haggholm | Mental—in the British sense (Reply)

Over at this blog, an anonymous poster quoth as follows below, and I find it strange and simultaneously amusing and disheartening that people apparently believe in this stuff, according to this reasoning.

Hi ReligionProf, I am paraklete from uncommondescent.com...

I really think that the mind-as-emergent property-of-matter view needs to be thought through some more. When we consider all the different views, from reductive materialism to dualism to emergentism, we need to bring in background information to help us determine which view makes the most sense. From what we know of matter, that it is basically "stuff" that follows natural laws, it is as you know very difficult to see how mental properties - non law like properties - could "emerge" from physical properties. This difficulty does not just appear to be our inability to imagine it, it seems to be based on the very nature of the two phenomena, mental and physical. Not only that, but there's the question of how a network of matter can unify itself into a single stream of consciousness - the "I".
Now on the flip side, when we consider dualism, I believe we have some interesting background information to consider. First, we have a virtually universal ability to conceive of minds without bodies. The vast majority of the world actually believes in minds without bodies, whether it be angels, demons, ghosts, dead ancestors, out of body experiences, and the near universal belief in life after death. Next, we have religious sources telling us about minds without bodies. From the Bible, which you cited regarding Adam, we have a consistent belief in dualism, contrary to what you stated. The psychosomatic unity conception does not at all contradict dualism, for there are forms of dualism that see a deep interweaving of the body and the soul, most notably Thomistic dualism, a view defended by J.P. Moreland in "Body and Soul." For a book that lays out the dualism found in the Bible, I recommend "Body, Soul, & Life Everlasting" by John W. Cooper. Indeed the Hebrew conception of Sheol clearly implies dualism. And Jesus himself was a dualist (e.g. Luke 16:19-31)
So in my opinion, I think the background information should lead us to a dualist view. The only criticism that I have seen against dualism is the "ghost in a box" argument, which basically asks how spiritual substances can interact with physical substances. There does not appear to be any mechansim linking the spiritual to the physical. But I think this is a weak objection, because a child has no problem conceiving of a spirit acting on the physical world, and never does a child think, "Wait, what mechanism is there for this interaction?" The demand for a mechanism is circular reasoning, I think, for a mechanism is itself a physiconcept.
Anyway, those are my thoughts, and I appreciate how you have shared your thoughts with a respectful tone.

What's wrong with this argument, then? Let's go back for a second look…

From what we know of matter, that it is basically "stuff" that follows natural laws, it is as you know very difficult to see how mental properties - non law like properties - could "emerge" from physical properties. This difficulty does not just appear to be our inability to imagine it, it seems to be based on the very nature of the two phenomena, mental and physical.

I am amazed that someone can write out an apparently thought-out argument with this sort of content. Here, he is arbitrarily and a priori assuming that mental phenomena are not physical—referring to mental properties as non law like. In fact, he is using this assumption to further his argument that—mental phenomena are not emergent properties of physical phenomena! This is a circular argument, a tautology: Because A is true, it must be the case that A is true.

By what reasoning, that does not start with the assumption that dualism is real, can you arrive at the conclusion that it is so? What premises based on observable reality can take you there?

The rest of the stuff (to which I replied over yonder) is less interesting.

Now on the flip side, when we consider dualism, I believe we have some interesting background information to consider. First, we have a virtually universal ability to conceive of minds without bodies. The vast majority of the world actually believes in minds without bodies, whether it be angels, demons, ghosts, dead ancestors, out of body experiences, and the near universal belief in life after death.

—Which tells us that dualism is something that it is easy and tempting to believe in. That does not imply that it is therefore true: It is easy and tempting to believe in a flat earth, too.

There does not appear to be any mechansim [sic] linking the spiritual to the physical. But I think this is a weak objection, because a child has no problem conceiving of a spirit acting on the physical world, and never does a child think, "Wait, what mechanism is there for this interaction?"

Nor does the child think Wait, how can Santa Claus visit all the world's children in a single night? (Well, eventually the child will; it's called growing up. Chew on that one…)

How can you seriously use "children believe it" as an argument for the truth of a statement?

Never mind the religious and supernatural implications. The true tragedy is that this is apparently what to some people passes for intellectual discourse.