What are the thoughts of Less Wrong on property dualism?
I did a search about property dualism and I couldn’t see much written here on this site.
What is your opinion on this topic?
Are there any articles on this site that I should read, including articles that aren’t directly about property dualism? I’ll add links to articles here as I find them (I’m still doing some searching myself)
The prevailing point of view among non-religious scientists (as well as here) is that mental processes (the mind) are reducible to the physical processes in the brain. This part is rather uncontroversial, even Searle agrees with it. Out of the alternatives described on Wikipedia Emergent Materialism is probably the closest to the mainstream thought here:
though Eliezer does not like the term emergence.
This point of view is described pretty well in Sean Carroll’s classic Free Will Is as Real as Baseball, with free will standing in for your favorite mental property.
Emergent materialism explicitly denies that mental properties are reducible to physical processes, so I don’t think it’s closest to mainstream thought here. Emergence is often used in philosophy as an alternative to reduction. Or did you just mean the closest out of all the versions of property dualism?
I suspect the view in the philosophical taxonomy closest to the LW mainstream is functionalism.
I trust your expertise in the matter, at least as far as classifying various approaches to philosophy of mind. As I said I was going by the two-line description on Wikipedia. I was hesitant to use the term functionalism because it relies on ill-defined “functional roles”.
With a few exceptions, positions within academic philosophy generally receive very shallow treatment on LW, and what discussions you do find here are more rigorously addressed elsewhere. That’s not surprising, to my knowledge most LW-ers don’t have much if any background in philosophy.
I’d say if you’re curious just read Chalmers’ book or Searle (not a property dualist, but provides a good critique), then you’ll know the lay of the land well enough to seek out other things on your own =)
“With a few exceptions, positions within academic philosophy generally receive very shallow treatment on LW, and what discussions you do find here are more rigorously addressed elsewhere”—yeah, not as rigourous, but forums are good for gaining a quick introduction.
I don’t think “property dualism” has a unique, canonical definition. The identity criteria for properties, in general (not just mental properties), are disputed in philosophy. Many of the most plausible views could probably be classified either way, depending which definition of “property dualist” and which criteria of property-identity you select.
I agree with some of the other commented that the sequences may not have a lot to satisfy you at the expert level.
Personally, I tend to favor the weakest form of panpsychism I can reasonably get away with. Probably I read too much Teilhard? I’m deeply impressed by the observation that Gödel’s completeness theorem ‘extracts semantics from syntax’, the implications this has for semantic engines such as myself, and for the relationship between mathematical reality and material reality.
I suspect that most philosophy of mind you find on LW will be monist, but after that all bets are off.
It’s the Zombies subsequence of the Reductionism Sequence that refutes property dualism.
For convenience, it’s here.
How persuasive that argument is depends on how you feel about epiphenomenalism. It’s a bit of a stretch to call it a refutation.
Not all forms of property dualism depend on zombie arguments or lead to epiphenomenalism.
I’m not sure what Property Dualism is. I just looked at the diagram on Wikipedia.
There is a sense in which software is independent of the hardware that carries it, that two books can both have the property of representing “Harry Potter” and therefore being the same book despite being made of different matter, and so on. It doesn’t matter whether the calculator that computes 2+2=4 runs on electrons or steam. Is that what Property Dualism is?
I (and I am guessing most Lesswrongers) generally believe that the seeker of philosophical knowledge is better off just deriving everything fresh from scratch, because of how traditional philosophers manage to make their readings so incredibly long to the point that it becomes literary criticism to figure out what they are saying. But I think “property dualism” would be a useful concept if it is in fact what I outlined?
“I (and I am guessing most Lesswrongers) generally believe that the seeker of philosophical knowledge is better off just deriving everything fresh from scratch, because of how traditional philosophers manage to make their readings so incredibly long to the point that it becomes literary criticism to figure out what they are saying.”
Apply that logic to biology—start deriving fresh from scratch and see how long it takes until you get to mitochondria. Or to keep it within philosophy, apply that logic to ethics—and see how much time you waste hung up on some obscure issue with utilitarianism that Bentham already worked out two hundred years ago.
Philosophy’s not like a science with a (mostly) linear progression of accumulating knowledge, but there are endless examples of seemingly commonsensical positions on philosophical questions which philosophers have long ago cut to ribbons and moved past. “Deriving everything from scratch” is intellectual suicide.
(Philosophy majors are often told the apocryphal story of a genius who resolved to derive his own philosophy without “wasting time” on other people’s ideas, only to wind up with a midget version of what Kant wrote three centuries ago.)
I’d wager that virtually no person reading this who has mastered the (weirdo, unnecessary) jargon in The Sequences would be unable to master the (weirdo, unnecessary) jargon in contemporary analytical philosophy, if curious.
(Biographical disclosure: I studied philosophy in college so am familiar with the major issues, but have long-since turned to science so there are definitely better authorities on current trends)
To some extent, I wish we would. I wish instead of teaching us about mitochondria in elementary school, we were shown the evidence that lead to mitochondria and asked what we think about it, Maybe not to that extreme, but in general I wish education would shift towards that direction.
In any case, I think it’s different when you’re dealing with a large body of steadily accumulating empirical evidence. You don’t need empirical evidence for philosophy. I suppose if you used Mathematics as an example, I would have conceded it...I’m just not sure Philosophy as a discipline has progressed that far.
Let’s try? I haven’t really studied philosophy—can you name an issue which was satisfactorily worked out by the Ancients (in the sense that I can say aaah yes, this is clearly correct once I hear the answer) which I can’t immediately work out? (Not trying to aggressively challenge you or anything—It’s no big deal if you don’t have an example on hand. I am just curious. Perhaps a specific example lead you to your conclusion?).
For one who wishes to be an academic philosopher, I would agree. Anytime you are publishing in the field, it is necessary to know what has been said, and what is trite and unoriginal However, I’m not trying to be an academic philosopher—I’m simply trying to grasp at the nature of things. It’s not that I think the ideas of others is a waste of time, it’s that trying to ascertain exactly what is the claim of this-ism and that-ism takes forever, and the sheer network of citations required to say anything is heavy. This is what I mean by “it borders on literary criticism”—I’m not interested in doing literary criticism, I simply want to strike at the core of epistemology, ontology, etc. When I do read philosophy, it feels to me like more of a study of the evolution of ideas, rather than an actual statement of ideas.
However—progress occurs, I agree. I think philosophy does tend to seep into the culture—a lot of philosophy (both in academia and lesswrong) converge with stuff I “independently” came up with myself as a kid. (“independently” is in quotes, because I had the benefit of knowing words like “deterministic process” when I was 15, whereas Nietzche did not. I’m not claiming genius, I think most older LWers have similar experiences.) I think this is why when I read the great philosophers, my instant reaction tends to be “yeah, duh and why do you need that many words” or “that is just obviously false” and then I get to spend the next few weeks learning about how civilization sloooowly figured out why it was obviously false. (Or the third worst case option: “your writing is about clear as the Bible—I have no idea what you are trying to say and the various subsequent interpretations of your work are longer than the original text”, but let’s leave that aside.)
If one starts with the assumption of an intellectually privileged upbringing, it shouldn’t take your whole life to re-derive Bentham. You would have absorbed Bentham’s ideas through cultural osmosis. Everyone with a passing interest in philosophical matters knows the word “utilitarianism”. You might be able to “independently” re-derive Bentham before you hit 20 without even knowing who he is, and when you tell your friends they might roll their eyes at your earnestness. It’s thanks to Bentham’s impact on culture that you were able to re-derive him at 20, but that doesn’t mean you must to struggle firsthand through his 17th century English to basically get all the important bits.
I think the mistake the Philosopher’s make is devaluing the apocryphal genius’s insights because they are not original. A fresh independent formulation of Kant is no less enriching than the original work of Kant from the perspective of the genius (though perhaps not from the perspective of Academic Philosophy).
I’m not suggesting obstinately refusing to study Kant if you think his ideas will help you. I’m saying there is something vaguely unproductive in asking what people;s opinions on “property dualism” is when everyone who uses the word “property dualism” is using it in a slightly different sense and there are libraries of books on the subject. each with a slightly different take. Formulate the idea you want to evaluate afresh (and you can tag it “property dualism” if you so choose) and then ask what people think of it. It’s okay to borrow ideas when you start from scratch, and it’s also okay to not borrow ideas. In my answer to OP, you see I formulated a pseudo-”fresh” idea that may or may not be an accurate restatement of property dualism, yet I feel it goes straight to the core of what is being discussed.
I just returned to the Property Dualism wikipedia to scan some quick philosophical lit. - for example: Searle, John (1983) “Why I Am Not a Property Dualist”. Just skim it over—in the first paragraph, he has a straight, common sense idea about what he thinks is the truth, which is identical to the view I espoused in my own comment. Then, he spends multiple paragraphs detailing his semantic quibbles with the word “Property Dualism” and whether it does or does not mesh with the fresh, straightforward view. This is the sort of “drag” of old ideas that I am referring to, the constant clarification and re-clarification and rarification of meaning which gives me a headache.
Agreed, but then again I didn’t dutifully set out to read the sequences with scholarly discipline. I only read the fun ones. This is my attitude to philosophy in general—read it if it is compelling and fresh, otherwise drop it. I praise the sequences for creative writing talent, not originality. Then again, I don’t think I’ve ever praised anyone in philosophy for true groundbreaking originality… only for their ability to articulate the truth of the matter without getting muddled and confused.
I started out in science. I took a few philosophy courses too, but I ended up getting really bored and dropping them because they were rehashing ideas that I was independently chewing through in middle school...and then testing us on definitions and other useless stuff. I’m told from the philosophy majors that this is because introductory courses suck, and that the later courses are better.
I do want to clarify that I don’t think studying philosophy is useless, or anything. I just think that one’s approach to philosophy aught to have a certain freshness to it. I’m not sure if this has adequately come across. I think that when it comes to understanding true meaning, the act of sitting quietly and starting from scratch and working things out on your own is the core of the matter, and it gets you 90% of the way there. Other people’s writings are the supplement to this process, not the main course. I think mainstream philosophy overemphasizes the study of other people’s writings, and thereby veers into literary criticism.
It seems to me that a physical phenomena is both physical and phenomenal.
I think the big problem is the word “physical”; loaded with meaning, highly deceptive. Physical just refers to a phenomena that we can describe with physics (conjectured mathematics tentatively accepted due to good fitness with observation).
I think any physical description of reality should leave out the word physical. It shouldn’t be part of the argument. We in retrospect apply the adjective “physical” if there are mathematical models reliably predicting the out comes of experiments.
It also seems a bit peculiar to me that anyone calling themselves a rationalist would believe that the brain is primary to the mind. But I guess that’s the world we live in.
Your perplexity perplexes me. Please elaborate.
Do you think the senses are some conduit from the world outside our mind into the world inside our mind?
As in, if you look at something, you are getting a somewhat faithful representation of the thing you are looking at?
For example, do you think your thumb is a part of fundamental reality?
In the source code for reality, is “polymathwannabe” or polymathwannabe’s thumb?
I don’t think so.
The source code just has a huge array of particles. The thumb is something a mind projects onto those particles. So is the brain.
A rationalist should be aware that their senses don’t reveal reality to them, their rationality does by inventing theories based on stimuli.
Even if everything I perceive is a projection from my mind, it’s not a random projection. Even if my senses are not transparent, their fabrications are not random. They make sense, follow logical rules, and are consistent with the assumption of an external world that matches those perceptions, and they’re thus deserving of being taken seriously.
So you’re saying, that in reality external to the mind, there is such a thing as a thumb?
It depends. Is there such a thing as sound?
In the external reality, there are quarks. My body is a particular set of (continually replaceable) quarks that more-or-less obeys my mind; besides, my mind has privileged access to the sensory inputs of this body, so it’s justified to consider it as distinct from the rest of reality. A category like “thumb” is a shortcut entry that is very useful to refer to a subset of quarks that stay in a very specific, more-or-less constant configuration.
So, does my thumb exist? Yes, in the sense that a bird flock exists because some of them fly together.
Let’s say we’re talking about the source code of reality.
You and I seem to agree we could start somewhere like “var quarks = [...]”.
My position is that there is no “flockofbirds” or “var polymathswannabe_thumb = ”
Those a purely made by the mind.
Likewise, in reality, there is no “brain” or “brainstem” or “frontallobe”, there is just “var quarks = []”.
The brain is a product of a mind.
You have it backwards. Even though our image of the brain and all of the concepts associated with the semantic shortcut “brain” are mental fabrications, the mind itself is the product of a terribly complex arrangement of quarks which happen to exist within the physical boundaries that we conventionally call a brain.
That the mind exists within physical boundaries, (ie, quantitative material, temporal, or spatial relationships) has not been demonstrated.
The entire field of psychopharmacology rests on the assumption that the mind has a physical basis. Substances that alter the functioning of the brain will make your mind work differently. Also, brain lesions may severely limit what your mind can do. This very strongly suggests that the mind is not only experienced “through” the brain, but that it originates in the brain. Equally important evidence is the fact that nothing else affects the functioning of the mind; if you want to alter it, you need to tinker with the brain.
You make a pretty good point.
The mind originates from the brain, experimentation strongly suggests.
In my mind, overcoming that bias is the definition of rationalism (ie, empirical truths are not fundamental truths).
If you’re not going to trust empirical evidence, what on Earth are you going to trust? How is dismissing empirical evidence the definition of rationalism?
Critical rationalism.
“Rationalists have such a high confidence in reason that proof and physical evidence are unnecessary to ascertain truth – in other words, “there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience”.[4] Because of this belief, empiricism is one of rationalism’s greatest rivals.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalism
If you believe that you get truth from the senses, you are missing the part where the mind processes that sense experience in a conceptual framework.
The biases in the conceptual framework need to be analyzed through rational processes, as they are already apparent in the observations we make, and thus observation alone will not reveal them.
I’m sure it’s been explained to you several times that the meaning of “rationalism” prevalent on LW is not the technical philosophical meaning that makes it opposite to “empiricism”.
There is nothing wrong with using “rationalist” in this way rather than with the technical philosophical meaning; e.g., the second definition in the OED (the first being a theological one) is “The doctrine or belief that reason should be the only guiding principle in life, obviating the need for reliance on, or adherence to, any form of religious belief” which isn’t quite the LW usage but is a clear ancestor of it.
I have the impression from your comments about “rationalism” here that either (1) you think that no one uses the term “rationalist” with any meaning other than the technical philosophical one, or (2) you think that no one should and are interpreting every use of the word that way even though you know that’s not how it’s really being used, presumably to make a point. If #1, you are simply wrong. If #2, you are being pointlessly rude.
Do you expect us to disagree? If so, why?
My point is, if you want to discuss cognitive bias, the first and foremost bias should be that we seem to see material things, and think its territory, when really we’re dealing with the map.
That’s rationality, however you want to dice it.
EDIT: Thefore, the brain is part of the map.
The mind is what makes the map, the mind is the space between the map and the territory.
Our concept of the brain is part of the map. It seems like you want to forbid regarding anything as territory, which makes the whole map/territory distinction less useful than it could be.
I’m not advocating naive realism, and I don’t think anyone at LW does. The map-territory metaphor, much beloved at LW, is a comprehensive rejection of naive realism. However, I see “the part where the mind processes that sense experience” as being exactly the part where you “get truth.”
Right. The brain exists on the map, just like London does.
The line between the brain and the brain stem is something we create. It exists in textbooks (the map) not the territory.
Do you mean critical rationalism in the sense of Popper? I find this strange given your other comments since Popper’s notion of critical rationalism does allow one to use empirical data to falsify hypotheses.
(This is aside from the fact that critical rationalism is an utterly unsatisfactory approach to epistemology.)
I fully support using empirical evidence in the critical examination of ideas.
The question is not whether one dismisses empirical evidence (as someone suggested, but not me), but whether empirical evidence (the facts as I see them) are indeed the facts, or whether cognitive biases exist in the empirical data.
The critical rationalist says that empirical evidence is not the truth, that objective truth is a tentative model, a model that influences our observations, and that both ideas and observations should be subjected to critical tests (which consist of more ideas and observations).