Existence of the Soul

[pancreasman]

You said "There is no objective elements of your mind independent of your body. You can't have a mind without a body." If that is not materialism, what is?

A statement of the obvious as it appears. I am open to the possibility of an non-corporeal mind. I have just seen no evidence of one, direct or indirect. I think confusing the subjective with the objective is a category error.

[ZackMartin]

A statement of the obvious as it appears.

What's obvious to you isn't necessarily obvious to me, and what's obvious to me isn't necessarily obvious to you.

I am open to the possibility of an non-corporeal mind.

Good to hear.

I've heard some materialists say, the mind is like the software and the brain is like the hardware. But software isn't corporeal. I think even many materialists agree that the mind is non-corporeal. The real argument is about whether the existence of hardware is necessary for the software to exist.

Seen the movie the Matrix? Read Nick Bostrom's paper, Are You Living In a Computer Simulation? Not saying its true, but we don't know for a fact that it isn't. But, if it is true, then what we think of being the "hardware" actually isn't hardware at all, it's software (virtual hardware); but still the materialist will insist, the hardware must be somewhere, it can't be software all the way down ("all the way down" in nested virtualisation). The idealist says - everything is software, even the hardware is software - virtual hardware sure exists, but the "real hardware" is non-existent.

I have just seen no evidence of one, direct or indirect.

Here's a question for you - do you believe in unobserved matter? Would the universe still exist if there was no intelligent life to observe it?

Materialists have this belief in unobserved matter, despite having no evidence for its existence. The only matter we know exists is that which we have observed to exist.

So it seems to me that we have materialists demanding evidence for mind without matter, and the idealists demanding evidence for matter without mind, and none seems to be forthcoming for either. Is agnosticism the answer?

And then there's you, who isn't a materialist, but happens to say many of the things they do, so even if you aren't one, you are still closer to being one than you are to being an idealist.

I think confusing the subjective with the objective is a category error.

Possibly. Depends on what exactly "objective" and "subjective" mean, and which pigeonhole the things we are discussing (like mind, matter, etc.) fall under.

Zack

[pancreasman]

Since you want to avoid talking about actual evidence at all costs our conversation is pointless.

[ZackMartin]

Since you want to avoid talking about actual evidence at all costs our conversation is pointless.

I think its pointless because you seem unwilling to consider the possibility that your assumptions might be wrong.

[pancreasman]

I think its pointless because you seem unwilling to consider the possibility that your assumptions might be wrong.

lol. Pot. Kettle.

[Seasanctuary]

I know about three philosophical arguments that are used to prove the existence of the soul. What do you think about these arguments?

I'm going to treat these as arguments against physicalism.

1. The Argument from Intentionality
All of us have thoughts and those thoughts are about something. For example, if you are thinking of baseball, then you are having thoughts about baseball. The idea that your thoughts are about something is called “intentionality.” In other words, your thoughts have the quality of “aboutness” and “aboutness” is called “intentionality.” Your thoughts refer to things outside of themselves. Your thoughts transcend themselves and your mind as they refer to people, places, or things. This quality of aboutness or intentionality is something that physical objects do not have. Physical objects do not refer outside themselves in the same way that thoughts do.

I think they can. Consider a robot that maps its environment. Wouldn't that robot's internal representation of its environment count as having the quality of "aboutness"?

2. Mental phenomena are not identical with physical entities
There are things that are true of mental phenomena, which are not true of physical entities like neurons. Physical entities like neurons are spatially located, but one’s beliefs, thoughts, and desires are not. Physical entities have physical properties such as electrical charge, mass, volume, and so on, but mental phenomena do not have those properties. It makes no sense to say that my thought of San Francisco is two millimeters long or that it is located one millimeter away from my right ear or that it has a certain weight and smell.

It also doesn't make sense to say my sandwich has quantum spin or that its quarks have a taste.

3. The Knowledge Argument developed by Frank Jackson
Suppose there is a scientist who spends her entire life in a black and white room and she never sees color. She learns everything there is to know about how people perceive color. She learns about all of the brain states that are related with perceiving color. If she were to step out of the room and observe colorful things such as a rainbow, a multi-colored jacket, and so on would she learn something new? The answer is “Yes.” Having firsthand experience of seeing color is not identical with knowing the physiology of seeing color. One’s subjective experience of what color looks like does not have the same properties as one’s knowledge of the physiology of seeing color. If they had the same properties, then the scientist would not learn anything new upon leaving the room and seeing different colors.

I actually tend to agree with this, because I don't see how conscious experience could possibly arise from physical structure. However, other thoughtful people have considered problems like this and fail to share my intuition. Nor have I seen any especially good arguments which do more than appeal to the same sort of intuitions (unhelpful!). So while I personally hold back from going full physicalist, I can't blame others for embracing physicalism until its skeptics come up with more than emphatic gesturing.

[GioD]

Actually, I think dualism has a problem that materialism and idealism lack. Dualism needs to explain how mind and matter come to interact, despite being separate and independently existing things. Neither materialism nor idealism have this problem, since the interaction of two things is trivial to explain when one of them is reducible to the other - it turns into the more basic one interacting with itself. For this reason, I think dualism has a greater burden to overcome than materialism or idealism.

I think your question is a good one, and poses a serious problem to Cartesian Dualism. However, I think the question is answered, while keeping the best of both Cartesian Dualism, Idealism and Materialism, very well by the Thomistic view of the soul - this says, basically, that the soul is what makes the human body be a human instead of a chunk of meat or, to reduce it even further, a set of chemicals. Aquinas also believed the soul had some traits of its own, which were essential to humanity, making most of the arguments for Cartesian Dualism and some for Idealism also apply to his view.

But anyway, the soul requires the body to be made of the right things put together the right way to express itself properly, so this solves the problem you pose - if the body's not put together right, then the soul can't express its traits properly. So while the soul is separate from the brain, part of the brain being destroyed would inhibit the soul's ability to express itself in matter.

Note this is a very simplified form of my already highly simplified understanding of it, for a fuller treatment I advise Edward Feser's "Philosophy of Mind" (which introduced me to the concept) and the works of St. Thomas and Aristotle themselves. Of course, I'm just putting up my ideas, to see what others have to say.

[pancreasman]

I think your question is a good one, and poses a serious problem to Cartesian Dualism. However, I think the question is answered, while keeping the best of both Cartesian Dualism, Idealism and Materialism, very well by the Thomistic view of the soul - this says, basically, that the soul is what makes the human body be a human instead of a chunk of meat or, to reduce it even further, a set of chemicals. Aquinas also believed the soul had some traits of its own, which were essential to humanity, making most of the arguments for Cartesian Dualism and some for Idealism also apply to his view.

But anyway, the soul requires the body to be made of the right things put together the right way to express itself properly, so this solves the problem you pose - if the body's not put together right, then the soul can't express its traits properly. So while the soul is separate from the brain, part of the brain being destroyed would inhibit the soul's ability to express itself in matter.

Note this is a very simplified form of my already highly simplified understanding of it, for a fuller treatment I advise Edward Feser's "Philosophy of Mind" (which introduced me to the concept) and the works of St. Thomas and Aristotle themselves. Of course, I'm just putting up my ideas, to see what others have to say.

I'd be interested in what some of those traits of the soul might be. It also sounds a little to me like a form of vitalism where life itself is regarded as an other than natural phenomenon. Given the fuzziness of the life/non-life boundary I'm not convinced such a position has merit. Or would you regard this distinction as applying to humans only and separating humans as distinct from all other life?

[ZackMartin]

I think your question is a good one, and poses a serious problem to Cartesian Dualism. However, I think the question is answered, while keeping the best of both Cartesian Dualism, Idealism and Materialism, very well by the Thomistic view of the soul - this says, basically, that the soul is what makes the human body be a human instead of a chunk of meat or, to reduce it even further, a set of chemicals. Aquinas also believed the soul had some traits of its own, which were essential to humanity, making most of the arguments for Cartesian Dualism and some for Idealism also apply to his view.

Sure, one might be able to solve the problem of interactionism - many dualists have proposed solutions, like the one you cite and others, none of them seem particularly convincing to me, but maybe I am wrong about them and one of them is right. All that really does is pull the probability of dualism back up to be equal to materialism and idealism once again, more evidence would be needed to conclude that dualism is more likely than idealism or materialism.

From the perspective of the principle of parsimony (all else being equal, the simpler theory is more likely to be true - Occam's Razor) - it seems that the monistic theories of idealism and materialism have the advantage over dualism - proposing one fundamental type of entity seems to be simpler than proposing two. So, as well as the problem of interactionism, the principle of parsimony is an additional hurdle which dualism must overcome but which idealism and materialism need not.

I actually think parsimony prefers idealism overall. According to materialism, the universe contains a certain information content, but we can divide that information content into two parts - that which will become known to some mind at some point in the history of the universe - and that which no mind will ever know. Now, the information which some mind will know eventually is far less than the total information in the universe. (Objection: How to define "mind"? Response: It doesn't really matter here, since even though there are multiple reasonable ideas about what constitutes a "mind", the conclusion is the same for all of them.) Thus, according to materialism, the universe contains far more information than any mind can know. Whereas, according to idealism, only information observed by some mind actually exists, so the real information content of the universe is far less than what a materialist believes it to be. So, it would seem, that by the principle of parsimony, idealism is a far simpler theory (it posits the universe contains far less information), and hence all else being equal, we should prefer idealism to materialism.

However, whenever I raise this argument, it very quickly descends into a debate over whether I am using "the principle of parsimony" or "Occam's razor" correctly. The reality is, most people agree that some such principle is correct, but when we drill down to the level of how to precisely formulate that principle, the initial agreement evaporates.

Zack

[GioD]

I'd be interested in what some of those traits of the soul might be.

Aquinas names memory, intellect, and will as borne by the human soul, in addition to some of the traits borne by lower animal and plant souls, which I can't name off the top of my head, haha.

It also sounds a little to me like a form of vitalism where life itself is regarded as an other than natural phenomenon. Given the fuzziness of the life/non-life boundary I'm not convinced such a position has merit. Or would you regard this distinction as applying to humans only and separating humans as distinct from all other life?

I don't think it's a form of vitalism. Hylomorphism certainly acknowledges that the body or "natural" aspect of living is present (perhaps more so than the Cartesian dualist), it merely states that what gives us our identity is the form, which is the soul in humans (according to Thomists). What makes something alive can be purely chemical, but what gives it its identity is its form. Non-living things also have form according to the theory, though obviously not with the traits St. Thomas said we have.