Rejecting Immaterial Minds
![Vulcan mind meld [365.11]](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2109/2466554362_bfa00f49b1_m.jpg)
In the third chapter of Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, Jaegwon Kim gives an evaluation of the Cartesian argument that immaterial minds exist.
It’s a view called “ontological dualism” (contrast this with David Chalmer’s “property dualism”) and is problematic for Kim because of trouble with explaining how causation works in this view. However, it is not primarily the question of how an immaterial mind can interact with a material body.
Kim suggests that our confusion about material-immaterial interaction is misplaced. Why couldn’t it just be a “brute fact” about reality that minds/souls do have causal influence over material bodies? Just claiming that they’re two different substances and therefore cannot interact expresses only a “vague, inchoate dissatisfaction”, not a philosophical argument.
The central problem is that we can’t explain, to any degree of satisfaction philosophically, what it is that makes my soul attached to my body. This “pairing relationship”, or R, is a mystery and brings about a serious problem:
Suppose that my soul (A) and your soul (B) perform the same mental act at a given time. As a result, there’s a physical change in my brain states, but not yours. What relationship R can be given to explain how soul A effects changes in my brain in contrast to soul B? We know that it can’t be any kind of proximity (i.e. my soul indwells me and yours does not–because souls are not material).
But it seems like even relationships like psychological ones ( Kim suggests a soul “picking out” another soul or a brain) require perception and intentional relationships that are causal. For example, I perceive the tree which I do because that tree causes certain perceptual experiences. But we’re trying to explain causal relations–so we’re begging the question, assuming a causal relationship to explain one.
This is a problem even when we’re talking about soul to soul interaction, a concern which Kim emphasizes is very troubling for a Cartesian account. If we have no idea of where to begin in explaining causation in a purely mental world, then how can we do so when it comes to mind-body causation? There are more examples and details in the chapter that I’m skipping: the basic idea of his argument is what’s important.
At bottom, his concern is that causation requires space-time coordinates in order to be intelligible. We need some way of distinguishing between the cause and the effect, and some way of explaining how the cause “picks out” this effect over another.
Interestingly, this schema is what motivates Nāgārjuna to claim that “cause” as an essential, reified thing, does not exist. That will be the subject of my next post–his examination of the agent and action in the MMK.
May 27th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
[...] Earlier, I stated that “causation requires space-time coordinates in order to be intelligible. We need some way of distinguishing between the cause and the effect, and some way of explaining how the cause “picks out” this effect over another.” This attempt to isolate cause and effect is what motivates Nāgārjuna to posit what he calls “emptiness.” Emptiness is not “nothingness”, but rather the dependent origination of all things. At bottom, reality is–to put it using current buzzwords–relational. [...]