Grant C. Sterling's Position on Substance Duelism

On 1/20/2012 8:37 AM, Malcolm Schosha wrote:

> Grant wrote:<<But I am used to having my dualism disparaged as unscientific" and "medieval", and most people hold that the ancient Stoics emphatically rejected dualism.>>

>

> ................................

>

> Grant, could you explain you thinking on dualism, or give a link to a source you think is good? It seems to me rather difficult to avoid dualism completely in practice, and I sometimes think it may just be built into how the human mind is hard wired.

>

> Malcolm

Malcolm:

In brief, my position is like this:

1) I am absolutely certain, beyond any possibility of

error, that I have qualitative mental experiences. I am more

certain of this than any other proposition.

2) Experience consistently tells me that I make choices

on the basis of the qualitative content of these experiences.

For example, I engage in complex reasoning (I may read a philosophical

proof, which I find convincing because I recognize it as having

a certain logical form which I have previously analyzed and

found to be deductively valid), and on the basis of this reasoning

I may come to believe a proposition which leads me to act in

certain ways. [As an example, I have turned down an opportunity

to eat veal (which I find to be extremely delicious) on the basis

of arguments designed to show that the way in which the veal is

raised is morally repugnant. Or, I have consciously chosen to

think about outcomes in a different way as a result of long discussions

about Stoic theory of personal identity and harm.]

3) Science tells us that when we are having mental

experiences our central nervous system is undergoing various

sorts of electro-chemical processes. But this does not mean

that science has offered an explanation of qualitative mental

states in physical terms--indeed, to the contrary, no scientific

theory that I know of employs qualitative mental terms in any

way whatsoever. In other words, science shows us that, for example,

when I feel pain my c-fibers are firing. But it does not show,

or even purport to show, that the qualitative experience of

pain somehow "is" the physical event of c-fiber firing. (Indeed,

I don't even see how that view can be made coherent.)

4) Ergo, materialistic theories based on modern science

must either:

4.1) deny that my experiences under '2' are accurate. That

is, hold that my thoughts, actions, etc. are really caused by

ordinary laws of Physics that involve mass, charge, etc. and

have nothing to do with things like "emotions" or "reasons"

(understood as qualitative states). (And that they "really

are" physical states.)

4.2) adopt qualitative mental states into the laws

of science, and explain how they can exert causal powers

qualitatively and still "be" physical things.

I know of no materialist who is conversant with modern

science and who thinks that scientific laws should be expanded

so that qualitative mental states are granted causal powers.

I know of no materialist who has coherently explained how the

qualitative mental states I experience can "be" (as opposed to

being correlated with) electro-chemical states. And so I am

left with:

a) The general idea that materialistic science has

explained a lot of things pretty well, along with the

firm but unproven conviction on the part of its advocates

that it's just a matter of time before it explains everything.

versus

b) My vast experience (under '2') of things that seem

to be caused to happen by things that do not seem to be

physical by any possible extension of the word "physical".

Given this choice, it seems rational to me to deny

materialism. Since, in addition, the truth of materialism

almost certainly entails that reason, morality, etc. are

illusory and utterly inert, and that all of philosophy

and, ironically, science are a waste of time, it will take

some substantial evidence for me to be converted.

Regards,

Grant

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This may be my last post on this subject--it's

too far away from Stoicism, and doesn't seem to be

going anywhere.

On 1/30/2012 8:57 AM, TheophileEscargot wrote:

>

> As I pointed out, a particle in motion exerts no force. A particle only

> exerts a force when it collides with something. You cannot tell the

*****

Agreed. I never said otherwise.

*****

> total force that will be exerted on the piston until you know which

> particles will collide with the piston. That depends on

> the/interactions/ between all the particles. Therefore, pressure is a

> property of the whole system since you can't calculate its value

> quantitatively until you know all the interactions.

>

> Nevertheless, it's still sort of true that "the pressure on the piston

> is caused by the particles hitting the piston". You can't calculate its

> value quantitatively, but it's still true that without any particles

> there would be no pressure. It's just slightly looser and less precise

> to talk this way.

*****

I don't know whether this makes a difference or

not, but I'm stubborn. Pressure is, by definition, the

force exerted on an object. What exerts that force?

Molecules striking the surface. What is the magnitude of that

force? The sum of the magnitude of the force exerted by

each striking molecule. I do not need to "know all the

interactions" between the molecules to calculate the value

of the pressure exerted--I only need to know which molecules

are striking the surface, and with what individual forces.

{Of course, in practice we neither know all the interactions

nor the individual molecules striking the surface. But in

theory we only need to know the latter, not the former.} Given

the gross inadequacy of our information about specific molecules

in ordinary situations, we treat "pressure" as if it were a

single quantity exerted by the group of molecules as a whole.

Hence, we employ formulae such as "PV=nRT", because we _can_

practically measure those variables. But in principle a

series of molecules fired at a surface without interactions

would exert "pressure" when they struck it.

*****

> In the case of Steve, his original statement was this:

> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sto ics/message/32851

>

> /"Theo I don't agree. You can only show a correlation, not

> causation, between third party observable physical phenomena and

> first person subjective mental phenomena./"

>

>

> Steve chose to use the language of causation. So I responded to him in

> similar language. This language isn't perfectly, literally accurate, but

> we seem to understand each other.

*****

You seem to understand each other because Steve was

asking a question and you answered it in a way that responded

to his question by totally distorting your view. It's like

the guy who tells his girlfriend that he spends time with her

because he loves her deeply and would be with her even if they

didn't have sex, and then when he gets home and his roommate

says "you just hang with her to get in her pants, right?" he

says yes. [Of course, he'd never say "yes". He'd say something

more crude. I'm abbreviating.] Both people "seem to understand

each other"--what does it matter that he has told them contradictory

things?

*****

> It would be kind of a dick move to complain about Steve's use of

> "causation" and insist we should be talking about "identity" instead.

> It's perfectly clear what he means, why get all pedantic about it?

> Better to just reply in the terms that he uses and we both understand.

*****

"A causes B" contradicts "A is identical to B". It would

not be a "dick move" to say to Steve "I'm not talking about

causation, I'm talking about literal identity", especially when

whether they stop getting the symptoms when the bacteria aren't

present), but that certainly doesn't mean that a staph infection

is synomymous with death (or that the _symptoms_ of a staph infection

in general are identical to a staph infection).

So your answer to Steve was not merely a case of using language

loosely, which it would indeed be pedantic of my to criticize. Your

answer to Steve contradicts your answers to me. Causation is much

easier to argue for than identity, and the philosophical consequences

of believing that the body causes mental states to exist are very

different from the philosophical consequences of asserting that some

bodily states are exactly the same thing as mental states. The

temporal correlation of brain and mental states may make a good argument

for causation (I think it breaks down ultimately, but it is a plausible

place to begin), but it makes no argument at all for identity.

Regards,

Grant

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