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comments on Substance Dualism
from 2010-02-22:
3 comments
What are some good examples of what modern dualist philosophers believe?
Yeah: I remembered our discussions on teleportation when I saw the molecule replacement thing.
Still, with the natural replacement of molecules, there's never the possibility of two distinct versions of you to exist, as there is with teleportation.
Yeah: I remembered our discussions on teleportation when I saw the molecule replacement thing.
Still, with the natural replacement of molecules, there's never the possibility of two distinct versions of you to exist, as there is with teleportation.
I'd start with Descartes - he's considered the "father of modern philosophy." :) Hey, I remember giving you a book by him.
But a quick intro to varieties of dualism can be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article, along with a good bibliography.
But a quick intro to varieties of dualism can be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article, along with a good bibliography.
He seems to be attacking strawmen most of the time, along with asides for totally pointless "arguments" like how "substance dualism" is a contradiction in terms because a substance has to be physical. (question begging much?)
While I'm sure there are people who believe in souls who also believe memories and senses are *completely* non-physical, none of the actual philosophers who supported this position (from Plato to Descartes) would deny that the mind can be strongly affected by physical phenomena.
Now it's true that many people who believe in substance dualism believe in incoherent ideas and confuse mind/soul/consciousness, etc., again he would do better to actually argue against actual philosophers' positions. I mean, I'm sure you can find self-proclaimed atheists on the street who don't have a very clear idea of what they actually believe, but refuting them is not sufficient to refute atheism. This is especially true since the guy doing this video clearly has a good idea of various philosophical positions on this. I hope he does engage more rigorous and specific concepts, actual arguments from Descartes or Platonists would be good.
As an aside, that whole argument with molecules of the body being replaced over time - the most common usage of that I've seen is by materialists to say that since you contain no parts from you of several years ago, it's perfectly fine to get disintegrated and replaced by a copy in teleportation.