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Another excellent video from QualiaSoup!
Philosophy of Mind 101.
:)
For anyone interested in reading the philosophical literature on philosophy of mind, many of the seminal papers can be found at David Chalmers’ website:
http://consc.net/chalmers/
He has papers on consciousness/ mind, etc but also a humor section. Chalmers rocks! :)
Chalmers is a property dualist.Which is something of a moderate position. At one end there is the substance dualist and at the other is the monist / physicist. Philosophers of mind like Dan Dennett are hard-line physicists. Folks like Chalmers think there is a lot more to learn about the nature of consciousness.
Excellent! It always depresses me to see how many otherwise bright people buy into the separate magisteria argument. There are passages in the Bible that indicate that ancient Jews and Christians borrowed the Egyptian idea of the soul as a physical thing, that could reanimate a body or fly out through a window. They also took the Egyptian idea that consciousness resided in the heart, not the brain.
I think this video ignores the actual weaknesses of substance dualism in order to invent some.
His bit about non-physical substance is either completely ignorant, which I doubt, or it is a deliberate attempt to re-characterize the philosophical definition of substance. While “substance” colloquially means physical substance, substance has a very specific philosophical definition which he blatantly ignores (that in which qualities inhere). Substance does not need to be physical; this is a mis-characterization *at best;* at worst it is just wrong.
I am strongly tempted to check every point this video makes against a reputable philosophical source, but I want to wait and see if any other philosophy people have anything to say about this first. I’m very uncomfortable with his very first point, which seems inexcusable, and I don’t think I can take anything else he says at face value without some checking.
I am not necessarily a philosophy person but I had a similar reaction. My understanding of the mind body problem is that mental “substances” have no physical qualities at all. Hence to problem of how these two kinds of substances can affect each other.
Sure, and the problem of interaction between physical/non-physical substances is the only interesting part of the movie. Everything else is wrong, trivial (mind =! consciousness?), or a straw-man characterization of what substance dualists often say, rather than what the philosophies they espouse actually indicate.
JonJon:
Can you give an example of a non-physical substance?
Could a story not be regarded as a non-physical substance? It has its qualities (it can be long or short, it will have characters, setting, plot) but does not necessarily have any physical substance to it. It will likely be in physical media, such as ink and paper, or soundwaves in speech, but that is its mode of transfer, the story itself is just a story. The story of A Christmas Carol exists physically many, many times over, but could it not also be argued that the story exists as a non-physical entity by virtue of it having been created?
Just a thought that occurred to me. I was quite a dualist back in the day, but over time the idea has been chipped away as I have discovered more and more. The rest of the video is very solid as far as I can see but I think JonJon has a point regarding the misuse of ‘substance’.
No. Messages do not exist separately from the medium in which they are encoded. There is no A Christmas Carol “entity”; it exists on paper, hard drives, brains, and other media. If those go away, it doesn’t exist.
Yes it does.
(I can argue without backing up my assertions too! It’s fun…)
In what sense does a message exist if all copies are extinguished?
does the message have qualities? (length, formality, tense?)
There must be something *substantial* in which these qualities inhere.
While a message indeed might not exist without a mind to comprehend it, and therefore might not have any qualities at all, there is no way to verify, support, or weaken your assertion; you have made a bald statement. I don’t strongly disagree, I just don’t know that you’ve said anything that convinces me that messages have no existence beyond the media they’re encoded in.
Like I said in my other comment, “substance” has a specific meaning in philosophy; it means that ‘stuff’ in which qualities inhere. It has no special definition that makes it necessarily physical. This guy, regardless of whether or not the rest of what he says is kosher, is flat wrong on this point. Non-physical substance is not contradictory; calling it that is disingenuous at best. Even non-dualistic philosophers agree with this definition of substance (although they might not agree that substance exists at all) and non-dualist philosophers also do not necessarily limit the substance they talk about to purely physical substance. Often they indicate some substance “behind” or “underneath” all other phenomena, both physical and non-physical.
This is not something this guy should be unfamiliar with if he’s going to make instructional videos.
Yes: the message. I deleted a response and typed this instead, and assuming it’s not in my computer’s cache somewhere, the message is gone. It has no length, formality, tense, subject, or anything else. Only messages that exist have those properties. Any properties at all, in fact.
I think there is only one kind of substance. So does QualiaSoup. That is what his video is about. You are criticizing the video for not being about something else. In your terms, he is denying that substances exist at all. But the target audience wouldn’t know what that means, and really do use the phrase “non-physical substance”, which is really contradictory in that sense. Really.
Descartes gave the example of mathematics.
Mathematics is not a substance.
No, not a physical substance.
Mathematics is not a substance period. You could say that mathematics falls under your definition of “squishy”, even get a bunch of people to agree, but that doesn’t make it meaningful. To Descartes, apparently, mathematics is a substance, but to me and any materialist worth their salt, it is not. He believed there are two kinds of substance, material and mental. Quoting Descartes about dualism is like quoting the Bible about the nature of God. It’s only convincing to people who already agree.
My understanding of the philosophical term-of-art definition of “substance” (“that in which qualities inhere” as JonJon gave it) is that what qualifies depends on the speaker’s philosophy: substances are Forms for Platonists, to Hume they may be ideas, to QualiaSoup they are atoms. There is obviously not agreement that there is such a thing as a non-physical substance. That is the point, I think, of the first minute or so of the video, if not the whole: using the word “substance” to refer to anything non-physical is absurd. The whole idea is that a dualistic definition of “substance” is fallacious; it is meaningless to criticize the idea as not following the dualistic definition of “substance”.
Again, however, non-physical substances are by no means unique to dualistic philosophies.
Example?
Are you confusing substance dualism with other kinds of dualism? Or suggesting that substance monists / materialists accept the existence of non-physical substances?
I’m saying that there is an entirely “monist” type of philosophy called idealism (which the video briefly mentions, in fact), which accepts only non-physical things as ontologically basic substances.
I’ve still not understood what non-physical ‘things’, ‘beings’ or ‘places’ are supposed to be then?
And how could a physical being like us understand what non-physical actually means or would ‘look’ or ‘be’ like?
Okay. Then call it a non-substance. The problem is still the same. Mind/Body.
“And how could a physical being like us understand what non-physical actually means or would ‘look’ or ‘be’ like?”
It would look and be like mathematics.
I think a mathematical truth has a good shot at being a non-physical substance.
The pythagorean theorem doesn’t depend on the existence of anything else for its truth. It simply *is* true, like a rock simply *is* there.
Not true at all. It’s only true because it follows from the postulates of Euclidean geometry. In fact, the Pythagorean theorem isn’t necessarily true anywhere in our universe because space-time has a non-Euclidean geometry. The Pythagorean theorem is only true given a few assumptions — if no one ever bothers to make those assumptions, then in what sense is the theorem true?
“If you want to understand all the Buddhas of the past, present, and future… then view the nature of the universe as created by mind alone.”
In order to qualify as a deepity, one of a statement’s two meanings must be true (but superficial). This is merely meaningless.
A story can only exist in physical space and with the help of physical beings with physical brains.
A story doesn’t just exist by itself, independently from all physical things.
“Consider magnets,” the old man said. “If you hold two
magnets near each other, they are attracted. Yet there is
nothing material connecting them.”
“Yes there is,” I corrected. “There’s a magnetic field.
You can see it when you do that experiment with the metal
shavings on a piece of paper. You hold a magnet under the
paper and the shavings all organize along magnetic lines.
That’s the magnetic field.”
“So you have a word for it. It’s a ‘field,’ you say. But you
can’t get a handful of this thing for which you have a name.
You can’t fill a container with a magnetic field and take it with
you. You can’t cut it in pieces. You can’t block its power.”
“You can’t block it? I didn’t know that.”
“You can alter a magnetic field by adding other magnetic
material, but there is no non-magnetic material you
can put between two magnets to block them. This ‘field’ of
yours is strange stuff. We can see its effect, and we can
invent a name for it, but it doesn’t exist in any physical
form. How can something that doesn’t exist in physical
form have influence over the things that do?”
- Scott Adams. God’s Debris
Magnetic fields exist in physical form, they just aren’t visible. Many physical materials (and most forces) cannot be seen, gotten in a handful, or put in a container. Kind of a weird quote, I was like “what the hell is Douglas Adams doing spreading misinformation and apparent support for supernaturalism?”, then I realized Scott is the Dilbert guy.
I agree.
And magnetic fields are like heat in a sense. You don’t see the heat but you can feel it. Yet both magnetic fields and heat need physical sources in order to exist in the first place. And they both, obviously, can only exist within physical space.
Douglas Adams has stated in the intro of God’s Debris that most of what is sold as ‘truth’ in the story actually isn’t and people should try to recognize these instances. The claims about magnets would evidently be one of these.
Douglas Adams had a very interesting and often thought-provoking bog by the way. Check it out.
I think those of you engaged in the “is mathematics a substance” are getting side-tracked and missing the point of the video. He’s talking about trying to explain the composition of a human mind, not whether abstractions such as mathematics are material or not. In other words, does a human mind need some components that are outside of the realm of known physics in order to work?
Cheers,
Graham
It is rather obvious that substance dualism as the author defines it is unworkable. The video becomes, for that reason, almost pointless. Of course such a chimera as this is disprovable. It’s a straw man that does not address true dualism.
Hi Nomad,
Is there any other kind of substance dualism? A link to material that defines a different kind of substance dualism than the author is talking about would be useful.
There are, of course, other kinds of dualism but the author is very specific that this video is only about substance dualism.
Cheers,
Graham
Descartes doesn’t explain much in the end. He still simply refers to his magical ‘substance’ but doesn’t even try to show how it would interact with the physical world … It’s a lame explanation but he needs it of course to uphold the illusion of his god.
You can’t prove it’s not true, so it is.
Yet it did not really explain much in the end?
And there’s still no real reason to assume that his dualism actually exists.
He was trying to prove the existence of God, to be sure, but it was what he did in the process, the elaboration of the mind/body problem, that turned out to be his most important accomplishment.
Oops, my reply should have been here:
Yet it did not really explain much in the end?
And there’s still no real reason to assume that his dualism actually exists.
Except maybe the evidence.
Which evidence is there that Descartes’ dualism exists?
The fact that things exist that have no physical properties, like math and the principles of music. Even language could be argued to have no physical properties.
Here is a definition of Substance according to Stanford’s Plato database (your one stop shop for philosophy needs)–
“There could be said to be two rather different ways of characterizing the philosophical concept of substance. The first is the more generic. The philosophical term ‘substance’ corresponds to the Greek ousia, which means ‘being’, transmitted via the Latin substantia, which means ‘something that stands under or grounds things’. According to the generic sense, therefore, the substances in a given philosophical system are those things which, according to that system, are the foundational or fundamental entities of reality. Thus, for an atomist, atoms are the substances, for they are the basic things from which everything is constructed. In David Hume’s system, impressions and ideas are the substances, for the same reason. In a slightly different way, Forms are Plato’s substances, for everything derives its existence from Forms. In this sense of ‘substance’ any realist philosophical system acknowledges the existence of substances. Probably the only theories which do not would be those forms of logical positivism or pragmatism which treat ontology as a matter of convention. According to such theories, there are no real facts about what is ontologically basic, and so nothing is objectively substance.
The second use of the concept is more specific. According to this, substances are a particular kind of basic entity, and some philosophical theories acknowledge them and others do not. On this use, Hume’s impressions and ideas are not substances, even though they are the building blocks of—what constitutes ‘being’ for—his world. According to this usage, it is a live issue whether the fundamental entities are substances or something else, such as events, or properties located at space-times. This conception of substance derives from the intuitive notion of individual thing or object, which contrast mainly with properties and events. The issue is how we are to understand the notion of an object, and whether, in the light of the correct understanding, it remains a basic notion, or one that must be characterized in more fundamental terms. Whether, for example, an object can be thought of as nothing more than a bundle of properties, or a series of events.”
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/substance/
Qualiasoup is either dead wrong, or deliberately misleading in the first part of his video. I don’t know what else to call it.
How could something ‘be’ in non-physical space?
Really? Did you miss what we were talking about?
A physical substance couldn’t “be” in “non-physical space.”
A non-physical substance could.
What’s non-phyiscal ‘space’ then?
A relational manifold for non-physical objects.
Obviously.
What’s a non-physical ‘object’?
It’s funny. After the intro, it seemed like such a pointless discussion, I didn’t stick around till the end. The really interesting discussion would have been the things they preemptively took “off the table”.
Hi Graham,
I don’t really know. It’s been a long time since my Intro to philosophy course, but I got from it a completely different notion of what dualism was. “Substance” dualism is a term I am not familiar with. I was under the impression that mental “substance” was simply a way of referring to things that had no physical qualities. This is clearly not what this video is discussing. I can only refer you to the philosophy of Descartes.
I’m just irritated the fun stuff comes up when I’m away. :)
welcome back!
Thanks. Y’know, it just occurred to me as a serious irony that the biggest problem with qualiasoup’s point in this video is…qualia.
LOL!!!!! True dat.
Yeah, I had noticed that too.
Nomad:
I’m not sure that Descartes was thinking about math and the principles of music when he claimed that humans were both ‘body & soul’, both ‘physical and non-physical’ …
What is the evidence that there is something non-physical to humans? And what would that be?
I’m pretty sure he was thinking about math. It’s me who thinks about music. The principle is the same. People didn’t just make up the rules of math or music. They had to discover them. These are non physical things. Part of the mystery of the human mind is how we are able to comprehend these abstractions. But the fact that we can suggests there is something non-physical about humans. Even if its only temporary. Descartes placed great significance upon this ability. “I think (therefore) I am.”
Math? Wasn’t he trying to make the case for a ‘soul’?
Sorry. Yes he was trying to make the case for soul- for God, at any rate. But math was the model upon which he based his method of proof.
So his god would be like math? That doesn’t sound like the anthropomorphic god from the Bible though …
Also math can’t create something by itself, can it?
And does math makes sense in a non-physical world?
O-o-kay.This doesn’t follow from what I said:
“So his god would be like math?”
Math was the model for the method he devised to prove the existence of God. Why should the means be conflated with the end? We all know now that his proof doesn’t work. It is what Descartes articulated in the process that was important.
1. He didn’t prove the existence of his god.
2. Except if his god was like math.
He did not prove the existence of a god as described in the Bible.
> It is what Descartes articulated in the process that was important.
I still don’t see how that proves that there is something ‘non-physical’ about humans?
Neither do I. Your point?
BTW, isn’t the belief that our bodies regenerate every 7 years just a myth? As far as I know, some parts of the body do regenerate regularly, but at different rates, while others hardly regenerate at all.
If true, that would seem like a more devastating rebuttal to the argument mentioned in the video than the one used by the author.
I was wondering if anyone else could confirm or deny that the 7 years regeneration is a myth?
The substance dualism argument is a non-sequitur – the conclusion doesn’t follow the argument. If non-material substances are undetectable then how do we know anything about it? How do we know that something non-material can possess a mental state? It’s a bit of an invisible pink unicorn.
It reminds me of the non-sequitur argument about the capabilities of ghosts. I am sure many of you have been assured that ghosts cannot hurt you. To me, it looks like this:
1. To make the assertion that ghosts cannot harm you implies that ghosts exist.
2. We know that ghosts exist by their ghostly behaviour, e.g. moving pictures, opening doors, turning lights on and off, breathing on our neck, footsteps.
3. Ghosts cannot harm you.