From: holmes@opal.idbsu.edu (Randall Holmes)
Subject: Re: Dualism
Organization: Boise State University
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 16:15:37 GMT

In article <BvDD62.Gur@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
>In article <1992Sep28.151204.4333@guinness.idbsu.edu> holmes@opal.idbsu.edu (Randall Holmes) writes:
>
>>By asking for an "entailment", you _assume_ a difference between the
>>two sets of phenomena.  I claim that there is no reason to assume such
>>a difference.
>
>This is just silly.  The fact that John is a bachelor entails the
>fact that John is male, without this implying any kind of dualism
>about John.  Similarly, I've outlined at length how the physical
>facts about a dog, say, can entail the fact that it is alive.  This
>doesn't assume or imply any kind of dualism about life -- it just
>implies an intensional difference -- that the dog's being alive, as
>a fact to be explained (or as a *phenomenon*) is a different fact
>to be explained than the dog's microphysical constitution (as evidenced
>by the fact that it's possible to explain one without explaining
>the other, although in this case an explanation of one can easily
>yield an explanation of the other).
>
>All I've been asking for is the same kind of entailment for qualia
>as it's straightforward to give for life, or for tables, or for
>learning, or for just about any other property around.  And that's
>what nobody, manifestly, has been able to give.  I suggest that
>this is prima facie evidence that with qualia, something very
>different is going on.
>
>-- 
>Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
>Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
>"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."

The point is that there is NO new principle involved in the
entailment; identity is a special case of entailment!  What you are
suffering from is a linguistic problem!  Your continuing to maintain
that qualia are something different from the bare physical reality of
part of your brain is formally exactly analogous to a vitalist
agreeing that all the physics works out just right inside the dog, but
the "vital principle" still _must_ be there, over and above the
microphysical processes.  A sign that this is the nature of the
problem is that we seem to agree precisely on the nature of the
physical reasons why people profess to have qualia.  I think that a
complete explanation of all discussions of qualia is a complete
explanation of qualia; your explanation uses nothing non-physical, so
nothing non-physical is involved with qualia.  In any event (and this
is the main point, _not_ the defense of my "physicalist" position)
your argument from "possible worlds" is definitely invalid.

Observe that if you adopt a convention that every reference to qualia
is translated by a reference to the correlated physical event with the
same structure, the whole question disappears.  Qualia are identical
in structure (the only _intelligible_ aspect of anything) with part of
the physical world; if this hypothesis (with which you seem to agree!)
holds up, there is no longer any reason to maintain that there is any
difference between the qualia and the physical events.  There is
certainly no reason ever to _refer_ to the ghostly realm of qualia,
since the corresponding part of the physical world gives us the same
information (and it gives us the same information about our subjective
experience that an appeal to qualia would, too -- experiences of
subjective qualities carry no information (_try_ explaining blue to a
blind man)!)  I certainly agree that God could create a world in which
we would be forced to conclude that the local analogues of "qualia"
were nonphysical -- the reason for this conclusion would be that we
could find no correlated physical facts.  But we do not seem to live
in such a world. 

-- 
The opinions expressed		|     --Sincerely,
above are not the "official"	|     M. Randall Holmes
opinions of any person		|     Math. Dept., Boise State Univ.
or institution.			|     holmes@opal.idbsu.edu
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech