From: holmes@opal.idbsu.edu (Randall Holmes)
Subject: Re: Dualism
Organization: Boise State University
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 15:38:39 GMT

In article <BvDny3.GGr@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
>In article <1992Sep28.150204.4237@guinness.idbsu.edu> holmes@opal.idbsu.edu (Randall Holmes) writes:
>
>> -- so your parenthetical
>>>explanation here won't do.  There is also the secondary question
>>>of why it feels like *that* rather than like *this*
>>
>>Everything is itself; you can't get further than that.
>>
>> -- it seems
>>>perfectly coherent that our blue experiences and red experiences
>>>could be systematically inverted, for instance.  Even when all
>>>the physical facts are in, it seems arbitrary why one kind of process
>>>is accompanied by this experience, and another kind by that one.
>>
>>It is arbitrary.
>
>Well well well.  It's arbitrary.  That's quite enough, as far as
>I'm concerned, to establish dualism.  Given the physical facts,
>the correspondence between physical facts and qualitative feels
>*could have* been that way, but *in fact* it's this way.  So
>this correspondence is a further fact.

No, that's not quite what I mean.  The "arbitrariness" has to do with
exactly what physical state represents what external factor (like
"blueness").  It is the same arbitrariness that goes into the
construction of the basic vocabulary of any language.


>
>Seriously, yours is turning out to be about most dualist of
>non-dualist theories that I've ever come across, all but
>acknowledging the distinctness of the properties in question
>and the lack of a conceptual entailment relation between them
>(although a bizarre, radically extensionalist epistemology
>stops you from putting it quite that way), but dealing with
>this by asserting a brute identity between these properties
>without any conceptual connection to back it up.  Qualia *just
>are* physical; don't ask why.

This is not true, but I despair of communication here.  It is more
accurate to say that I flatly deny the existence of "subjective
blueness" and the like as properties; I don't think that they are
"properties" in any meaningful sense.  Certainly they are
unanalyzable, as you have pointed out yourself.  There is something
going on there, but it is the simple presence of some thing, not a
"property" of anything, I think.  Blueness is a property of physical objects,
roughly correlated with reflection of certain wavelengths of EM
radiation; the subjective experience of "blue" is a quite different
creature.



>
>>>As I said in another post, evolution won't do as an explanation,
>>>as it will only get you as far as the current physical details.
>>>Evolution is irrelevant to the question of why *this* physical
>>>sructure gives rise to *this* experiential feel.
>>
>>Each physical structure is itself and not anything else...
>
>And there we go again...
>
>-- 
>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 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