Monist vs. Dualist Experiment?

[bennyboy]

The difference would be that the zombie only processes information, while I both process and subjectively experience it.

Can you show this difference to be relevant?

More to the point - can you show that "subjectively experiencing" is qualitatively different than "processing information" rather than being a specific form of it? Or can you show the absence of "subjective experience" within a zombie?

Not at all. I can't show, or know, if there IS any difference. Given any physical structure or process, I cannot know for sure whether there is some kind of qualia "floating" around it.

If there's something special about the organic materials that is required for qualia, then a non-organic machine could never subjectively experience. If it's only the self-referential nature of the data being processed, as you've suggested in the past, then we might make something that really does experience, and doesn't just seem to.

But we could never know for sure that we had.

The fundamental error of dualism - which is the same one you commit in the rest of the argument - is rooted in this proposition. That the 'simplest observation of one's own experience shows that there's an "I"' - it tells you nothing about that "I"'s metaphysical nature. You don't know whether that "I" is a fundamental entity or a composite one. You don't know what it is made of. You don't know anything about its nature other than that it observes.

That's all correct.

Dualism makes the mistake of regarding it eliminatively and as a fundamental entity. It sees that "I" is not the body or the brain or thoughts or feelings etc - so it must be something separate from all that. And given that the existence of "I" is a brute fact, it must also be a fundamental and irreducible entity. These two suppositions result in the assumption of a secondary, non-physical, irreducible substance called "mind". But given that the assumptions are invalid, the conclusions regarding the nature of mind become invalid as well.

Given that ANY assumption is invalid, the conclusions based on it are invalid as well.

I don't think "I" is an assumption. I think it's a label for "whatever it is that thinks and observes." But I agree that assuming there's a self, unique to and separate somehow from the rest of the universe, is potentially a false assumption.

In substance dualism, my question is: how is it possible for mind and matter to interact? How, for example, does one move? What is the bridge? It seems to me there must be something which is partly matter and partly mind. If so, that duality is collapsed anyway, since there's now mind/matter, which is pretty much the monist's description of the brain.

Before asking that question, what you should be concerned about is "what is mind?". Without knowing what the bridge is being built between, talking about the bridge itself is pointless.

Super-accurate definitions aren't always necessary, in my opinion. If I say, "Mind is thinking and imagining 'n' sich," and others understand what I'm talking about, that's good enough. Whatever mind is and matter is, if they are unique substances which interact, we'd need some hypothesis about how such apparently unlike substances COULD interact. That's probably where the ideas of "will" and "soul" come in: there's a third-party which is neither mind nor matter but reconciles them. I'm not sure if that's the Catholic trinity, but it's A trinity.

In the case of physical monism, the problem is that science takes as its target observable properties of matter. Brain function is observable, but the mind isn't. Mind is not an observable property of matter, nor is it a necessary explanation of how any material system behaves. It doesn't MATTER (snerk) whether a brain has a mind: the mechanism from eye, to brain, to behavior can be traced along physical structures without reference to qualia.

'Observable' is what sense? In science, we infer the existence of an entity from the effects it causes - so, in that way, mind is very much observable from the effect called behavior. And given that certain behaviors - such as learning - require the existence of a mind, it does become the necessary explanation for that particular behavior.

Is this an existential argument, or a semantic one? It's often hard to tell when we're in this territory. Are you defining mind as "that which observes and learns?" Because this clearly begs the question. However, in a dualist view, I can't find a very satisfying definition either: "That which experiences qualia" begs the question in a similar way.