Substance Dualism is true

I’ve never done a devil’s advocate debate for dualism before, but I hope to be able to defend the position. As Con quoted dualists fall into different camps. I will simply defend the thesis that the mind and the body are two different, distinct metaphysical entities. The Zombie Argument This argument here can be formed in this syllogism. (1) If P-zombies are possible, then the mind isn’t physical. (2) P-zombies are possible (3) The mind isn’t physical. C. Substance Dualism is probable. In philosophy, zombies are hypothetical creatures that act like conscious beings, but aren’t. Chalmers describes zombies as “physically identical to a normal human being, but completely lacks conscious experience. Zombies look and behave like the conscious beings that we know and love, but "all is dark inside. " [1]. The important part about P- zombies is that if they are possible, then it would follow that that the mind doesn’t have physical properties. Premise 1 Why is that the case? Think of it this way, if Mr. Barack and Mr. Obama refer to the same thing, does this mean it’s possible for Mr. Barack to be someone else other than Mr. Obama? No, it’s contradictory by definition. If it’s possible, then Mr. Barack must not have been Mr. Obama in the first place. This is the basic Law of Identicals drawn out by Leibniz. Which states [2] “(i) Ifx is identical to y, then for any property x has, y has and for any property y has, x has. “(ii) If for any property x has, y has, and for any property y has, x has, thenx is identical to y. ” If x= the mind and y= the physical we can understand why the first premise is true. Furthermore, Dr. Torin Alter states that “And most [philosophers] agree that if zombies are metaphysically possible, then physicalism is false” [3] Greg Restall and Francesca Poggiolesi also write in "New Waves in Philosophical Logic” that there is a wide consensus in philosophy about the systems of modal logic and the correctness of Kripkean interpretations. What’s debated is the way to understand what it means to prove statements [4]. The important part is that premise one follows from Kripkean modal logic [5]. Source [5] also states that even people who don’t agree with the conclusion of this argument nonetheless have a “Kripkean backdrop” [ibid], therefore they accept premise 1. This is a valid appeal to authority [6] ,as the authors meet the qualifications for such an argument [7][8][9]. Premise 1 is justified. Premise 2 This premise seems to be a modest claim. What it means to be possible is “Able to be or become; potential:” [10] It seems that there could be p-zombies, since there’s no contradiction in the idea. In order for something to lack potential is for something to be contradictory. If nothing is restricting some proposition, it is able. If there existed every possible reality, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why there wouldn’t exist p-zombies in one of them. This means philosophical zombies are possible. Premise 2 is justified. Premise 3 & conclusion. Premise 3 therefore follows from the previous 2 premises. The final conclusion also follows, as it would mean the mind and body are two separate things. The resolution is affirmed The Knowledge Argument The knowledge argument presented by Frank Jackson details a story about Mary [11]. She is a neuroscientist who has spent her whole life in a black and white room. She has come to learn everything there is to know about the neuroscience of color. Looking at your brain scans, she can tell if you’re looking at color and what color you’re looking at. All physical facts about color are known to her. However, we notice, she doesn’t actually know what color is. When she frees herself from this room she learns something new, what color actually is. If the mind and physical were the same thing, she should’ve already known what color is, as she had all physical facts about color. Since she clearly didn’t know what color is, we can conclude mental information isn’t physical. The argument can be formulated like this [12] (1) Mary has all the physical information concerning human color vision before her release. (2) But there is some information about human color vision that she does not have before her release. (3) Therefore, not all information is physical information. The resolution is affirmed. Now to Con. Sources [1] . http://consc.net... [2] . http://www.oberlin.edu... [3] . http://www.disputatio.com... [4] Restall, Greg, and Gillian Kay Russell. New Waves in Philosophical Logic. Chapter 3 Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print. [5] . http://plato.stanford.edu... [6] . http://www.nizkor.org... [7] . http://philosophy.ua.edu... [8] . http://shaps.unimelb.edu.au... [9] . https://sites.google.com... [10] . http://www.oxforddictionaries.com... [11] . http://home.sandiego.edu... [12] . http://ocw.mit.edu...