Another day, another debate: physicalism vs. dualism with Bob Smith

As promised, yesterday I debated a fellow named Bob Smith on a question upon which I've already cogitated several times: whether physicalism (the view that the mind is essentially a physical phenomenon) or dualism (the view that the mind is a substance separate from the body) is a better description of the mind.

There is no video, but there is audio: download here (scroll down to the very bottom; the big buttons are ads) or listen here. Throughout the debate, I make numbered references to my sources. I did not use every source, so I have posted also those I did not use, with brief descriptions of the contribution of that source to the debate, here.

To my knowledge, Bob's writeup on this subject is substantially contained in this reddit comment. If he makes any additional writeups, I will of course link to them. Now, to the commentary.

Firstly, I like Bob. He's a serious but conversational fellow with a keen mind with a clear familiarity with the literature of the subject at hand. We had a good conversation that went to a lot of interesting places, and I think that at times we got sort of off-topic just because we both enjoy the philosophical process of unpacking a proposition- much unpacking was had, indeed. I'm glad he challenged me to the subject, because I really haven't been seriously engaged with the literature on philosophy of mind since college, and the massive infusion of the literature I underwent in preparation for the debate really helped sharpen my views on the subject.

You can listen to the debate yourself and make your own evaluations about how it went. I can't much speak for Bob on this one, but I will point out what I think were the main areas of agreement and the main areas of clash:

• Bob agrees that minds are essentially localized in space around the people that seem to "host" them, that they at least have beginnings in time and probably have ends in time, that they are accessed or communicated with by interacting with physical matter (in ways like talking to things like ears), and that minds themselves interact with physical matter like synapses and even body parts.
• Bob does not agree that the mind is material, and he does not seem to think that minds could be material: that minds are kinds of substances on such a scale that he sees them as distinct in kind from things like laws and chance.

Again, you can hear his arguments and you can hear mine, so I'll be brief on the arguments before explaining why, after this debate, I remain a physicalist. In his write-up, Bob characterizes my position as an interactionist epiphenomenalism kind of physicalism, which I think is fair- as he says, I do not think that your experience of the color red is in your brain any more than digestion is in your gut- if you peeled open a gut frozen in time, you would never be able to indicate which arrangement of its atoms is "digestion." Digestion is a dynamic process, it is a description of a progression of physical states, which is also what I think the mind in general is and which your experience of the color red also is- though I do think that if your brain, frozen in time, were understood to its fullest, we could tell that you were experiencing the color red, if you were.

The argument that Bob pressed is that it does not seem to him that fundamental laws, chance, and matter alone could ever create an intentional, subjective force called the mind, that the forces that organize systems are external to those systems, and so organization to the level of a mind must require some mind external to it. He analogized it to the universe itself, where we got into a slightly off-topic skirmish about whether even physical systems like planets could organize without the influence of a mind. Both his argument about minds and his argument about planets are privy to the same assumptions, on which I pressed him to elaborate:

• Bob assumes that systems do not self-organize in ways like evolution indicates that they do.
• Bob assumes that "functional" systems of a certain complexity, like the configuration of gasses in the early Earth's atmosphere, could occur without intelligent design- though what makes a system "functional" is an open thread after this debate.
• Bob assumes that the mind is a fundamentally distinct kind of force or material from other forces or materials.

These are the three key points of debate. To the first one, I think that I at least provided ample reasons to think that systems do self-organize in that way. To the second assumption, I offered I think at least as much good evidence to the contrary- Bob used a rather blunt tool from the kit of intelligent design, that of the calculation of the massive odds against the arrangement of atoms in human bodies or in the Earth's atmosphere, the standard reply to which is that it is not simply a matter of counting the odds of one arrangement of matter among all possible arrangements since some arrangements are more likely than others (products of evolution like us are, I think, so likely in universes like ours that we might as well call them inevitable). And even if they weren't, we have no idea how many times the universe has run different iterations of those arrangements, or that the multiverse (if there is such a thing) has, so we simply don't know the odds.

To the third, I offered only the opportunity to examine the evidence, and I was not satisfied with the reply. Aside from what I think we can agree is the unconvincing evidence of seeming numerological coincidences surrounding the 9/11 attacks (show me a similarly broadly-defined event without numerological coincidences), I wasn't even able to get any clear evidence that disembodied minds can exist, much less actually do. It seems to be only bare assertion that the mind is different in kind from other matter, an assertion that actually contravenes Bob's own admissions- Bob admits that the mind is very much like normal matter (localized in space and time, interacts with and is affected by physical states, etc.), except in the one fact that it is somehow a different force- one that, by the way, Bob does not seem convinced continues to exist without the brain. That the mind is a force at all seems only to be a turn of phrase; what such actually entails that is different from physicalism is not clear to me.

My banner in this debate is that the mind is like digestion. You cannot look at or touch "digestion," per se, by examining the physical states of the gut, but Bob also does not think that there is such thing as immaterial digestion in the way he thinks that there are immaterial minds. Like digestion, minds are organic processes radically located in physical structures. I think that the analogy is sufficient, that things like intentionality or planning in minds no more make them non-physical like the more complicated aspects of digestion make digestion non-physical, just as I think that it is no objection against physicalism about digestion that none of the atoms in a gut contain even a fraction of digestion.

The main arguments that I tried to press:

• The causal closure argument- there are decades of neuroscience drawing on billions of years of evolutionary biology indicating that mental processes as complex as morality and intentionality to as simple as experiencing color or hearing sound are radically embodied- there are known physical structures that perfectly account for them, the impairment of which likewise impairs those mental processes. The mind is supervenient upon the brain- you cannot change the mind without changing the brain; to suppose that, in addition to these physical, embodied structures and processes there is a supernatural element guiding the mind is to just add an additional, unnecessary entity- Bob's dualism is, as we say, causally overdetermined, in that there are just too many causes per effect in his system, one of which is unnecessary, where on physicalism, we only count the causes that are present in the evidence.
• The interaction question- a long time ago, a guy called Descartes invented philosophical dualism. An objection that in mainstream philosophy has prevailed against Descartes' theory that the mind is distinct from the body is the question of how a non-physical mind interacts with a physical body. There don't seem to be any mind-particles in this substance; the whole idea of its being disembodied is that it doesn't adhere to the physical world. But it does- as Bob admits, minds obey the laws of physics.
• The brain- as cannot be repeated sufficiently, brain damage damages mind, brain death seemingly ends minds, brain alteration alters minds. Minds just seem physical.
• The big synthesis I was going for is that Bob actually agrees that minds are just like physical things in a huge number of (above-listed) ways, with the sole exception being the interpolation of aphysicality to the mind which, as far as I can tell, is without reason.

Our disagreements, then, were primarily on whether law-abiding material systems can self-organize into systems as complex as minds, and whether such systems can do things like plan, experience, or intentionally apply force to other systems. I think they can and they do, and I've yet to hear a convincing explanation for why they can't. The immense circularity of assuming that matter cannot organize in this way as an objection to the evidence that systems can organize in this way was lost on this debate, as was the ultimate ambiguity of a radically embodied, physically interacting, spacially and temporally local mind being amaterial. As Bob's writeup says, he thinks that the "mind-force is a force like gravity-" why it is a force like gravity, and not a material process like digestion is left unexplained - he think that just as matter cannot cause gravity (why not?) matter cannot cause minds (if minds are completely unique categories of force like gravity, which I doubt). The primary defense of these assumptions that I received was their reiteration.

But, all in, it was excellent to have a similarly-situated non-professional philosophical mind with which to hone our positions. I hope we do something similar on like topics again in the future.

Now, as promised, I will do a written Q&A with the good people of reddit who obliged me with written questions in this thread. That's coming tomorrow. For now, though, listen to the debate- you'll get a good background for where my answers will be coming from.