Monist vs. Dualist Experiment?

[Whateverist]

I'm going to be brief without going into requisite detail because it's been a long day and for that and other reasons, I'm not up to a complete response at the moment.

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It is probably accurate to say that it is impossible to prove monism or dualism to the satisfaction of most dualists, perhaps ever, but definitely for now. This has to do with a number of issues, one of which has to do with what is meant by proof, it's relationship to whatever truth is, and other epistemo-ontological questions. That being said, I don't think it's necessary to handle those questions at the moment. To my mind, at present, it is safe to say that the proposition that the mind is a product of the brain is a scientific fact, yet you need to be precise in your understanding of what the term 'scientific fact' means technically. A scientific fact is often misunderstood or rather ambiguously defined by most non-specialists. It does not mean that science has demonstrated what the truth is nor that what science says is the way reality is. A scientific fact is a hypothesis about the behavior of reality which, in conjunction with all necessaey auxiliary theories such as the theory of measurement and so on, is corroborated to a sufficiently high level that the possibility of the null or alternate hypothesis being true in spite of the corroboration meets a specific statistical improbability. This refers to type I and type II errors (type I in this case). There are a number of caveats to bear in mind. First, the hypothesis can be well corroborated and still be wrong, due to any number of things from an error in an auxiliary theory to ignorance of alternate explanations or the appropriate null hypothesis. Different sciences and different situations also call for different strength of statistical improbability, known as significance, and afaik, there is no hard and fast rule as to what is appropriate when. Moreover, from what I understand, if the exact mechanism by which the phenomenon occurs is unknown or implausible, it is considered appropriate to require greater significance in the result to consider the hypothesis to have been demonstrated. (E.g. As far as I know, the mechanism underlying the analgesic effect of acupuncture is not understood, but the effect is sufficiently strongly demonstrated that it is considered a scientific fact that acupuncture has these analgesic effects.)

Now, back to monism and dualism. There are legitimate philosophical questions still at large. At one of my philosophy groups, we spent a year or more in monthly meetings discussing topics in philosophy of mind, and many of the questions are subtle, deep, and dumbfounding, more so than at first blush it appears. The depth of the subject only truly revealed itself to me thanks to the stimulation of debate with people with different views, and I would not claim in any sense to have come close to mastering the subject. (If one wants to hit the ground running on the subject, I can't recommend Patricia Churchland's book Neurophilosophy highly enough. It doesn't solve all the issues, but rather furnishes a helpful untangling of some of the more fundamental philosophical questions. It's the best primer on the subject that I know.)

Again, back to the question, a friend at a philosophy discussion once said to me that neuroscience is "awash in a sea of data." By this he meant that there is a lot of detail known about mind and brain, but no overarching model or explanation which ties all the data together, makes sense of it, and explains the subject in question, the nature of mind and consciousness. (IMO) As noted, I don't think this is as big a scientific issue as it is essentially a scientific fact that the brain is the cause of the mind in the technical sense given above, but that certainly doesn't put either the scientific or philosophical questions to rest, especially in the absence of an actual mechaistic model of how the brain and mind are explicitly related, causally. The lack of an established model or complete theory is a problem for both science and philosophy. This is just my personal opinion, but I'm not a fan of the way the concept of 'emergence' is used, both by professionals and non-professionals, and imo, saying that consciousness is 'an emergent property of the brain' is little more than hand-waving the problem aside; that answer doesn't explain anything. It just replaces a puzzle with a vague, official sounding word. That being said, I still think physicalism as an explanation has virtues over dualism, but I'm not going to go into specifics here. (Read Curchland.)

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The key point is that dualism itself doesn't actually explain anything either; it's just kicking the can down the road. "A seperate substance is responsible for consciousness." "Well, how does that second substance give rise to consciousness?" "I dunno; it just does." Dualism is similar in that respect to a lot of arguments that seek to justify belief in a creator, but then fail to explain where the creator came from or how, or how he created everything, and by what process or means. It's the philosophy of mind equivalent of "goddidit," to my understanding. (Correct me if I'm wrong. How does this other substance give rise to mind, qualia, and consciousness?)

So my understanding in summation is, it is a scientific fact that the brain gives rise to the mind; however that doesn't really imply that we understand how, why, or in what sense yet. There are legitimate scientific and philosophical issues to be explored and answered. Monism doesn't have it completely in the bag, but it has many virtues over dualism, dualism has vices and problems that themselves are as daunting as those facing monism, and to my view dualism's problems are insurmountable; moreover, dualism itself doesn't really answer the question which motivates the positing of dualism in the first place. It just defers it, and tucks it safely inside some commonly accepted but likely vacuous metaphysical and ontological notions.

IMHO.

Agreed. To be even more terse and correspondingly less helpful, I would say the suggestion that the brain is a receiver for a phenomena that originate elsewhere which we don't know how to study .. amounts to a conspiracy theory. If consciousness is something we don't entirely understand then I am inclined to think it is the functioning of the material brain in response to the sensory world that give rise to these qualia. We can't rule out that qualia are a kind of mana from the gods which we receive through our skull meat, but for me that goes on the shelf reserved for far-fetched alternative explanations.

Aside from the fact that this alternative explanation is not disprovable Chad, can you think of any reason which would lead any reasonably thoughtful person to look beyond the material?