It would be very easy to be a property dualist in the philosophy of mind if one were also a substance dualist. What I am having trouble understanding is how a property dualist can be a substance monist. In contemporary discussions, the one category of substances is that of material substances. Property dualism, then, is an abbreviated name for the position in the philosophy of mind according to which mental and physical properties are mutually irreducible -- hence the dualism -- but had by the only kind of substances there are, material substances. Hence the monism. But having employed the traditional jargon, Ill now drop the irridescent word substance which will undoubtedly cause many to stumble and use particular instead. A particular is an unrepeatable entity. It neednt be a continuant. Events and processes count as particulars. To come directly to my difficulty. How can an irreducibly mental property be instantiated by a physical particular? An irreducibly mental property is one that is not identical with, or reducible to, any physical property. Examples of mental properties: being in pain; thinking about Thanksgiving dinner; having a blue sensation; wanting a cup of coffee. This post assumes that at least some mental properties are irreducibly mental. Various arguments have been given; this is not the place to rehearse them. An irreducibly physical property is one that is not identical with, or reducible to, any mental property. Examples of physical properties: impedance, ductility, motion, solubility, weighing 10 kg. I will assume that all physical properties are irreducibly physical. (It is not that I rule out idealism; its that the goddess of blogging reminds me that brevity is the soul of blog.) To further focus the question we need to exclude relational properties. Weavers Needle has the property of being thought about by me now. So a physical particular has now an irreducibly mental property. But this is unproblematic because the property in question is relational: it does not affect the Needle in its intrinsic nature. But if my brain is what does the thinking in me, and I am thinking about Weavers Needle, it is not so easy to understand how my brain, a physical thing, can have the irreducibly mental intrinsic property, thinking about Weavers Needle. (If you think that is not an intrinsic property, substitute wanting a sloop, given that there is no particular sloop in existence that I want.) ... Colors and shapes are mutually irreducible, but they are also such that color properties cannot be instantiated without shape properties being instantiated, and vice versa. I am talking about colors and shapes in Sellars manifest image, colors and shapes as they appear to normal visual perceivers. No color is a shape; but it is also true that there are no colored particulars without shapes, and no shaped particulars without colors. This is a point of phenomenology. One cannot see a colored particular without seeing something that has some shape or other, and vice versa. (And this is so even if the particular is an after-image.) But only some material things are minds. So we have a disanalogy. Wherever a color property is instantiated, a shape property is instantiated, and wherever a shape property is instantiated, a color property is instantiated. But it is not the case that wherever a physical property is instantiated a mental property instantiated. There are plenty of physical particulars that lack mental features even if it is true that everything with mental features also has physical features. Why the asymmetry? This needs to be explained. ... The red ball analogy fails because only some physical particulars instantiate irreducibly mental properties. This is readily explainable if irreducibly mental properties are emergent properties. Emergent properties are system properties, properties of complex (biological) systems. But then the question arises as to what these emergent properties are properties of. They cant be properties of the parts of a system taken distributively any more than the property of weighing 1000 lbs. can be taken to be a property of the stones composing a wall taken distributively. So emergent properties are properties of wholes or collections of some sort. But this seems problematic.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 17:47:36 +0000
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