The anti-epiphenominalist argument makes me think that if substance dualism is true, introspection alone can’t provide an epistemic warrant for it, any more than introspection could tell an AI what its processors are made of. Substance dualism makes the prediction that certain loci in the brain behave in a physics-violating but regular way with a significant impact on behavior, but the brain doesn’t have any ability to notice this. Since the brain is of finite complexity, there would have to be some computer that, wired in the right way, would produce the same behavior as the ‘soul’, in which case the brain would have the same belief (or at least ‘z-belief’, informationally identical but lacking in phenomenal content) in the soul… you see where this is going.
Actually, that might better be said to show that there’s no such thing as the “supernatural”, it’s all one web of causality, in which case the impossibility of introspective warrant for ‘dualism’ (= our model of physics being incomplete in some way that affects the brain’s behavior) is even more obvious.
The concept of a supercausal cause is nonsense of the highest order; e.g. “God speaks to me in my heart, and you can’t scientifically refute that because it has no experimental consequences”. But if you define the “supernatural” as “ontologically basic mental stuff not reducible to non-mental parts, like the Force in Star Wars”, then it is much less obviously nonsense; nonsense of a lower order, which is harder to detect.
The anti-epiphenominalist argument makes me think that if substance dualism is true, introspection alone can’t provide an epistemic warrant for it, any more than introspection could tell an AI what its processors are made of. Substance dualism makes the prediction that certain loci in the brain behave in a physics-violating but regular way with a significant impact on behavior, but the brain doesn’t have any ability to notice this. Since the brain is of finite complexity, there would have to be some computer that, wired in the right way, would produce the same behavior as the ‘soul’, in which case the brain would have the same belief (or at least ‘z-belief’, informationally identical but lacking in phenomenal content) in the soul… you see where this is going.
Actually, that might better be said to show that there’s no such thing as the “supernatural”, it’s all one web of causality, in which case the impossibility of introspective warrant for ‘dualism’ (= our model of physics being incomplete in some way that affects the brain’s behavior) is even more obvious.
The concept of a supercausal cause is nonsense of the highest order; e.g. “God speaks to me in my heart, and you can’t scientifically refute that because it has no experimental consequences”. But if you define the “supernatural” as “ontologically basic mental stuff not reducible to non-mental parts, like the Force in Star Wars”, then it is much less obviously nonsense; nonsense of a lower order, which is harder to detect.