A Simple Argument against Dualism
I am going to offer an argument against Cartesian dualism. The argument goes as follows:
(1) If dualism is true, then mind is not spatio-temporal, and body is spatio-temporal.
(2) If mind is not spatio-temporal, and body is spatio-temporal, then mind and body cannot interact.
(3) Mind and body can interact.
Therefore, (4) dualism is not true.
This argument is modus tollens.
(1) If dualism is true, then mind is not spatio-temporal, and body is spatio-temporal.
(2) If mind is not spatio-temporal, and body is spatio-temporal, then mind and body cannot interact.
(3) Mind and body can interact.
Therefore, (4) dualism is not true.
This argument is modus tollens.
Comments (186)
Descartes was aware of the problem: If mind and body are entirely incommensurate, how can mind make the body do things? His solution was the quite unsatisfactory notion that "god did it".
Dualism fails.
Why can't the mind be spatio-temporal? Of course you mean the human mind, but why can't the human mind be a physical representation of this mind-stuff? Wouldn't this still be dualism, but with the division between physical and mental moved over slightly?
Such a thought is called 'epiphenomenalism'. Epiphenomenalism is a kind of dualism. Many philosophers reject epiphenomenalism.
It can't be epiphenomenalism, because the mind in this case is exactly the causal physical structure. It's almost indistinguishable from physicalism, but admits that certain purely abstract entities - e.g. the non-computable numbers exist.
So, it's similar to the distinction between computable and non-computable numbers. Physical reality can only instantiate computable numbers. The suggestion would be that physical reality can only instantiate computable-minds, which appears to be the case.
I'm sure this view must exist and have a name? Maybe it is just physicalism and I've not been paying attention?
I don't think it fair to say that dualism fails because it hasn't explained how the mind and the body interact. There are a lot of things that physics hasn't explained (which is why we don't have a theory of everything) but it doesn't then follow that it's fair to say that physicalism fails for this reason.
That would be an argument from ignorance.
The problem is not that dualism fails to explain so-and-so, but that dualism defines mind and body not to interact one another.
No, it defines them to be different with the mind not being a spatial thing. Your second premise isn't part of the dualist's definition(s).
1. If physicalism is true, then physical matter produces the mind and consciousness.
2. It is not the case that physical matter produces the mind and consciousness.
Therefore:
3. Physicalism is false.
Dualism specifically defines that the mind and body do interact with each other.
How about this:
1. If physicalism is true, then physical matter produces the mind and consciousness.
2. It is the case that physical matter produces the mind and consciousness.
Therefore:
3. Physicalism is true
Descartes defines mind as non-spatio-temporal entity. He defines body as spatio-temporal one. According to these definitions, mind and body cannot interact. It seems that pineal gland is irrelevant to mind-body interaction.
I'm not endorsing the argument that I presented. It is a bad argument. However, it is bad in the same way that the OP argument is bad. They carry the same amount of weight. Pretty much, both are arguments from ignorance: the negating premise in the modena tollens is simply asserted because the creator of the argument does not hold it to be true.
Dualist response:
Clearly, the immaterial substance of the mind and the material substance of the body do interact, as we can clearly see observe them doing so.
Only if you define spatial and non-spatial things as being unable to causally influence one another, but the dualist doesn't define them this way.
Mind-body interaction is evidence of which dualism is false.
(1) Mind and body obviously interact one another.
(2) If mind and body obviously interact one another, then dualism is false.
Therefore, (3) dualism is false.
Just so you know where I'm coming from, I'm a physicalist who thinks that the idea of nonphysical existents is incoherent.
However, I'm wondering whether your first and/or second premises aren't straw men.
Does a dualist have to believe that nonphysical existents are not spatio-temporal?
And does a dualist have to believe that nonphysical existents that are not spatio-temporal can not interact with spatio-temporal things?
I don't think either one of those are clear. Although that's of course because there's not a uniformly agreed-upon, clear characterization of just what nonphysical existents would amount to. Usually people just give examples of things they consider to be nonphysical, or they just describe them functionally. It's rare to run into someone who tries to explain just what their "nature" would be ontologically a la "what sort of 'stuff' they are."
According to Cartesian dualism, the mind is a non-spatial thing, so we can grant quine the first premise.
The problem is that Descartes claimed that the mind and the body can nonetheless causally influence one another, and so the Cartesian dualist would reject quine's claim that that non-spatial things are defined as not being able to causally influence the body (and would also reject the claim that as a matter of fact non-spatial things are not able to causally influence the body).
Descartes says that the essence of mind is thinking. He claims that the essential feature of body is extension. It implies that Descartes thinks that mind is beyond space and time. Anything beyond space and time cannot interact with something in space and time.
Is that true by definition or is it just an empirical fact?
I think that it is an empirical fact.
Then it was wrong to claim that "dualism defines [my emphasis] mind and body not to interact one another".
This is the entire crux of the problem. The dualist clearly believes that the immaterial, non-spatial mind can interact with the material, spatial body. They reject the notion that this interaction is prima facie wrong until proven otherwise. The dualist thinks the mind is obviously not material, and holds their position to be more likely than a physicalist notion of the mind.
Cartesian dualists are wrong because they wrongly define mind and body.
But why does a dualist have to be a Cartesian dualist?
He doesn't. But @quine explicitly said in the opening post "I am going to offer an argument against Cartesian dualism".
There are various dualisms. The target of my argument above is Cartesian dualism.
How? Please assert how you falsified and/or demonstrated how the substance dualist is false.
My argument against Cartesian dualism is formally valid. The conclusion is derived from premises.
Yes, it's modus tollens.
However, I was talking about the premise:
Quoting quine
Why should we accept it as true?
But, as others have said, the second premise is false. Just because physics has no way of determining how the spatial-temporal and non-spatial-temporal interact, this does not mean that they do not interact.
Ah--I overlooked that he specifically mentioned Cartesian dualism in his initial post.
It's because they are located in entirely different areas. Bodies are located in space and time. Minds are not there. They never met each other. It's the result of dualistic scenarios. Fortunately, they can meet each other. Dualism is false.
Yes, minds clearly interact with bodies. You are assuming that immaterial causes cannot interact with physical causes, i.e. you are assuming your premise.
Until we determine exactly what it means to be in space and time, we cannot make any determinations about whether or not things which are not in space and time can influence things in space and time.
If we assume that all things are necessarily in space and time, then from that assumption it is impossible that anything is not in space and time. But if we assume that there are things which are not in space and time, we can still allow that these things are related to things which are in space and time. The relationship would be through the means of something other than space and time.
Well, supposedly, on this Cartesian view, nonphysical things are not located at all. So it's not true that a nonphysical thing is located in a different place than one's body. Of course, it's not true that a nonphysical thing is located in the same place as one's body, either.
It's not at all clear to me how there are supposed to be things that have no location (all of the typical examples that dualists forward are things that I believe have locations), or how things without a location interact with things that have a location, but that's the view.
You mean like the brain is a mind-detector receiving instructions from outside space-time?
Perhaps. The mind and body are clearly linked, that is for sure. The question is how. The OP presented an argument.
Again, the argument I intitially presented is a dualist parody arguing against physicalism. Both the OP's argument and the parody I presented rest on an increduility of the opposing position, pointing out that the other side has not shown and has not presented a way in which the mind works. For the dualist, the physicalist has physical matter somehow produce the mind and consciousness, the mechanics of which has not been illustrated. For the physicalist, the dualist has two different substances on different modes of existence interact, the mechanics of which have not been illustrated.
My point is that the arguments null each other out and that we should appeal to other arguments for and against dualism/physicalism, like Occam's razor.
The interaction problem is not the only problem. There are reasons why some people reject the claim that the mind is a physical thing, with dualism solving these problems.
So you can't simply say that identity theory is the better choice because it solves one problem.
And mind-body indentity theory has the hard problem of consciousness and the notion of how physical matter, in some forms, produces consciousness and minds while it does not in other forms.
Questions about the propositions:
1) What is the nature of mind in a spatio-temporal sense?
2) What is meant by a body is spatio-temporal?
3) What is spatio-temporal?
4) What does it mean to interact in a spatio-temporal?
5) Is current knowledge of the physical specified in terms of spatio-tempiral?
The most significant problem s that I found with the argument is that terms are not defined and therefore cannot be argued for our against. Without specificity and precision, it is impossible to understand the proper meaning of the statements.
'Spatio-temporal' means space and time where we are.
Bodies are spatio-temporal because they are extended in space-time points.
According to Cartesian dualism, minds are not extended in space-time points.
Therefore, i would think that using space-time as grounds for a proposition for mind or body is highly debatable therefore subject to endless argument at the propositional level. Until that debate is settled, which it cannot be, the syllogism cannot be used as any proof.
I'm not sure the situation is quite symmetrical. Physicalism explains life, computation, and offers an active research program into consciousness. Dualism can't explain anything.
It's interesting to me that medical scientists - for example - in practice mix 'physical' and 'mental' terms all the time. The accepted definitions of placebos all refer to both the physical nature of treatments, and the beliefs and expectations of patients and medical practitioners.
There is therefore *methodological* dualism. Mental and physical terms are freely mixed in good science.
I'm an old Wittgensteinian about this stuff, so my question then is...what further question is then usefully answered by asking 'What is the world really made of?' What is the debate about ontology for? I see it's fun in a fictional sort of way, but how are we to know when someone is right? And how will it further our human ends? Will it tell us something more about placebos, for instance?
That's a very strange thing to see as a problem, though, because it suggests that in general, people don't understand how different sorts of matter, in different dynamic structures, can have unique properties.
Observations:
Evidence:
Reasoning:
All minds are uniquely associated with, and localized to, bodies. Therefore, by abduction, mind is contingent on body, mind is something body can do, and body is “moved” by mind, alike.
As the old saying goes, you can’t misplace your body, but you can lose your mind. :)
Are there any significant reasons to think otherwise?
Does the above and (some sort of) physicalism contradict?
(Chalmers style mind-body problems, and the explanatory gap, aren’t so much contradictions, as they are “partitions”.)
[quote=Agustin Vincente]every physical effect (i.e. caused event) has physical sufficient causes †[/quote]
† On the Causal Completeness of Physics (Jul 2006)
That very well maybe the case and I honestly think lines like this are worth talking about and arguing for. I actually am on the physicalist side. My overall point is that the argument in the OP is bad and that, until such a time comes in which the physicalist account can deal with its own mechanical problems, we should avoid using arguments against dualism based on potential unexplained/weird mechanical issues.
I agree with you if we are talking generally, but people (in my experience, usually dualists) try to use their viewpoint on the mind to defend a viewpoint on something that matters (free will or the existence of non-physical objects). It usually is not argued for intially, but is a careover or a requirment for another belief.
Well, apart from simply asserting that the hypothesized "mind substance" somehow derives qualia, I suppose, though that doesn't seem like much of an explanation.
If "mind substance" isn't spatiotemporal, then it certainly doesn't account for the fleeting nature of phenomenological experiences.
Quoting jorndoe
Stole (and remembered) that from @Bitter Crank, and forgot to credit.
It's not a question of our not having found a way for them to interact; it's rather deeper than that. If dualism holds, then mind and body are such that one cannot be reduced or explained in terms of the other - it's not like our not knowing the connection between gravity and quantum mechanics. Any causal connection between mind and body removed dualism by explaining one in terms of the other.
There's the problem for dualism.
If the mind is not physical then why should it have causal influence upon the physical?
If the mind does have causal influence upon the physical then how is the mind not also physical?
It goes back to multiplying beyond necessity.
The physicalist will say that if the mind is physically causal, then it is because the mind is physical.
Or rather that if the mind is physically causal it is not necessary to regard the mind as non-physical.
Don't mind & body learn to cooperate over time.
Rug rats don't walk.
It takes time and lots of energy to learn how this apparatus works.
What do you mean by asking why it should?
Because unless the physical is defined as being whatever has causal influence on the physical (a circular and so vacuous definition) then having causal influence on the physical doesn't make that thing physical (at least not by definition).
What does it mean to be physically causal? If you mean that it's physical and it's causal then the dualist will reject the claim that the mind is physically causal. If you mean that it has causal influence on the physical then the dualist will reject the claim that this entails that it is physical, as that would require that the physical is defined in a circular and so vacuous manner as explained above.
Maybe not if you only consider the interaction problem. But there are other concerns that dualists will claim warrant regarding the mind as non-physical.
But for me Searle's descriptive language is methodologically dualist. He speaks simultaneously of a hand movement and of a decision, of wanting. In what way is he demonstrating that the decision itself has some sort of a physical basis? He only demonstrates that the consequence of the decision, of wanting, is physical. But the nature of the decision is left unclear.
What if it were said that body is an expression of mind; would you call that 'dualism'?
Curious, why not?
This premise seems to rest upon the assumption that something can only be causally relevant to something else in its ontological "space".
If the mental and the physical are indeed two completely different things that have nothing in common at all, it does seem difficult to see how they can interact.
But if the mental and the physical are different, but not entirely, then there is room for them to interact. Say the mental has the property M and the physical has the property P, but both have the property T. By having T, they are able to interact with each other in a way that is not possible to understand from within the ontological "spaces" of those of M or P.
To illustrate, then, say we have the mental: M=====T , and the physical: T=====P. M and P cannot interact directly from the M or P endpoints, but can interact through their T endpoints. Thus just as you cannot understand how a tree obtains nutrients from the ground by only looking at the leaves, we aren't able to understand how the mental and the physical interact from the perspective of the mental or the physical. A holistic picture would be required, but this is exactly what is impossible to obtain directly. Correlationism, basically.
Not saying I necessarily agree to all of this. I'm undecided on what I see to be the most reasonable mind-body interaction theory.
You asked what was the problem for dualism.
I answered.
The problem for dualism is to account for how the non-physical acts upon the physical causally.
The monist does not have this issue because they do not maintain that the non-physical acts upon the physical causally.
Quoting Michael
I mean just what I wrote, why should the non-physical be such that it is causal but not physical?
Quoting Michael
It is not circular or vacuous it is economical.
There is less to account for, if the mind is physical, then that is what accounts for physical causation.
There is no need to multiply explanations beyond monism.
Quoting Michael
How is dualism necessary?
Are you proposing that monism necessarily false?
There's another way of thinking about 'mind', namely, as 'that which grasps meaning'; the nature of meaning is not something normally associated with the notion of substance. But that is a clue to the nature of mind. When we understand meaning, it can indeed have physical effects; if you receive a credible death threat in writing, then your adrenal glands would kick into action. And there's your interface between mind and body. The mind is constantly engaged in such activities - that is the basis for 'mind-body medicine'.
You could say a lizard will react to danger, and it's adrenals kick into action. That's just physical, isn't it? I would say this instance is matter of stimulus and response. It is characteristic of organisms (but not of inorganic systems). What is different with human cognition is that it can be understood in the abstract, in terms of meaning, and the relationship of ideas, rather than between cognition and reaction. That ability to perceive meaning in terms of the relationship between ideas is what constitutes res cogitans.
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/thomas-nagel-thoughts-are-real
Where is there meaning without syntax though?
If meaning is just syntax then there is no reason it can not be physical.
Meaning is a question of semantics not syntax although the two are interdependent. Searle and others all go into that.
That is where we disagree.
I do not view syntax and semantics as interdependent.
You acknowledge yourself that there are examples where there is no meaning to account for the behavior of the lizard.
Syntax is not dependent upon semantics but semantics is dependent upon syntax.
Syntax- Grammatical rules for specifying correct word order and inflectional structure in a sentence.
Accordingly, semantics relies on the ability to grasp meaning, which is an attribute of rational and linguistic ability. Syntax only requires grasp of grammar, whereas semantics requires knowledge. You could compose any number of syntactically-correct statements which mean nothing; happens here frequently. ;-)
But, that is a tangent to the OP so perhaps we ought to adjourn.
It would be nice to know in what sense the non-computable numbers and similar entities exist.
Also, even in the case of a computer, where exactly does the computation take place?
You don't happen to have a reference for that do you?
Anyway, it's perhaps a little too much to expect anyone from the 1700s to anticipate modern science.
Descartes' solution is also false. Pineal glands themselves are extended in space and time. Minds that are not extended in space and time cannot be moderated by pineal glands that are extended in space and time.
The trouble with that is, 'causes and effects' only operate given certain constraints and conditions. Why atoms and molecules have the properties they do, is wholly dependent on a chain of causation, which somehow appears to point back to the origin of the Universe, or, alternatively, are simply 'thus'. So, the nature of those particular kinds of questions, are metaphysical, i.e. about what must obtain if there is to be physics in the first place.
Aristotle, and the scholastic tradition, and Thomas Aquinas, understood those kinds of questions and proposed various doctrines as a consequence. Descartes wished to throw off scholasticism and Aristoteleanism and instead proposed his 'new philosophy' of substance dualism. However it was at least an attempt at a metaphysic. Whereas to say that causes and effects occur solely in space and time, is to assume that nature, as it were, contains its own cause, ground, or reason for existence. Or, to put it another way, that the only kinds of causes are material and efficient causes, the kinds of causes that can be understood in terms of a temporal sequence of events, a physical causal chain.
A simplistic illustration of all of that is that numbers, for example, or logical laws, are not themselves 'in space and time'. The law of identity will hold here, on Andromeda, or on some other world-system, because in order for anything to exist, there have to be such kinds of constraints that we describe in terms such as the law of identity. And the mind is able to grasp such laws, becuase of its rational nature. So, according to traditional philosophy, the rational mind is able to grasp the rational order of things, which is an attribute of the fabric of the cosmos, and are the necessary condition for there to BE space and time.
You're preaching basic scientism.
And your assumption is one that Descartes denied, being that he claimed that the mind doesn't "occur in space" but is nonetheless a cause.
I don't think you need to make any assumptions, or appeal to cause and effect. According to our knowledge there are only 4 forces that describe all interactions. If there were a 5th force, then this would necessarily be in physical reality, so Dualists would then require a 6th etc.
However, when a computer is playing you at chess (or Go or poker) where exactly is the chess program? The program being of course an abstract algorithm to achieve an abstract outcome based on an abstract set of rules.
For that matter, neither has anything Descartes said. For all the sentiment against interactionist dualism, I've never heard a solid argument against it, and if you scan this thread, you will also not find (even the beginning of) one.
The "chess program" is our abstraction of the mechanical events occurring inside the computer.
If you say, because we define causality that way, then this is not good enough, for then we can just defined causality so as to include interaction between the mental and physical, seeing as we seem to have so many obvious instances of it, and you beg the question.
If you say, we don't know how, but we can observe this happening and write down generalizations as to how it does, then this is not good enough, because then we can do the same with physical and mental activity, the correlations between which are even pre-theoretically obvious and abundant.
So what is the argument? In what way is the interaction between the mental and physical mysterious, that interaction between physical objects already is not? What provision can you make for one that will not carry over to the other?
The interaction is by what we call forces. Three of them are by particle exchange, two of which only operate on the sub-atomic scale. The fourth interaction is arguably not a force, but an effect of space-time geometry.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Physics does not define causality. Our fundamental laws are time-symmetric, so they can't include any conception like causality.
Once you define causality to include the interaction between the mental and physical, then what are you going to do apart from stare at a definition?
Is the computer playing chess or not? If so, how?
Yes. But the "computer playing chess" is our abstraction of the mechanical events occurring inside the computer. So are you asking how the mechanical events occur? Or how we come to form such an abstraction?
If a computer is controlling a power station or a refinery, is that "controlling a power station" our abstraction or is it really controlling a power station?
That depends on whether by "really controlling a power station" you mean it in an abstract sense like "playing chess" or if you mean it in a more concrete sense like "it is mechanically responsible for the mechanical behaviour of the power station".
So to save me from having to answer 101 questions, whenever you ask a question like "when a computer is doing X, where exactly is the X?", either the X is some mechanical process (and so has a location) or it's our abstraction of this mechanical process.
You put the problem right there in the first sentence. You assume (hold to be true for no reason) that causality can only occur in space-time, which can be argued against not only by mind-body dualists, but by anyone who has any conception of something beyond the physical (or even a conception of the physical that goes beyond space-time). So, I guess theism is assumed out the window.
Quoting quine
Descartes is publishing around the mid-1600s. I think attacking the whole pineal gland thing is pointless.
The problem is that there's no non-physical account of how anything is supposed to work.
Quite, but perhaps it might be more accurate to say that there are no good non-physical accounts. By "good" I mean an account that is difficult to modify and still account for the explicanda.
e.g. The mind interacts with physical reality via pre-established harmony, or angels, of rays that only conscious brains can detect, etc.
The hard problem is precisely hard because of the rigorous demands physicalism imposes on its explanations.
Dualists seem happy to state at a word re-definition and think they have achieved something.
Speaking as a physics layman, my understanding is that theorists have been struggling to reconcile QM and relativity, as the theories work well in their own domains, but break down into nonsense when one attempts to integrate the theories (something about crazy infinities popping up all over the place, I think). Given this failure of reconciliation, would it not follow that at least one of theories (QM or relativity) are false (not that something like those theories couldn't be true)?
Translating this analogy to the thesis of substance dualism, the substance dualist (qua substance dualist) would likely assent to three core propositions:
(1) the mind is res cogitans.
(2) the body is res extensa.
(3) mind and body interact.
Of these three propositions (3) would seem to be on the most secure footing, and is therefore the least likely to be false. So, assuming that the substance dualist cannot dismiss mind/body interaction, and cannot reconcile the interaction problem, does it not follow (in the manner of QM and GR's reconciliatory failure) that (1) and/or (2) must be rejected? And if either (1) or (2) are false, then substance dualism is false.
True. Historically, one of the more annoying responses to empirical demonstrations of some phenomenon is to dismiss it for want of a mechanism (e.g. plate tectonics). However, scientific theories can always be fleshed out by empirical observation and collecting more data. The same is not true of metaphysical theses, which only require thinking one's way to a solution. If, after a few hundred years of substance dualism, no one has yet posited a convincing resolution of the interaction problem, does that justify at least diminished confidence that substance dualism is the correct metaphysical theory of mind?
I don't think so. As I said, the interaction problem is not the only problem. Dualists are dualists because they believe that there are problems that a physicalist account of consciousness cannot resolve. That a physicalist account of consciousness can resolve the interaction problem by avoiding it entirely doesn't help it avoid the problems that dualists claim it does have.
I think the difference between the two situations is that QM and relativity are inconsistent, and so one must be false, whereas the interaction problem is simply a mystery. It's not the case (at least according to the dualist) that res cogitans and res extensa interacting leads to contradictory consequences.
I know. But we're here speaking only of substance dualism, not whether physicalism is true (to claim that if the former is false, then the latter must be true would seem a false dilemma).
And my question could be applied to any metaphysical thesis (or even any philosophical thesis whatsoever, I suppose). If a thesis has a central, potentially fatal problem, which hundreds of years of theorizing have failed to resolve, does that lead to a justifiably diminished confidence that said thesis is correct (or whatever passes for "correct" with regard to philosophical theses)?
I don't think so. Again, there's a difference between a mystery and a contradiction. Not being able to explain something is not the same as entailing something that isn't the case or denying something that is the case. The latter two I would count as fatal problems.
At least one has to be false, presumably both are. But, we have scores of predictions from the theories, all of which are true. E.g. All the fundamental particles and their interactions, entanglement, teleportation, no-cloning, decoherence, big-bang, black-holes, cosmic microwave background, gravitational waves, ... None of these unexpected features of reality are going to go away.
As for the theories breaking down into nonsense, well they don't. They don't to the extent that there are experiments (BICEP2) looking into pre-big-bang signals in the CMB.
So, the extent to which either theory is false is the extent to which either is an extremely good approximation to a deeper theory. Despite LHC and many other efforts, no observation that renders either theory problematic has been made.
Quoting Arkady
Leibniz thought it was false. Does that make it any less likely?
I think it is wrong to characterise Dualism as a metaphysics which has made zero progress. Did we not think once that life and non-live were different substances, body and soul, heaven and earth, etc. It seems a great deal of progress has been made.
Dualism's persistence may be due to the fact that it is a generic method of retreat from problems. What is to stop you claiming anything is due to some substance that interacts with physical reality by mysterious means? And, you can always move the goalposts.
I don't think this analogy potrays the entire picture. The total mind-body problem, at least as I was taught, contains four premises:
(1) the mind is res cogitans (immaterial).
(2) the body is res extensa (material).
(3) mind and body interact.
(4) res cogitans and res extensa cannot interact.
Dualists deny premise four.
I know they would deny (4). Propositions (1)-(3) were supposed to encompass what substance dualists do believe.
Not sure substance dualists believe that though, if there are any that is.
I've appeared to have misunderstood your initial point. My bad.
Charles Sanders Peirce scoffed at both dualism (of any kind) and materialism/physicalism, instead hypothesizing what I think is an interesting monist alternative: objective idealism. He did not claim that everything is mental, thoughts in the mind of God, etc.; instead, he acknowledged a distinction between mind and matter, but conceived it as one of degree rather than kind: "the physical law as derived and special, the psychical law alone as primordial ... matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws" (CP 6.24-25; 1891). In this context, the psychical law - the "law of mind" - is the "law of habit."
This view "holds matter to be mere specialized and partially deadened mind" (CP 6.102; 1892), such that "what we call matter is not completely dead, but is merely mind hidebound with habits (CP 6.158; 1892). Eventually, "dead matter would be merely the final result of the complete induration of habit reducing the free play of feeling and the brute irrationality of effort to complete death" (CP 6.201; 1898). We are successfully able to model much of nature mathematically - i.e., with necessary reasoning - because its (physical) habits are relatively fixed; not so with people, whose (mental) habits are considerably more malleable.
Y'all need Leibnizian monads and vicarious causation, bitches.
Couldn't interact, couldn't be subject to causation, or be an effect (in part or whole), couldn't change.
A bit like Platonic abstracts I suppose (assuming Platonia is coherent).
The other way around might be conceivable, that there could be effects thereof, though there would be additional implications.
Causation could, at most, be uni-directional.
Odd.
I don't think this could be mind, at least not in any ordinary sense.
I think that this is a better representation than Arkady's. Now if we want to bring the evidence of physics into this, there are interpretations of QM, hidden variables and non-local interaction, which allow for an "immaterial" which interacts with the material. Once we establish through the principles of physics, that the immaterial may interact with the material then we have no basis for a denial of #4.
Again, I agree with that assessment to a degree. I find arguments directly confronting dualism that amount to "your metaphysics are weird and has mysterious elements" to be poor. However, I generally do not like arguments that revolve around relatively new physics concepts given that, as @Arkady mentioned, we know that our current understandings of modern physics, quantum mechanics included, do not mesh together and are currently incomplete. Yes, there may be some interpretations that allow for immaterial causes to influence material causes, but unless we have reason to believe those interpretations over others, I do not see the point here.
The point is that science gives us evidence that there is no good reason to consider (4). There is no good reason for the claim that the immaterial cannot interact with the material, because modern science clearly demonstrates that it is possible that the immaterial interacts with the material.
Quoting Chany
I agree. Once we clear that up, the fact that there is no good reason to reject dualism as a metaphysics, then we can move toward assessing the benefits which dualism offers. These include a rational approach to the existence of freewill, intention, and human creativity, as well as an empirical approach to the nature of time, the past being distinctly different from the future.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
only works if the rejection is on mechanical grounds alone. By inverse, this means that we cannot use arguments against physicalism that amount to "your metaphysics are weird and has mysterious elements". Physicalism might pass Occam's razor better than dualism. This is why arguments like the p-zombie argument are important to dualism- if we do not need to appeal to something other than the physical, or even appeal to some other type of monism, then it seems redundant and unnecessary to posit some other substance. There may be a general problem with this though, because as @tom pointed out, dualism might be moving goalposts continually smaller and may suffer from a "god-of-the-gaps" style reasoning. At one point in time, I could imagine that dualists might have argued that chess and number of the things computers can do today were uniquely mind-based activities. You mention creativity. However, I would not be surprised if over the next few decades we see machines getting rapidly better at producing art that passes an artistic Turing test, therefore eliminating the need to appeal to a non-physical substance to explain creativity.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is where what I alluded to in another post starts to come to light: we are less interested in analyzing the merits of the mind-body problem as a unique issue and are more interested in what we can get out of it.
Feigl was a remarkable man, Austrian but of broad interests - he met Wittgenstein in Vienna in the 1920's and had some chats with him even though he'd quickly realised that Ludwig was not the positivist his Vienna Circle friends had been hoping to meet. Feigl escaped to Minnesota in the 1930's and had a fruitful collaboration with Sellars, see other threads. He had strong humanist options and sympathy with practising scientists.
Nevertheless, I think dualism has a big problem indeed. If we say mind is not anywhere in space and yet it is obviously temporal then why we don't hear each other's thoughts? That is what bothers me. If the thought occur at the same time then what makes us not here all the thoughts?
Well, it is clear how two material things can interact, in fact just as clear as how two ideal things can interact. They can interact because they are one substance. If a basketball is made of atoms, and a a football is also made of atoms, then they can interact, if they collide, by virtue of the simple fact that they cannot share the same position in space, so when they come in contact with each other, something must happen.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Hence because they are pre-theoretically obvious and abundant, we adopt a one substance view with two parallel attributes...
Dualism is fucked up precisely because it cannot account for correlation - it creates two separate realms, which aren't even correlated to begin with! Their correlation becomes an unsolvable mystery.
I think you need to distinguish between being non-spatial, and being located in space. My soul may have a location, coinciding with my body, but it can still be non-spatial itself. Consider the dimensionless point. The point may have a location in space, but it is dimensionless, occupying no space, and therefore non-spatial. Two non-spatial points will have space separating them.
The part of me which is non-spatial, my soul, and the part of you which is non-spatial, your soul, are separated by space and therefore we have no direct access to each other's thoughts. Even within my own body, "my soul", may consist of numerous such non-spatial points which have established control over the immediate spatial environment, through the creation of "my body". You and I, and others, may communicate, and attempt to establish control over a larger spatial environment.
It is not any more clear than how a material and 'ideal' thing can interact (although 'ideal' is a poor descriptor for the mental in Descartes' view).
Quoting Agustino
OK, why can't they, and how do you know that? If you know it by experience, then we also know about physical-mental correlations and their effects on one another from experience. If you made it up as a postulate, then we can equally make up postulates about physical-mental interaction.
Quoting Agustino
But this is just false. Obviously the dualist thinks the two realms interact in systematic ways – hence interactionist dualism.
Just because two things are distinct doesn't mean they can't interact: if that were true, distinct physical things couldn't interact either.
They don't. They're merely correlated with one another. The ideal is parallel to the material.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Tell me TGW, can you conceive of two objects occupying the same position in space at one and the same time? No.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Which is stupid. If they interact, they could really affect each other, but they don't. They're merely correlated with each other - two attributes of the same substance. Serotonin in the brain is correlated to a feeling of happiness, just as a feeling of happiness is correlated to serotonin in the brain. One doesn't "cause" another.
Quoting The Great Whatever
No, things which have a different nature cannot interact. A thought cannot kick a stone.
As far as I'm aware, particles interact only when they do occupy the same space.
It's only identical fermions that can't occupy the same space.
So a particle is literarily in the same spatial position as the other? Isn't it around the same vague (in QM) position? That's entirely different from what I said.
I believe this "vague" position is all the position particles have. It's not that they "really" have a non-vague position but we're just incapable of determining it. So to occupy the same "vague" position is to occupy the same space.
That's because it is both wave and particle... and it's not the only interpretation of QM. Pilot wave theories also exist for example.
Why? Quantum indeterminacy, for instance, surely has at least some bearing on philosophical theses such as the Principle of Sufficient Reason?
Quoting quine
Dualism is the doctrine that there are two sorts of things: mental and physical. Neither can be reduced to the other.
Further, it's not like "I have a left hand and a right hand, they are distinct yet they interact". The mental and physical are completely distinct, while hands have much in common.
Consequently if we were to show that the mental and physical do have something in common - Quantum Weirdness or whatever - what you have shown is that dualism is wrong, that there is only really one thing, Quantum Weirdness.
That is, any post here that has argued that there is some compatibility between the mental and the physical has inadvertently argued against dualism.
There's a good IETP article on 17th Century Theories of Substance, which shows that the idea of 'substance' is not any kind of 'stuff or thing', but in terms of 'the subject of any predicate' - modes inhere in substances - 'a door is the subject in which the mode of rectangularity inheres'. Furthermore a substance is real in proportion to its proximity to the First Cause, i.e. the divine intellect or author of creation. From that it follows that there are degrees of reality:
The discussion in this thread about 'what mind can do', attempts to depict 'mind' in the naturalistic fashion as 'a force' that interacts in the same way that other physical things do. And that's because the cultural background against which the discussion is being had, has changed so completely since Descartes' time. I think a great deal of what (for instance) Gilbert Ryle wrote about Descartes, doesn't really come to terms with that. It is because of the loss of the 'vertical dimension' or the hierarchical nature of reality, which is preserved in Descartes but which has since been lost. So the discussion of 'mind' is like a discussion of a three-dimensional object, in terms of two dimensions.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/
"Since its publication in 1896, Matter and Memory has attracted considerable attention (see, for example, Deleuze 1956). In the Preface that he wrote in 1910, Bergson says that Matter and Memory “is frankly dualistic,” since it “affirms both the reality of matter and the reality of spirit” (Matter and Memory, p. 9). However, he is quick to warn us that the aim of the book is really “to overcome the theoretical difficulties which have always beset dualism” (ibid.). In the history of philosophy, these theoretical difficulties have generally arisen from a view of external perception, which always seems to result in an opposition between representation and matter. Thus, Bergson's theory of “pure perception,” laid out in the first chapter of Matter and Memory aims to show that — beyond both realism and idealism — our knowledge of things, in its pure state, takes place within the things it represents."
The last sentence is critical to the new understanding.
Yes.
Quoting Agustino
Well, that's obviously false. Feet and stones have different natures, yet a foot can kick a stone.
Not at all - for example, the mental and physical are both temporal. Descartes says the mind and body are far more closely intertwined than ship and captain.
Descartes had a vested interest in downplaying the distinction.
Bergson's approach is to to have mind and matter share temporal time matter being residual. In this way he avoids introducing any need for a bridge.
What is the bridge?
Isn't this a problem for physicalists?
The bridge is "matter" itself. Physical objects exist as forms, we describe their properties. The human body is such a physical form. We assume that physical objects consist of matter, and the matter substantiates the form that an object has. But physicists have not yet determined "matter".
In terms of the current discussion, a foot and rock would both be considered substantial matter and not requiring a bridge at the overt physical level. Things get much trickier if one had to explain how insubstantial energy fields convert themselves spontaneously into physical matter. No doubt there is much to be disturbed about I'm the typical physicalist's metaphysical model.
So, right, as Rich says, the bridge is 'matter.' & my guess is that the intuition the physicalist is trying to express is that both that foot and the rock are made of atoms - and the atoms in the foot, and the atoms in the rock, should they meet, will interact with the same lawful regularity that characterizes any meeting of any atoms, anywhere.
Which is to say, I guess, thinking about it, that this kind of substance monism would be ultimately a kind of physical reductionism.
But then (drawing obviously from an emergentist vein) How do hurricanes and representative democracies interact? Stock markets and Film Festival circuits?
These questions all seem to involve form as much - if not more - than the material. And it's not like the mind is formless. But it still seems another step to then say the mind isn't supervenient on matter, the same matter that anything else, that exists, supervenes on. But maybe that's just because it would make the mind seem too free of limitation, formless.
Just kind of rambling here. I like the conversation so far.
It's a good practical rule of thumb, but, then, has any philosophical discussion that's reached for atoms gone astray? How about any that reaches for DNA? Cosmology? Newtonian Law? Geometry?
It's kind of a troubling thing to think about. If some scientific ideas are on the table, but not others, isn't the reason the latter aren't on the table that we amateurs don't know enough to effectively speak about them? But, then, if we disallow the complicated stuff, but still allow the former to figure into our conversations, especially when talking ontology or metaphysics - then we've essentially agreed (implicitly) to do philosophy in a kind of make-believe setting, where we pretend the state of the scientific art is what it was long ago. It's a kind of parlor game. In this sense QM is a kind of 'card' that sophisticated parlor gamers overrule, perhaps justifiably, with a disdain 'card.' These same sophisticated players nevertheless feel free to use other science 'cards' because they know the rules of the game - and the attitudes of the other players - will allow such cards to be played
But if we decide that no scientific stuff is allowed in - we're then committed to an idea of philosophy as utterly independent of scientific findings. Which seems bad.
Which leaves one last sobering option: Only people who truly know QM can do philosophy (and most of them seem not to want to.)
All 3 options suck. But what's the 4th option? (This isn't snide or rhetorical, I think about this often, & I don't have a good answer.)
Mind-body medicine has some interesting clues. Placebo effects, psychosomatic illnesses. There are even cases where physical symptoms manifest as a consequence of psychological causes - what used to be called 'mind over matter'. This book has an anthology of such cases.
Quoting Cavacava
Language allows for more than just communication. And I would question the equivocation of language and sound. Written and spoken symbols - words - mean the same thing, even if one is aural, one visual. For that matter, when a sentence is translated into different languages, or even into different systems of representation, then it may retain its meaning, quite independently from the form in which it is represented. (There's your epistemic cut again.) 'Meaning', then, is separable from physical representation, and if the mind is 'that which grasps meaning' then in that sense it also is not explicable in physical terms.
Quoting csalisbury
The problem with QM - well, one problem among many - is division amongst the experts : you can find credible advocates for multiple, incommensurable interpretations. You read up on one school of interpretation, only to find that some other school thinks it's completely wrong, and you don't know enough to judge which is the better answer.
Quoting csalisbury
Have a look at this book list.
Is there something different about saying that a gluon and a quark are both physical, and so can interact, and saying that matter and consciousness are both real, and so can interact?
... How do you conceive of such a thing? Can a foot and a stone be at the very same point in space at the same time? How is that possible?
Quoting The Great Whatever
No, feet and stones have the same nature in that both are composed of one substance - atoms and void 8-)
I'm still waiting for you to show me a thought kicking a physical stone.
How the non-physical moves the physical is a complex issue, this involves free will, intention, etc.. I believe it can only be understood through a thorough understanding of the nature of time. No one has such an understanding of time. Do you notice that the past is radically different from the future? Think about the future. It is always right in front of you but you cannot see or sense anything in the future. That is because there is no physical existence in the future. The fact that, through a free willing act, the human being can change, or destroy any physical thing within its power, at any random moment of the present, demonstrates that there is no physical existence prior to the present. The continuity of existence at the present, which we take for granted in laws such as Newton's first law of motion, is not necessary. This means that the entire physical world must come into existence at each moment of the present. The soul, having its existence anchored in the non-physical side of the present, has some capacity to control how the physical comes into existence at each moment. Therefore it moves the physical body.
Quoting Rich
I am not familiar with Bergson, perhaps you could explain some of his principles. As far as how the mind grasps the physical though, I understand this in traditional Aristotelian terms of matter and form. It is not that the mind converts the physical into something that can be grasped, it is that the physical already exists in such a form. Under Neo-Platonic principles, the Form of any, and every object, must pre-exist that object in time. How I understand this, is that the form of the object, exists in the future of the object, and this determines how the physical object will come into existence at each moment of the present. To change the object is to change its form, such that when it comes into existence at the next moment, it will be different. So the form is fundamentally separable from the physical object, as the existence of the physical object relies on the form, but not vise versa. When the mind grasps the object, it grasps the form of the object. Being a form itself, I believe the soul has the capacity to reproduce aspects of the form of the object, in sensation, or in conceptual structure, without actually altering the object. It is a representation. The material aspect appears to be beyond the grasp of the mind, and this limits our ability to apprehend, and change the world.
QM is the "trump" card. But if we don't like the idea of trump, and think it's a cheat, we can just make rules allowing us to ignore whoever's playing trump.
Isn't dualism simply the assertion that, despite all the things we know that supervene on matter, including film festivals, there is one thing, namely the human mind, that cannot supervene on the physical?
Considering that Life itself is known to supervene on the physical, it seems a bit outrageous to claim that the "mind" of a particular species cannot.
The irony being that, according to quantum mechanics, quantum coherence cannot have any bearing on the operation of the human mind.
Bergson's metaphysics develops a model that avoids the clumsiness of the above stated view, as does the Bohm Interpretation. Conscious (Mind) and Matter are one and the same, moving in different directions in Duration (real time). One can say that Matter is Mind (Bergson names it the Elan Vital) that is no longer evolving in Time. They are one and the same but in different states. If one wished to be highly precise, there is still a bit of Duration in Matter but it had slowed so drastically that evolution has appeared to stop.
Bergson understood very thoroughly all of the issues with both Dualism and Physicalism and sought to close the gap. In doing so, he amazingly created a model that fortold both holography and quantum physics. An amazing accomplishment which De Broglie wrote about.
Stephen Robbins as a series of videos on Youtube discussing the holographic aspect of Bergson's philosophy though I'm not sure it is easily understood without reading Bergson first.
https://youtu.be/RtuxTXEhj3A
There is also an amazing debate on Amazon where Robbins disects Special and General Relativity and points out how they contradict each other!
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R17WTYWUM6881A/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_btm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0691173176#wasThisHelpful
:-}
Right and this soul goes out of the body upon death and into some other realm right? Where was it before birth? Why don't I remember anything?
I have no problem with this basic principle, that Mind and Matter appear to be the same, because neither philosophy nor physics has been able to determine "mind" or "matter". As undetermined, they appear to be the same. What physics deals with is the various forms which matter takes. It makes assumptions concerning matter but only bases these on the forms of matter. Philosophy deals with logical forms, and only metaphysics speculates about matter itself or mind itself. For all we know, mind and matter could be the very same thing.
However, there is an important difference which Aristotle points to. Matter is understood to be passive, while the soul is an active form. This becomes relevant in the cosmological argument. If we adhere to this difference, it is impossible that they are the same. This is evident from what you say as well. Mind is "evolving in Time" (active), while Matter is not (passive). That one is passive and the other is active makes it impossible that they are one and the same thing.
Quoting Rich
This is why matter is unintelligible. What is intelligible is active forms. But matter, to fulfill the assumptions of physics, must be passive, that which is acted upon. When we try to understand matter itself, we get lost in infinities such as "slowed so drastically that evolution has appeared to stop". We cannot use the principles which understand active forms to understand passive matter, because then matter appears as an infinitely slow activity instead of being purely passive. That's why we need dualism.
Quoting Agustino
Why "goes out... into some other realm"? It already is in that other realm. That's what dualism's all about. At death it has lost its influence over the material body.
Please don't be dense.
Where is the soul before birth? Why don't I remember anything?
No it's quite serious actually, because I don't understand what you're seeking to say. I don't see instances of thoughts kicking stones. I only see instances of feet interacting with stones and footballs and whatever other physical object. I see thoughts on the other hand interacting only with other thoughts. Where the hell do I see thought interacting with matter?
You didn't have any memory before birth therefore you don't remember anything before birth. In fact, your memory was just developing at birth and that's why you can't remember things from a very young age.
Then in what sense did I exist before birth? No experience means no existence, except as a potential maybe, which doesn't say much.
"I" refers to a combination of body and soul, so in no sense did "I" exist prior to that combination.
Quoting Agustino
I don't see any reason to accept this principle. What do you mean by "experience"? A rock doesn't experience, does that mean it doesn't exist?
>:O Then what's the mumbo jumbo of soul existing? In what sense does it exist if it has no experience?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, from its point of view it doesn't.
In my thought process I view matter as relatively passive, remembering that all matter is decaying (half-lives), thus there is no absolute passivity (everything is changing albeit in different directions) but we can say that matter is a continuation in the spectrum of death. What happens below total decay is probably best addressed by Bohm's notion of an implicate order. I don't believe Bohm ever referenced Bergson directly but there may have been some indirect influence arrive their interpretations of quanta are very similar as are their references to a holographic explanation of the universe.
The thought is the initial impulse conveyed through the energetic, substantial field which we call bodily matter. There is no hardline between the two, just differences in substantiality. It is a continuum as electricity moves a train.
I'm asking dualists, not you. You're not a dualist. So be quiet :P
That's a form of monism if it has dissolved the line between the two.
You do. It is called instincts, inherited traits inborn skills.
Right... where do instincts go after death? Instincts apart from the body make little sense for me.
Which means very little in practical terms.
Quoting Rich
I have almost 0 knowledge of Bergson, so forgive me, but why does he call it dualism if the two don't have a boundary between each other, but are instead more like a gradation?
In practical terms it makes all the difference in the world in the way we view and treat life, for those who are exploring the quality of who they are.
This is how Bergson begins his first major work Matter and Memory:
"THIS book affirms the reality of spirit and the reality of matter, and tries to determine the relation of the one to the other by the study of a definite example, that of memory. It is, then, frankly dualistic. But, on the other hand, it deals with body and mind in such a way as, we hope, to lessen greatly, if not to overcome, the theoretical difficulties which have always beset dualism, and which cause it, though suggested by the immediate verdict of consciousness and adopted by common sense, to be held, in small honour among philosophers."
His ideas were greatly refined in subsequent writings.
Can you specify what this difference is concretely?
Hmm Bergson seems interesting. Is there anyone who explores Bergsonian ideas in a modern context that I could read as an introduction to his thought?
Deleuze is said to be a modern scholar of Bergson, but for my taste he wondered too far away. The original is always the best. I began by reading some of his works, then some scholarly papers which are easily googled, and then I fell upon Stephen Robbins, who does a masterful job of explaining Bergson's ideas in modern holographic terms. Interestingly, and I emailed him directly on this issue, is that he avoids Bergson's concept of the Elan Vital, which is of course vital to understanding Bergson.
https://youtu.be/RtuxTXEhj3A
So like everything in life, Bergson is an endless exploration of deeper understanding. De Broglie wrote an excellent essay on Bergson if you can find it in the library: (I purchased the book a while ago).
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-010-3096-0_38
I'm not responding until you stop pretending to be stupid. If you actually are that stupid, then there's also no point in responding, right?
There is no pretending here. I can imagine how a ball interacts with a foot, and to imagine that I make appeal to their common nature - that they are both made of atoms. I cannot imagine how a thought interacts with a physical object though. All I know is that there are correlations between the two. These correlations are explained by thought and extension being two attributes of the same substance, which grounds the parallelism between the two.
I don't really want to play this game.
I may be dumb, but at least I'm honest 8-)
Yes I will be looking into Bergson, thanks! :)
When we discussed politics you confessed to believing in God. Clearly that's not the case, or you wouldn't be asking such silly questions now would you? What's really the case, are you skeptical toward God, or a strong disbeliever?
To believe in God doesn't necessarily mean I believe in dualism or existence of the soul prior to birth or after death. I think of God similar to Spinoza. I also believe in existence after death, but I recognise that I have no clue what that means - that's a faith based belief.
That's what the pineal gland is for. Everybody knows that.
:)
First, regarding the idea that in order for two things to interact, that they must occupy the same space, consider a "space" in a computer simulation or game and the computer, the code, and the world outside of the sim and how they can interact. You could have a virtual space in the simulation in which there are "local", "physical" interactions according to laws given by the code. A body in that world could be an avatar for some entity that isn't an occupant of that virtual space. And some means of interaction could be provided for in the code that would not be detectable in the game world. We do such things all the time in MMORPGs. It is clearly not the case that the things in the game world cannot interact with things outside of it. A player interacts with that world through input devices, but that input is not detectable from within the game world.
Sure, you might then argue that there really is no game world, that everything involved actually resides in the higher, truly physical world, that all "interaction" inside the virtual world is illusory. But such a situation could also be the case in our physical world. Even body-to-body interactions as we imagine them might not be truly mediated via physical mechanisms through space and time. Their true background and what gives rise to correlations between them might go deeper and might be inaccessible to us, belonging to a deeper world that we can't know directly through this one. I'd say that the whole concept of the physical is rather muddy anyway. We don't really understand "physicality" or even substantiality as well as we tend to think we do. Nor do we understand consciousness. Reducing everything to one or the other and then declaring the problems and mysteries eliminated is foolishness.
How do thing-to-thing interactions in the physical world actually occur? Do they occur? Doesn't such an idea assume that there are multiple truly distinct things interacting? In order for there to be interaction in the strict sense of the word, doesn't this require that multiple things are involved? And doesn't this actually run afoul of what Spinoza argued about the problem with multiple substances? If you conceive of particles as truly separate, independent things, one from another, things each standing on their own, so to speak, having self-existence, you are talking about multiple substances, substance here being used in the traditional metaphysics sense. And multiple substances interacting is usually considered problematic. For one thing, if they are truly independent, why are they the same in so many ways? Why are all electrons basically identical? And why do they occupy the same space? How would truly independent substances have anything in common? And if things are not actually separate, then how can they be said to interact?
It could be that the concept of interaction itself is problematic, as it relies on there being a true multiplicity. Instead, all of reality might involve wholeness.
What are we really talking about anyway with causality? Do we even know?
Also, consider that space at least, if not time also, is possibly emergent and not necessarily fundamental. It seems to me a rather old-fashioned way of seeing things to think of atoms and the void as ultimate fundamentals, and yet most people seem to think in this fashion when thinking about the physical, even though modern physics has given us plenty of reason to raise questions here. For one thing, such a view leaves space, time, and atoms unexplained, as well as the laws that govern them. What is space? Is it just an emptiness or absence of things, or is it substantial? Is it a something itself? Is there a "fabric" of space? What is time? What are atoms? How do they interact? How is it that they have substantiality? How is it that there are multiple things? Why are there many identical things? Why do they have the particular properties they do?
In Einstein's theories, space gains its own degrees of freedom and seems to cease to be the empty void of Democritus that people still seem to imagine. What is it then? If spatial geometry can change, what is it that is changing? And what is it exactly that determines that a certain thing is in a certain place in space? How does that thing "know" where it is? How does the universe "know" where it is and whether it will interact with another thing?
There are all sorts of interesting things to think about. If the only thing in the universe is a single astronaut floating in space, where is he? How fast is he moving? Suppose there is another astronaut in view. Who is moving? There is relative motion. Without the other, velocity is undefined. With two astronauts, information about each is available to the other by way of things like light (maybe the astronauts have flashlights), gravity, and so on. But drop down to the level of a single sub-atomic particle. Until an interaction occurs, aren't its position and momentum undefined? At that level, unlike at the level of a large astronaut, where many, many interactions are involved in seeing another astronaut, interactions are comparatively rare. As a single tiny particle, you can't "see" the world around you. You aren't big enough be struck by enough photons or whatever in order to gain information about your surroundings. Prior to an interaction, it would seem, you are effectively isolated, and so your position, momentum, and so on, are undefined. Only upon interaction does any of this become defined. And since things are quantized and discrete, interactions are seemingly on and off. If light were continuous, particles could maybe be thought to receive tiny quantities of light from all around, from many, many objects, and thus not be so blind. The discreteness and quantization gives a different picture. But if you need interaction to gain definite position and momentum, how is it determined whether the interaction happens or not? If it isn't "known" where the particles are, how is it "known" if they collide? Seemingly, interaction is needed to generate information about relative states, but information about relative states is needed to decide if interaction occurs. What is it that keeps track of their respective positions and momenta, if anything? A real position in a real space? What does that mean? Is that compatible with the uncertainties of QM? In a computer simulation of particles, we keep track in the computer's memory. The computer "knows" and compares the positions. What about in the physical world?
How is any of this relevant to the discussion? I think there are questions that few ask about how any sort of interaction occurs. An interaction between two particles in space might require a third unknown factor, one transcending space. And if such other factors could be involved, why couldn't they possibly mediate mind-matter interactions? We just don't know enough to rule such things out. We don't know what mind really is. We don't know what matter/energy really is. We don't know what space is. We don't know what interaction really is. We don't understand causation. So deciding what is possible by means of arguments such as the one presented in the OP is more than a little misguided, it seems to me.
Recently, there has been some stir in the physics world over ER=EPR, and some are beginning to think, in possible glimmers of a theory of quantum gravity, that space itself is emergent and is "stitched together" by entanglement, and represents a sort of network of particles (not particles in the intuitive "tiny rock" sense). But if space is emergent in this sense, where do the particles that, by their entanglement structure, give rise to it, themselves reside? Another space? Why is that needed?
Where, for that matter, is the universe located? Does it have location?
Consider a computer program in which you define a bunch of nodes with "links". Create rules such that information can be moved from node to node, but only across links. Information can be passed at a rate of only one link per time step. Suppose you have nodes linked in a series such as A-B-C-D-E.... Information can go from A to B to C, but never A directly to C, since no such link exists. What happens here is that a sort of space emerges, a one-dimensional space. But in reality, A, B, C, D, E, and so on, are not actually spatially located. They are distinguished logically or informationally only. Spatial "proximity" here takes on a new meaning, having to do with the arbitrary structure of the network. The nodes themselves actually have no location in any true space.
Our space could be analogous to this in that there might not be any true, ultimate space in which particles reside. Reality might be more fundamentally logical/informational.
In our computer program, we could create more emergent spatial dimensions by linking nodes in more ways. We could have A1 linked to both B1 and to A2, for example, giving something like rows and columns. You could then have a 2D "space" "inside" the network, in which such games as Conway's Game of Life could happen. If you are an inhabitant of such a world, it might appear that all causal interaction is truly happening at the level of the things inside that space, between things locally acting on one another, one cell literally touching and thereby influencing its neighbor. In reality, what is responsible for that apparent interaction is something altogether inaccessible to the contents of the game world. It has more to do with the computer running the program and storing information in variables, executing conditionals, comparing variables, and so on. Similarly, in our world, many things might be completely hidden from us. Many of the conditions for the possibility of what we see happening might be based in something happening in a realm transcending the one we have access to.
Remember that correlation doesn't demonstrate causation. What might at first appear to be A causing B might in fact be C causing both A and B. Every time the mercury in the thermometer rises beyond a certain point, I also start sweating, but it would be a mistake to conclude that the rising mercury is causing me to sweat. And realize that when we think we observe physical causation, all we are really seeing is correlation. Every time X occurs, Y occurs. We are seeing patterns in our experience. We don't have any deep justification for our belief that one billiard ball striking another is fundamentally and finally what causes it to move.
Consider being stuck in a dream you can't wake from and trying, from that vantage point, to address certain factors that affect the dream world, such as your physical body. You cannot find that which governs the contents of the dream inside the dream. You can't find, strictly within the dream world, the brain that dreams it. You could not, for example, excise your brain tumor through the dream world. Similarly, in an MMORPG, you cannot find the player of the game inside the game world. You cannot find the computer on which the game is running inside the game world. You cannot find the code inside the game world.
Suppose we create a simulation in which we have a physics that works at the particle level and we evolve a complex world there built of these virtual particles. Now imagine that a scientist composed of such particles studies that world experimentally and adheres to the idea that reality consists only in what can be experimentally verified. Could that scientist, by means of his experiments, ever gain access to the computer on which his world is running? Could he discover the programmers? He might manage to discover laws, and thus, to some small extent, something of the code behind the simulation, but that's about all. So if he were to define reality as being limited to that which is composed of the particles in his world and their interactions, and that which is verifiable by experiments performed on these particles, he would be making a mistake, wouldn't he? He'd be rather short-sighted, but understandably so.
Also, what relevance might Kant have in this discussion? In his view, aren't space and time categories of the understanding? How does this affect the question of interaction between mind and body?
I think it even possible that the physical world is something that happens emergently inside mind, or is in some sense the content of mind, or represents the structure, seen at a certain level, of a kind of mental activity. After all, physics seems to reduce to math and information and maybe ultimately logic, which are themselves decidedly not very "stuff-like", seemingly rather more like cognition. We still, because of physics history, call the small constituents of reality "particles", but when you really examine the concept, the particles of modern physics are not at all what we intuit when using that word. A picture often presented in physics is that of a photon, a discreet packet of energy, being absorbed by an electron and thereby converted into a higher energy state of that electron. What is really happening here? Do we really understand matter-energy equivalence? Consider that a particle itself can be converted into momentum. What is this "stuff" then?
And from the perspective of the photon, because of length contraction, there is no distance or time interval in the crossing. The source and destination electrons are, for the photon, co-located or touching. Perhaps photons aren't real particles moving through space. Maybe space itself isn't what we imagine it to be. A seeming travel of a photon, which has never been observed by the way, might be one electron directly exchanging information with another by a sort of "local" action, transferring energy from one to another.
As little as we currently understand about the deep nature of things, I'd say it is extremely premature to claim that we know that things located in space and things not located in space cannot be related. Also, the idea that there can be nothing real that isn't located in space is absurd, space itself being the perfect example. Is space located in space? No? Is it therefore unreal? The laws of physics, mathematics, and logic are all real and not spatially located.
If space is emergent, as it seems it might well be, then even the things seemingly in space aren't truly located in space. And this would cause trouble for the idea of a problem with interaction between spatially located things and things not spatially located. Instead, we'd be talking about relationships where none of the things involved have true spatial location.
And what if space emerges in mind? What if matter and space are contents of mind? Mind is then clearly not in space and yet it is easy to see that mind could be said to have some bearing on its contents. If you have trouble with this in the big, real world, consider how the argument in the OP would play in a dream. The "dream-physical", or the content of the dream world, lives in the dream world, while the mind transcends it, and yet they clearly are related. But of course, this is not truly a dualistic picture. But a kind of dualism could certainly be apparent or emergent at a certain level.