Sunday, February 7, 2010
Arguments for Substance Dualism?
What do people think about substance dualism? I talked with my friend Larry Lacy this weekend about this. He's a retired philosophy professor who taught here for about forty years, and he gave me a very interesting kind of series of arguments for it. I asked him to send me his paper on it, and I'll post it when I get it.
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Thanks Austin, I agree that it would be good to generate some discussion regarding Descartes's substance dualism--that is, his view that minds and bodies are distinct kinds of substances, each of which possesses its own essence (thinking and extension, respectively)--where an essence means something like those distinctive characteristics without which a thing would simply cease to be what it is. A mind that (entirely) ceased thinking, for example, could not be known with any certainty to continue to exist, a concern that Descartes raises in the 2nd Meditation: "It might perhaps happen, if I totally ceased thinking, that I would at the same time completely cease to be." (p. 84) Similarly, a body without extension is not a body at all. But it does not follow (and this is why Descartes’s theory of substances is “dualist”) that extension belongs to minds, or that thinking belongs to bodies (except in the tricky sense that I will address in a moment). Bodies are naturally divisible, minds are naturally indivisible; bodies are material, minds are immaterial. (p. 139)
ReplyDeleteThe difficulty arises from the fact that, as human beings, we are somehow formed from the composite of these two seemingly incompatible substances. Thus Descartes’s substance dualism—which is present throughout the Mediations in the form of the question about the correspondence between thoughts and material bodies—takes on a new kind of difficulty when it is applied to a consideration of the human being (whose body is simply a particular case of all the issues that apply to material bodies generally, but a special case inasmuch as it is a body that must be necessarily coordinated with a mind, and not just contingently so, as with all other bodies as objects of sensory knowledge). Descartes explores several of these problems in the 6th Meditation, and while his particular account of how some of these interactions take place might rightly strike us as primitive and pseudo-scientific (see the account of the mental representation of bodily pain on p. 140, for example), it is nonetheless undeniable that many of us who believe that consciousness is something different from and irreducible to the brain (and to bodies generally) would be hard-pressed to give a more sophisticated account of this interaction.
Are these the sorts of issues that you had in mind, Austin?
Pretty much. What is the seat of interaction between the two? Is there a persuasive argument for either side? Can science even answer this question?
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