I'm not quite sure what point you're making here. That because we don't have a model for something physical, then it's not physical? — Uber

No, I was undermining your analogy between the mind/body problem and the problem of super-fluid states.

Should physicists believe that high-temp superconductors are not physical because they don't yet have a 'model' for explaining such phenomena? — Uber

No, but in the case of high-temp superconductors, there are no a priori reasons for thinking otherwise. It's not hard to intuitively accept that the properties of high-temp superconductors will fall out of the dynamical behavior of the substrate. Things are not so clear in the case of consciousness.

So the details still need to be finished, but the general idea is already there: consciousness is an emergent physical state. — Uber

I think that you are underestimating how counter-intuitive the materialist thesis is. It's not simply a question of dependency, but a question of identity. The form of materialism being criticized in the OP doesn't merely claim that the mind depends on the operations of the nervous system - even a dualist can accept that - but, that the mind is identical with said operations. You may believe that, but as the OP points out, it amounts to little more than faith at this point.

The article reviews his experimental results. Did you not read it? Or more accurately, were you not impressed because it happens to contradict some profound and misguided belief you happen to hold? — Uber

The linked article states:

1) "Damasio’s essential insight is that feelings are “mental experiences of body states,” which arise as the brain interprets emotions, themselves physical states arising from the body’s responses to external stimuli."

2) "His insight, dating back to the early 1990s, stemmed from the clinical study of brain lesions in patients unable to make good decisions because their emotions were impaired, but whose reason was otherwise unaffected—research made possible by the neuroanatomical studies of his wife and frequent coauthor, Hanna Damasio."

So:
1) Affect produces moods and emotions.
2) Brain damage affects emotions and decision-making.

And this is the empirical research you think establishes that mind is an emergent physical state? Right. We're done here.

I suppose we are. I have no great interest in debating your pseudoscience.

What does 'identical' mean to you? Because even I may not agree that the mind and the nervous system are "identical."

2,400 years of Platonist propaganda is not a good a priori reason to believe in dualism, any more than 2,000 years of Christian propaganda is reason to believe in deities and fairies.

Jacykow, materialists have indeed said things such as: What we believe is the consequences of neurons put together to form a kind of survival machine, as you put it. The problem is that they have no real evidence for the radical assumption that consciousness is some sort of illusion. Their claim that the brain somehow "fools" us is ad hoc and without any supporting evidence. It is far more likely that we think we have conscious experience because we actually do have conscious experience.

YouTube is betting their money on being able to predict the concious decisions of their customers.

It is far more likely that we think we have conscious experience because we actually do have conscious experience.

How does my belief in the existance of a thing make its existance more probable?

How does the nonmaterial interact with the material without being material itself?

How does the nonmaterial interact with the material without being material itself?

Bingo. This is the central problem with all philosophical doctrines that reject materialism. They posit one set of causal principles that exist and work in material reality and another set of causal principles that borrow from material reality but don't exist in material reality. It's just pure nonsense.

This is partly what the epistemological problem by Benacerraf was about, which to me constitutes a successful refutation of Platonic realism (and of dualism by extension). Quentin Smith also talked about this same problem in the context of theistic claims about causation.

It seems strange to say that brains contain our minds. When I look at another person having brain surgery, their brain is actually in my mind - as a representation of their mind. Brains are just models of other's mental processes, just as the sun is a representation of the fusion process. There are no objects, like brains and stars. There are only processes and our minds model processes as objects in order to categorize them.

Mind and matter are of the same "substance" because they interact. What is presumptuous is to label the primary "substance" as either mental or physical. It is neither. Mental and physical are simply different kinds of processes, which is why they are modeled differently, and appear different. We model our own mental process as consciousness, and other mental processes as brains, or neural activity.

Uber,

This is similar to your last post. First I want to point out that there are many different kinds of materialism, some not as rational as yours. You say that consciousness emerges from interactions among neural networks. Even assuming this is true, it does not mean that consciousness is physical. In fact, it appears that something non-physical has emerged from physical brains. This is really no stranger than life emerging from nonlife, something that appears to have actually happened.

Why do I think that the mind is non-physical? Well, for one thing, you cannot see any mental aspects or conscious experience when you examine a physical brain. This is one reason why many have thought these things to be mysterious, and they are mysterious in a sense, but it is an obvious fact that we really do have them. We sense mental aspects, such as feelings, thoughts, memories, and imaginings internally, while the physical world is external. What I am saying is that mental and physical are different and that nonphysical minds exist, but they are not so mysterious. They somehow emerged from the physical brain during the course of evolution. Consciousness itself is not so mysterious. What is mysterious is just how the brain creates it.

To say that something non-physical emerges from something physical is either a contradiction or an equivocation on the meaning of the word "emergence," which in this context was defined as the formation of new physical systems from the collective interactions among smaller physical parts of reality.

It's physics all the way up and all the way down. But the physical systems that emerge in reality, from life to nuclear fusion inside stars, can have very different collective interactions and arrangements of matter. Some systems are strongly interacting, others not so much. Some form under very extreme or unique physical conditions, others are less picky. Hence the reasons for the major apparent differences between them.

yatagarasu,

Thank you for being polite. Still, I think your view of history is a little off. I don't believe that science was formed within a materialistic mindset as you claim. It appears to me that modern science began with Copernicus, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and others of that time, which was well before materialism became ascendant in the twentieth century. Some have thought of Newtonian mechanics as being materialistic but this appears to be a overreach. (At least it is an overreach to think that it can be applied to absolutely everything, although admittedly many did.) Nonetheless, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, idealism was the dominant philosophy. It was only in the twentieth century that materialism became ascendant and got to be associated with science. Perhaps this somewhat oversimplifies, but it is certainly more correct than your assertion. It appears to me that science has recently gotten away from the scientific method where evidence and reason are important. Scientists have accepted some ideas, such as materialism, that are unsupported by the scientific method.

As for dual aspect theory, this is a theory that mental and physical are fundamentally the same, but still somehow different, so there is a sense that 2=1, which is obviously contradictory. At one time, I tried to make a kind of dual aspect theory work by holding that mind and brain are epistemically different and yet fundamentally the same. This appears to get around the contradiction, but it still does not work. For one thing, there is no real evidence that mind and brain are fundamentally the same. If they were, what would this fundamental unity look like? This appears to be even more mysterious than the brain causing conscious mental experience, and so it is even more mysterious than dualism. One of the main reasons dualism was widely rejected was because it was considered to be mysterious, and so it makes no sense to accept something even more mysterious. (By the way our ignorance of just how the brain causes conscious experience is not a good argument against dualism. It would be like saying that because you don't know why the sun is hot, it must not really be hot.)

Uber,

You are seriously confusing materialism and naturalism. I believe in naturalism. I believe that the internal mind and conscious experience evolved along with the brain through the process of natural selection, and thus the mind is natural although nonphysical. It appears that the joke is on you.

It appears to me that the mind did emerge from the physical brain. However, there is no real evidence that the mind is somehow physical. This is just something that some have assumed.

I am definitely not going to start a definitional war over physicalism, materialism, and naturalism. It's a war with no end.

The mind is natural

I will take this as some measure of agreement on the issue. I don't think our positions on the issue are very far apart at all. We may even have more in common than we let on during this debate.

Your puzzle analogy appears to be a good one. The mind is like a piece that won't fit into the materialistic puzzle. I think you're wise to caution us not to take a hard line approach. After all, no one knows just how the brain causes conscious experience. Still, I believe that those who dismiss the mind as an illusion or irrelevant are clearly wrong. It appears that a new kind of dualism is the best answer, but it will be interesting to see what happens from here.

I also believe that consciousness is an emergent state, but that does not make it physical. There is tremendous bias against dualism among neuroscientists. One might think that it is just a semantic difference, and perhaps there is some truth to this, and yet it really does appear to be more than that. A new kind of dualism is far more logical and likely.

You could not be more wrong in saying that materialism has won. In fact, it is on much shakier ground than it appeared to be in the 1950's. It's actually lost a lot of ground since then. See Nagel, Chalmers, Lanier, and McGinn to name a few. If we're still alive when they figure out how the brain causes conscious experience, then the joke will really be on you big time.

Fine the joke's on me. Naturalism has won instead.

You want evidence? How dare you? Just kidding. First, although many neuroscientists are biased against the mind, the idea that the mind emerged from the brain implies causation. Perhaps even Uber would agree with this. It appears that my main dispute with Uber is that he believes the mind to be really physical, which is actually contradictory. Mental and physical are in fact opposites. The mind is internal while the physical world is external. Thus, it makes no sense for the mind to be physical. This is why so many materialists have wanted to dismiss or eliminate the mind altogether. If the mind were really physical, then we wouldn't even be having this problem.
To clarify:
The mind consists of internal feeling, thought, perception, memory, imagination, and consciousness.
The physical brain consists of neurons, synapses, electrochemical activity and regions such as the hippocampus, frontal cortex, etc.

You've converted me to naturalism George! We agree now.

I'm done with this debate. The rest of you have fun.

Uber, I got the following from a quote you cited.

"Contemporary neuroscience has established a fundamental correlation between brain function and mental activity; the data support the basic monistic premise that human emotional and intellectual life is dependent on neuronal operations. This monistic perspective is associated with a philosophy of materialism."

The above quote demonstrates the basic problem, and some of the bias against dualism. Yes, there is a correlation between brain function and mental activity, but this actually supports dualism because these are two different things. To say that this supports monism is clearly biased. It assumes that because the mind depends on the physical brain, then it must itself be physical, but as I have already argued, that is not the case.

The thing I admire the most about you George is that you are perfectly happy to live with glaring and untenable contradictions. You are not a materialist, but you support naturalism (because of course there's a huge difference!). You cite people who disagree with you, and claim that they agree with you!

The finest example of what philosophers may call, "bullcrap." Enjoy your day.

In fact, it appears that something non-physical has emerged from physical brains. This is really no stranger than life emerging from nonlife, something that appears to have actually happened. — George Cobau

Does this mean that the same mechanism which caused life to emerge from non-life (how did it actually happen?) also caused mind to emerge from life?

If so, is this a new dualism, triplism, or quadruplism?

Thanks for being the only person on here to actually support me. I like what you said here.

"I think that you [Uber] are underestimating how counter-intuitive the materialist thesis is. It's not simply a question of dependency, but a question of identity. The form of materialism being criticized in the OP doesn't merely claim that the mind depends on the operations of the nervous system - even a dualist can accept that - but, that the mind is identical with said operations. You may believe that, but as the OP points out, it amounts to little more than faith at this point."

For Uber and his ilk to be consistent, they would have to think of the mind as being identical to the physical operations of the nervous system on some level, but that does not appear to be the case at all. Of course, conscious experience is caused by the physical brain, and yet it does not appear to be identical to the physical activity of neurons. Uber and others want to say that because the brain causes mental activity or mental activity emerges from the brain (which is really saying the same thing) then it must be physical, but that is not necessarily the case. In fact, it appears that internal minds and conscious experience are not physical, and that's why most materialists of the past have tried to either eliminate the mind outright or claimed that it is identical to the physical brain. When these strategies did not work, many have resorted to nonreductive physicalism, and yet this does not appear to work either.

The only theory that actually appears to work is a new kind of dualism where conscious experience is caused by neurological activity and yet is not identical to it. Because people hate the concept of the mental so much, perhaps it would be better to call this experience something else, but whatever you want to call it, there are clearly two very different and distinct things going on in the brain. Thus, the new dualism is the only theory that actually works and makes sense.

Wow, Uber, it appears that I got under your skin and you've gotten a little personal. I find that kind of amusing, both because I'm not used to these kind of online debates, and also, when I was younger, my cousin would make me mad, but now it seems that I'm on the other side.

First, let me assure you that my philosophy is extremely consistent, and if you don't see that, then it's you who do not understand. Second, there really is a significant difference between materialism and naturalism. I believe in evolution, and not in the supernatural. Of course, the mind has traditionally been conflated with the soul, but that is not necessarily the case. As I already pointed out, I believe that the mind evolved naturally even though it is nonphysical. I believe that it is extremely unlikely if not impossible that the mind (or soul) could survive brain death, given that mind and brain are intimately linked and connected. Third, I wasn't claiming that the person in the quote agreed with me. I was actually pointing out that he is wrong.

Yes, my philosophy is a little different. (That's why I call it the new dualism.) Still, I would recommend that you take it seriously and pay attention because what I say is probably right, and materialism is certainly wrong despite widespread acceptance. How do I know this? I've taken a long hard look at the history of this issue along with the logic and evidence of the mind. Much of the acceptance of materialism is based on faulty ideology and groupthink going back to the logical positivists and even before. In a way, it could hardly be more obvious once you really get it. You need to open your mind and realize that there is a real possibility that you could be wrong. The truth is not based on what so called experts think. It's ultimately based on logic, reason, and empirical evidence. Experts have been wrong before, and they are certainly wrong in this case.

I doubt that I will change your mind, and you probably think that I also have a closed mind, and yet that is not true. It is because I generally have an open mind that I was able to find what I believe to be the truth. One thing that we could probably both agree on is that your view is more mainstream, but in twenty or thirty years that may not be the case. GSC

You basically sound like a property dualist, which is not inconsistent with materialism. It's inconsistent with reductive physicalism. There's nothing "new" about your ideas. Don't flatter yourself.

You've reduced naturalism to belief in evolution. That's nonsense. Naturalism is a broad worldview that states only natural entities, interactions, and causes exist. Naturalism is entirely consistent with materialism. You can't really claim to reject materialism and support naturalism.

Furthermore, your dualism does not escape the epistemological problem. I pointed this out. You totally ignored it. Sounds about right. Do let us know when you move from the new dualism to the old trinity.

Hopefully in the next few decades, the tide will turn, and philosophers and scientists will come to their senses and accept the fact that we have internal conscious experineces that are different and distinct from neurologica activity. — George Cobau

But the general scientific position would be that the mind part of the equation is broadly some kind informational process. So for a long time, there has been a standard physicalist dualism which treats the mind as software running on hardware.

Now a lot more can be said about how to understand that. But the rival naturalistic metaphysics you have to argue against is the one that divides nature into matter and symbol. Folk feel pretty certain that the brain is some kind of information processing device.

This does make more sense than dividing the world into two disconnected kinds of substance - one that is inert matter, the other which is some kind of perceiving "soul stuff" ... that has no conceivable natural structure or laws, only the usual supernatural kind of existence.

Neuroscience knows for sure the brain does some kind of information processing. The structure of that has been mapped in laborious detail. That is what neuroscience does.

So on what grounds do you challenge a naturalism, a physicalism, which already recognises the further "surprise" of the possibility of information processing as part of what is nature?

Exactly right. George saying "different and distinct" means nothing in the context of this debate, because we all acknowledge conscious mental states are different than their corresponding neurons.

What does 'identical' mean to you? Because even I may not agree that the mind and the nervous system are "identical." — Uber

Identity is typically expressed in terms of properties - X and Y are identical just in case they have all of the same properties. From this perspective, it seems perfectly reasonable to speak about some particular quantity of high-temp super conductor being identical with a particular quantity of suitably manufactured oxides and carbonates. We might not understand how exactly how those preparations result in a material with superconductive properties, but there's not really any question of the plausibility of superconductive properties belonging to a suitably prepared material substrate.

Compare this to the case of the mind and the nervous system where there does not seem to be any overlap of properties whatsoever. The terms used to describe the nature and structure of subjective conscious experience seem to be completely disjoint from those used to describe even the most globally emergent properties of the nervous system. It's very difficult to see how the mind, with its apparent indivisibility, intentional orientation toward the formal and final objects of thought, privacy of perspective, capacity for conceptual abstraction and self-reflection, and other curious features, could ever fall out of a purely material analysis of any physical system. I would suggest that to pretend otherwise is simply to bury one's proverbial head in the sand.

I feel like my criticism was off and not worded properly. I meant to say that the current world is housed within the materialism of the 20th century. Which was influenced by the idealism you mentioned and those aforementioned philosophers in the 18/19th centuries. Mainly I was just try to say that while Materialism has been harmful in some ways, so has dualism. Thank you for correcting me about the history though. I should have been clearer. : ) An entire field, namely quantum mechanics, has started to venture into the realm of speculation in order to put together the parts and rectify some of the inconsistencies currently preventing a grand unifying theory from being formed. I have looked at that skeptically as well and wonder if it, similarly to topic we are discussing, has been slowed because the same people are looking at the same issues whilst trying to fit it into their pre-ordered templates. We need to challenge our conceptions to make headway. I think that's true of both questions of the mind and quantum mechanics.

That theory definitely seems to be violating any form of Occam's razor at the very least. I wouldn't throw it in the recycling bin but it's even harder to rationalize than any of the ideas we've discussed (as you mentioned). Thank you for answering. I know it can be tough to put together responses for all of these comments. XD But I appreciate it!

I agree that materialism faces massive conceptual difficulties when it comes to explaining the mind, but dualism faces many vexing problems as well. While we all have our leanings and biases, in my opinion humility dictates admitting that we simply don't know.