From: tycchow@riesz.mit.edu (Timothy Y. Chow)
Subject: Re: Dualism
Organization: None.  This saves me from writing a disclaimer.
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 92 23:17:31 GMT

In article <1992Sep11.013212.4413@math.ucla.edu> barry@arnold.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman) writes:

>As for twisting the meaning of 'possible' so as to make this argument 
>true---fine. But then you are no longer talking about the physical reality
>we live in. You are essentially saying there is a definition of 
>'possible' that makes the above true. Unfortunately, then you argument 
>concludes that disembodiment is 'possible' in this fictitious sense.
>Fine, but who cares.

The responses to Merriman's article that I have seen so far have ignored
this argument, which I think can be made to be plausible.  Rephrasing, I
think it goes something like this.

1. Many things that one can imagine are not physically possible.
2. If we interpret "possible" as "physically possible" then the first
   premise of the dualism argument fails.
3. The argument does not establish that it is physically possible for
   my mind to be disembodied.
4. The only kind of dualism worth caring about is, "It is physically
   possible for my mind to be disembodied."
5. Therefore the argument fails to support any kind of interesting dualism.

Here the most controversial step is likely to be 4.

>Here's a tip: the resolution to the 'mind body problem' is going to come
>from biology, not philosophy. Even at this early stage in brain
>biology we can start to get some solid ideas about what the 'mind' is.
>I suggest you get last months Scientific American, which was devoted
>to the brain. It'll straighten you out a lot more than such philosophical
>BS.
>
>Its pretty reasonable to assume the 'mind' is a biological entity, 
>not a philosophical one. 

A couple of people have dismissed these comments summarily, but Merriman's
view is rather prevalent, so it's probably worth explaining a bit more
carefully why it has flaws.

Consider a computer program, written in C.  What kind of entity is it?  Is
it an electronic entity?  Well, perhaps---but what about printouts of the
computer program?  We tend to say that those are also computer programs.  So
maybe a computer program is a sequence of ASCII characters.  Well, what
about a French version of the same program?  It's a different sequence of
ASCII characters, but it's still the same program, so maybe it's better to
say that a computer program is an equivalence class of sequences of ASCII
characters.  Further refinements might be necessary, but our definition of a
computer program is already mathematical, if not philosophical---and not
physical or electronic.

The analogy with "mind" should be clear.  Even if all minds that we know of
occur in human beings, this doesn't automatically guarantee that "mind" is a
biological entity in the same sense that "brain" is.  Some people think that
it is possible in principle to duplicate the mind of a human being on an
electronic (rather than a biological) substrate; this would suggest that
"mind" is not a biological entity but some kind of abstraction, just like
"computer program."

All this suggests that "mind" is one of those ill-defined philosophical
concepts that Barry Merriman so despises, and not a biological concept.

Though empirical data from biology has already had a profound impact on our
understanding of what "mind" is, the "resolution" to the mind-body problem
is going to be philosophical (if it ever happens at all), if only because 
the problem itself is a philosophical one (ill-defined as it may be).

By the way, Mr. Merriman, it seems that you adhere to some sort of
supervenience theory---that all facts about your mind rest ultimately on
physical facts.  Since this is a view held by many philosophers, perhaps
they are not all as stupid as you seem to think.
-- 
Tim Chow     tycchow@math.mit.edu
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs
30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh
only 1 1/2 tons.                               ---Popular Mechanics, March 1949
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech