Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[GrandizerII]

@GrandizerII

I’d never heard of properly dualism before. How can one distinguish between physical properties and mental properties? If both are made of the same physical “substance” so to speak, what, exactly, differentiates them from one another? Is there a mechanistic explanation? I’m not sure I quite understand.

Ok, since it's LFC, I'll post one more reply here:

This is what property dualism, in crude terms, entails: in a sense, the brain is not only physical, but mental. That's because things, at the fundamental level, are both physical and mental.

How can one distinguish between physical properties and mental properties?

I don't know if you can make a clean distinction between physical and mental, but generally speaking, think of it this way. You can go about doing proper science with physical properties from a "third-person perspective" (you can measure the perimeter of a floor outline, manipulate the temperature of water, and add more balls to a set of balls to increase the number). In the context of neuroscience, when you observe the firing patterns of neurons in someone's brains via the technologies we use to detect these patterns, we are observing physical properties here. You will not be able to see one's actual experiences through such a procedure, but you could nevertheless predict what they may be experiencing by observing these patterns.

Mental properties are what you can readily "sense" from a first-person perspective, but are not readily available for others to do direct science with. These properties are to do with one's experiences of the things they observe (such as the color of a golden apple or the feeling of pain when they stub their toe). Other people have to rely on your report of these experiences to have some idea what they are like from your perspective. Otherwise, the most they could do is make predictions about what you experience based on what they themselves experience when observing the same objects.

Is there a mechanistic explanation?

No, but then again, not even the pure physicalist has a mechanistic explanation for consciousness. They may say they do, but what they end up doing is explaining something different and not linked to consciousness itself (in the phenomenal sense).

Property dualism basically is a philosophical position one may adopt as a response to the hard problem. The issue I'm noticing is that one side is starting from what feels obvious to one's self (i.e., phenomenal consciousness) and then going from there, realizing that yes, there does appear to be a hard problem when one thinks hard about it. Another side is starting from what science has shown us thus far, thus coming at this with a highly optimistic faith that science (as it is now) will also eventually solve the apparent problem of consciousness, and thus never having to concern themselves too much with any hard problem.

The former side is thinking "yeah, seems like there is a qualitative difference, we should take this observation seriously". The latter side is thinking "it's to do with complexity, man, nothing more; don't worry, we got this!"