On Theism & Immaterial Minds

[Ben Davis]

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Hi Fallen, why the complication? It's much more simple than this: all the evidence that we have indicates that the mind is an emergent property of brain function. Further, there is no evidence in support of dualism. So I simply can't accept your first premise because if we were to assume dualism, we can speculate pretty much anything we like because there's no evidence for any dualist position.

Sorry if I'm missing the point!

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Even if mind is an emergent "property," that doesn't refute dualism-- it just teaches something about its nature, or about its relationship to physical structures.

As I understand, it does refute dualism. To go back to definitions, dualism is the idea that 'mind' (or 'soul'/'consciousness'/'spirit', depending on your beliefs) is separate from our physical bodies. Therefore, as 'mind' is demonstrably a property of 'brains', there is no separation consequently dualism must be false. Arguments that 'minds' use 'brains' as a conduit are based on the assumption that a mind is separate and further, those arguments even attempt to describe the behaviour of the 'mind' when there is no evidence to support such claims.

Even if you can find a 1:1 relationship between brain function and experience (which is so confidently assumed now and so poorly proven), there's still a problem: mind is a brute fact, and it is not objective; you cannot touch someone's mind, or even know if they are actually sentient (as opposed to being a machine which can fake sentience). Brain function, on the other hand, IS objective; you can play with it, monitor it, and do whatever science you want on it.

As I said a moment ago, the only evidence supports the position that there's a 1:1 relationship between brain function and 'mind'. There are no facts, brute or otherwise, to demonstrate the existence of 'mind', as defined in dualism.

One approach to this is simply to say that mind is brain function. However, saying repeatedly and confidently that things are equivalent doesn't make them so...

That's right, it's the factual evidence that allows us to state that it's most likely so.

...and science has a lot more assumptions than proof right now.

Nearly right, science still has many unanswered questions in regard to the nature of consciousness, interactions of matter & experience and the like; I'm not going to pretend that neurology is a field in which humanity has made substantial progress. However the progress we've made is significant. It puts the 'dualism' argument to bed for most people.

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Hi Fallen, why the complication? It's much more simple than this: all the evidence that we have indicates that the mind is an emergent property of brain function. Further, there is no evidence in support of dualism. So I simply can't accept your first premise because if we were to assume dualism, we can speculate pretty much anything we like because there's no evidence for any dualist position.

Sorry if I'm missing the point!

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I partly agree with you. I'm not so quick to dismiss dualism because I think the debate between materialism and immaterialism about the mind is fairly even. But what I was aiming to do was that if we accept immaterialism about the mind and we believe in a just, personal God, then we have a defeater for our combination of beliefs.

Cool. I understand. As you've probably gathered from my above responses, I side firmly against dualism based on the available evidence. IMO, until some factual evidence is presented in favour of dualism, there's not even any need to consider it as a viable argument.