From: epfaith@sunkist.berkeley.edu (Edward Paul Faith)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Dualism
Date: 11 Sep 1992 11:43:39 GMT
Organization: U.C. Berkeley Math. Department.
NNTP-Posting-Host: sunkist.berkeley.edu

Writes chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
in article <BuDoJ5.MDM@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu>:


>(1) It's logically possible that there could be a physical replica
>of me without any conscious states.
>
>(2) Therefore the existence of conscious states is a further fact,
>over and above the physical facts (i.e. it is contingent relative
>to the physical facts).
>
>(3) Therefore dualism is true.
>
>If there's anything wrong with this argument, it has to be at premise
>(1).  I confess that this premise seems obviously true to me, but
>some people would deny it.  It is contingent on those people to
>provide some kind of demonstration of how the physical facts
>could possibly logically entail the facts about consciousness,
>but such suggestions are usually manifestly unconvincing.  In
>virtue of what kind of physical properties is consciousness
>logically necessitated?  Suggestions usually revolve around
>discrimination of stimuli, or verbal reportability of mental
>states, but it seems clear that all those things are logically
>compatible with the absence of conscious experience.

I would say that, as far as we know for sure, consciousness is
not physical.  When we see a doughnut, we see at the same
time its physicality.  When we introspect, we do not see
our physicality.  We only see physicality when we look in the
mirror, and we are free to say that what we see in the mirror
is different from what we find when we introspect.

So we have two different ways of seeing.  We can look into
our brain via CAT scans, but we are free to say that what we
see on the screen is different from what we find when we
introspect.

Compare these two ways of seeing (introspection and looking
outwards) with two ordinary senses, for example, touch and
sight.  When we see objects, we are confident that we can
touch them, and that therefore what we touch is the same
object as what we see.  But what if this were not the case?
What if it were as if our eyes were in one world and our
hands in another?  We could never see our hands, and our
hands would not touch anything we saw.  It may never occur
to us to match up the physicality of what we touch with the
physicality of what we see.  We might say that we were
aware of two physicalities, the touch physicality and the sight
physicality, and furthermore, we might have no idea that
there was a common property that touch-things shared with
sight-things, namely, physicality.  We might
have no idea that a round ball as touched was in any way
related to a round ball as seen.  Then one day we might
discover that all along we had been wearing mini TV sets
over our eyes which were connected to a robot located far
away from our bodies...

Until that moment of revelation, we might be touch/sight
dualists.  We imagine that there are two ways of being real, a
touch way and a sight way.  A thing can either be touched (or
some touch physical apparatus can discover its existence and
tell us via touch) or else it can be seen (or some sight
apparatus can tell us via pictures that it exists in the sight
world--let us not worry how we make these latter machines).
We imagine that we are aware of two ways of being real.  We
have no reason to suppose they share something in common.
Logically, it is possible for the two kinds of existence to be
separated.  But to someone with integrated sight and touch,
such speculations are nonsense.  There are not two kinds of
existence, but merely two kinds of perception!

So here is my idea:  someday, when we are able to
manipulate the brain however we like, our introspection will
become integrated with our physical senses, and we will
cease to think that the mind has a different sort of reality from
the brain, and we will laugh at ourselves for having fretted so
much about the mind/body dualism, when the only duality
was one of unintegrated ways of perceiving.