Dualism is true.

This was an excellent debate on this popular philosophical issue, and I'll be glad to debate with my opponent anytime again about something similar! Throughout this debate, my opponent has countered my claim that we can conceive of disembodied perception but I propose otherwise (obviously). My main task will not only to prove this, but to also reply to his cursory remarks about dualism (dualism's casual interaction problem notably) and whatnot. ==================== Remarks about incoherent, idealism's relevance, and substance dualism ==================== My opponent's defense of idealism's coherence is at fault mainly in how he views what would make an hypothesis incoherent. An obvious basic test is to see if idealism is logically contradictory - this should be obvious to do (can you imagine a three-sided square?). The problem with his criticism is that there is a much more rich way to spy out incoherences than to simply spy for any violation of the law of identity in it's barest form - it's still a logically serious criticism, but a little more thinking is needed to be done. He reminds me that "nothing here picks out any logical contradictions with a mind perceiving without a body - the objections deal with other issues in idealism which are only contingently false", which he emphasizes the point that there isn't anything logically contradictory about idealism. I would say this is undoubtedly false. As I've pointed out, there are logical criticisms of idealism. I don't want to flesh out Moore's criticisms, so let me introduce you to a very simple one to understand: Nietzsche's criticism of Kant's transcendental idealism as either begging the question or being tautologically true (which under Kant's framework is troubling given that any argument that has a necessarily true premise cannot make any synthetic a priori statements). As Nietzsche said himself, "all idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity." "To be a substance dualist all one would have to believe is that there is at least ONE property of the mind that is not reducible or supervienient on the body." ----> Which, in other words, means this other substance must be ONTOLOGICALLY different than the body (the physical). I would be as clear as mud for me to understand how you can demonstrate how something fundamentally distinct from physical things have any spatial properties to them. "I do, you are correct. What I am saying here is that a mind existing without a body is conceivable and therefore not impossible." ----> And in similar fashion, I will also redirect you to my previous counterargument about it being incoherent. We've gone into a little tangent about idealism, so let me wrap my criticisms of your first premise in a new section again: ==================== Is disembodied existence and perception incoherent and/or inconceivable? ==================== You claim not only that I haven't shown a logical incoherency in conceiving of disembodied perception, but that my argument from the inconceivability of disembodied perception is "a restatement (albeit a clever one) of the interaction problem objection against dualism." So let me reiterate my criticism with more force, and go further to explain why the interaction problem is much more deadly than you would pretend. As I've explained before, given the very nature of perception it would be incoherent to perceive something without a spatial relation to relate to. Again, I have utilized the argument by Everitt but you have yet to respond in detail: "The idea that I am seeing my environment presupposes that I have a location from which I do my seeing. . . Why should this matter to Swinburne's case? The reason is this: if the supposedly disembodied perceiver's experiences might all be hallucinations, there is no reason to think that the perceiver is located outside her erstwhile body [2]." As for your remarks to the interaction problem, I would argue that you are lessenning it's actual effects. The problem with ontologically different substances interacting isn't just an epistemic issue of simply not knowing, but evidence against your metaphysical thesis. If we have reason to doubt such an interaction can't take place (or is highly unlikely to), then your dualist thesis crumbles. And that is EXACTLY what the interaction problem does -- it doesn't point to some practical lack of knowledge we are in about dualist metaphysics, rather it points to a theoretical issue the substance dualist is prey to. For example, how wold the dualist account for the relationship between mind and body? We get pricked and we feel this pain from the mind, or we decide to move and the mind signals the body; there seems to be a direct relationship between the two and yet your hypothesis has a much more extravagant job to do by explaining this. It's been often noted that "physical objects are spatio-temporal, and bear spatio-temporal and causal relations to each other. Mental states seem to have causal powers, but they also possess the mysterious property of intentionality — being about other things — including things like Zeus and the square root of minus one, which do not exist[3]." The concept of a mental substance interacting with a physical substance is not simply an incredibly difficult epistemic problem, it's evidence against your position on theoretical grounds. It would seem prima facie, and even more, that such a causal relationship is absurd. ===================== Begging the question? ===================== "Now that's begging the question. You're simply assuming that out-of-body experiences are not really out-of-body." ----> Actually, I was ready to defend it on scientific grounds though it seems you didn't seem to want to defend such a controversial claim. There are many solutions[1] to explain it, and though there obviously isn't a unanimous theory many factors have been considered to be caused via tangible, scientific reasons. Needless to say, things such as out of body experiences or near death experiences have tangible scientific reasons for their occurrences, dispelling any notion of another "substance" coming into play. "It would not be begging the question if opponents of dualism grant premise 1 of the modal argument!" ----> Absolutely, but who is your opponent right now? That would me, and I obviously do NOT grant your the first premise :). You can't refer to what most physicalists will grant to be true and then imply I have the same rational obligations; this would be rushing the process much to quick and thus creating errors along the way. ==================== Conclusion ==================== I would like to remind my opponent and the audience on a slight tangent that personally, my main line of criticism would actually be the move from conceivability to possibility (as most philosophers do). I find it highly suspect that we can garner such a move from an epistemic act to a metaphysical possibility. However, I find the idea of attacking the very idea of disembodied perception as incoherent to be incredibly fascinating. While I was preparing for this debate and reading sources I came across interesting articles on precisely this criticism, so I decided to go "what the hell" and try this argument. While I am not entirely familiar or comfortable with it as I am with the criticism of conceivability to possibility, I do believe it still is strong enough to cast serious doubt on my opponent's argument. So there you go, I propose that disembodied perceptions is as incoherent of a thing to conceive as philosophical zombies; it's what Dennett calls "the most seductive error in current thinking." ---References--- 1. http://www.mindspring.com... 2. http://www.infidels.org... 3. http://plato.stanford.edu...