibility have a special colour assigned to them (lets say blue)  alternatively the zombic lack of qualia is signified by a a different colour (green). Now within this analogy the middle ground of turquoise is where all the philosophical debate should occur, i.e.when does one stop and the other begin. Lets decide that the question of causality (not whats its like but what it is) is analogized numerically x+x=y. What dualism does is decide to give the y value a colour (y),(y)or (y) which wrecks the equation and if you play by the rules renders it unsolvable. I guess it kind of an apples and oranges thing.

If we were to look at things a little more cynically this irreducibility becomes a free standing tenet that’s only purpose was to hold up a statue of Descartes. René’s been knocked off It since, but modern dualists can still dodge the rude pot-shots of materialists and teleofunctionalists by standing behind it. Materialists can stand behind it too; one can’t know what it’s like to be someone else and with the same unproductive sentiment one can’t know what it’s like to not be a ‘one’. Nothing is achieved just a sort of stalemate that Augustine or some clever theologian would’ve thrived upon.

John Searle seems to be a man in the middle. Here is a quote from a paper of his which sums up what is increasingly becoming a minefield of tautology.

“The property dualist wants to say that consciousness is a mental and therefore not physical feature of the brain. I want to say consciousness is a mental and therefore biological and therefore physical feature of the brain. But because the traditional vocabulary was designed to contrast the mental and the physical, I cannot say what I want to say in the traditional vocabulary without sounding like I am saying something inconsistent. Similarly when the identity theorists said that consciousness is nothing but a neurobiological process, they meant that consciousness as qualitative, subjective, irreducibly phenomenological (airy fairy, touchy feely, etc.) does not even exist, that only third person neurobiological processes exist. I want also to say  that  consciousness is nothing but a neurobiological process, and by that I mean that  precisely because  consciousness is qualitative, subjective, irreducibly phenomenological (airy fairy, touchy feely, etc.) it has to be a neurobiological process; because, so far, we have not found any system that can cause and realize conscious states except brain systems. Maybe someday we will be able to create conscious artifacts, in which case subjective states of consciousness will be “physical” features of those artefacts.”

That’s it, we’re done with the criticism. Here’s a little coda on the kind of property dualism that suggests that anathema causally closed world.

Property dualism has lots of different proponents and hence many different kinds of itself. One that has been around for a long time, and one that (despite being generally derided) I find surprisingly compelling posits epiphenomenalism. I think Thomas Huxley is the progenitor of this one; he has referred to consciousness as being akin to the whistle that comes from a steam train, it has no bearing or effect upon the actual functioning of the locomotive. Imagine that! Imagine all that clamour in your head amounting to a little ineffectual existential flatulence. My last post outlined something similar except I tried to imbed a little causation. I even came up with a grandiose phrase for it since, Epiphenomena with Asymmetrical Causation. Roles of the indignant tongue, eh? This sits well with the Modular stuff and the idea that social intelligence is running the cognitive show.

If I were to be very ambitious I might even say that the externalisation of information in culture and art might be the factor that allows epiphenomena to supervene in what in almost real time decisions. Of course it must be stated that the very architecture of our brains is in flux so epiphenomena of a reflexive social intelligence module are of course modulating the physiological properties of a mind in what would otherwise be a causally closed world.

That took longer than I expected...