[Wittrs] Re: Stuart on Dualism (Emendation)
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:00:56 -0000
I was typing fast this morning because a lot was flying that I had to attend
to. In the course of that I left a number of typos in my precdeding post which
a more careful vetting by me would hopefully have dealt with. Most of them are
minor but at least one bit of text I wrote was confused and, therefore,
confusing.
I wish to clarify it here. Among other things, I wrote:
"'Property' like so many words can be used to designate a range of things
including colors and shapes of physical objects as well as propensities to
behave in certain ways, etc. We could say that it is a property of some
physical systems to cause consciousness under certain circumstances, but such a
'property' would not be a discrete thing we can observe and is thus not to be
understood as being causal. It's merely a way of describing certain
propensities of certain systems, etc."
Obviously when my text says "it is a property of some physical systems to cause
consciousness" and then, further down, "such a 'property' would not be a
discrete thing we can observe and is thus not to be understood as being
causal", I was not sufficiently clear myself.
Oy, what a grievous error. (Good thing I checked later on, when I had more
time.) The point I was making about the variant uses of "property" is still the
same but I, myself, obviously failed to write this clearly.
Background: The issue arose because Joe was maintaining that my position was
really either a variant of "property dualism" or a mind-brain identity claim,
neither of which I was willing to 'fess up to.
But I have always been willing to accept the suggestion that my approach
represents a kind of identity claim. I just want to be clear that it isn't what
is typically understood as "mind-brain identity". See the difference of the
meaning of "identity" in the following circumstances:
Logical Identity: A thing is the same as itself. (Anything that is defined as
one thing is the same as anything else defined as the same thing.)
Identical Twins: Two different organisms share a common genetic blueprint.
Identical Artifacts: Two or more different artifacts are made to the same
specifications.
Aspect Identity: Two sides of a coin (the head and tail of a given coin are
different aspects of the same coin).
My point is that certain processes in brains (and perhaps in other media) have
both observable features such as the electrical patterns created (and
observable via appropriate devices) and non-observable features (the features
we associate with being a subject). Thus my claim is one of identity but not
the sort of mind-brain identity that would lend itself to a claim that the
electrical firings in the brain are what we mean by our reference to a
subjective experience that might be associated with it. So logical identity
does not apply here.
I have also said elsewhere that I accept the use of "property" as being
equivalent to my use of "feature" or "characteristic" and, more, that Minsky's
description of consciousness as being a "system property" is one I could
certainly live with. But THIS use of "property" isn't what philosophers
generally mean by the term. A property as a feature is not necessarily anything
in the world as the color red or the shape of the ball might be. There are no
physical features we can point to. Instead such a property is best understood
as a tendency to do something, a propensity to do it, etc. On this view, there
is no dualism to be found here since there are not merely one or two such
properties to be found in the universe but a myriad of them. Thus it makes no
sense to speak of "property dualism" in this way.
The ONLY way it would make sense is if we were to say there are two basic
classes of properties, say the physical and the mental, within which the myriad
of actual features of the world are found but, in that case, if neither of
these classes could be reduced to the other, the claim would go beyond what I
mean by "property" to something more often discovered in traditional
philosophy, i.e., what Joe insists on calling "substance". That is, so-called
"property dualism" would be a claim that there are at least two separate and
distinct ontological basics.
Thus the claim that "property dualism" is different than "substance dualism"
hinges on whether it's really dualistic at all. If it is, the claims of
property dualism cannot be any different from those of substance dualism. But
if it is different, it cannot really be dualism.
(Now, hopefully, I have got this right and don't have to worry about proofing
it again, so will bite my tongue and click "send", hoping for the best.)
SWM
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