Monistic Idealism
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This is an argument for Idealism: In philosophy, the group of philosophies which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial.
I will lay out a rough sketch of the argument in formal terms and explain how I arrive at each premise and in order:
P1.) Mind exists (Introspection).
P2.) Eliminating Consciousness is self-refuting (P1).
P3.) Mind cannot be reduced to non-mind (Hard Problem of Consciousness).
P4.) Substance Dualism is false (Mind-Body Problem).
P5.) Mind-Body Problem implies Monism (P4, Causal Closure).
P6.) Non-Reductive Physicalism is false (Exclusion Problem).
P7.) There is mental causation (Introspection/Mind-Body Interaction).
P8.) There is only mental causation (P5-P7, Exclusion Problem).
Conclusion: Monistic Idealism is true (P1-P8).
P1.+P2.) We are conscious. There is first-person subjective awareness. Even if you're skeptical about whether you're in the matrix or if this is a dream, you're still aware that you're aware in each scenario. No matter what you're still conscious, this you definitely know for sure if there is anything that can be said to be known for sure. To claim otherwise would be a contradiction: you would be consciously denying that you're conscious and those who think otherwise are not only mistaken in their thinking but aren't actually thinking at all.
P3.) Given that we know the mental exists, we surely would like to explain it the same way we normally do by reducing it to something more fundamental than itself. The problem is the mental resists this reduction. As explained in the internet encyclopedia of philosophy (a peer-reviewed academic resource):
Thomas Nagel gives us a good example of this:
Neurons and their cells are just other cells that performs functions like any other cells. They're not magical, they're not special, they are describable with observation just like any other cell. If the mind were identical to such, then describing such would be enough, but we know that it's not. And no, you cannot appeal to some possible future discovery to bridge this because if the mental were identical to such then there would be nothing to bridge. You could bite the bullet and say there is nothing to bridge but you will just wind up an eliminativist and deny the existence of the mental which we've already established exists.
P4.) So the mind exists and is not reducible to non-mind. Perhaps from here we could accept substance dualism by believing there is both the mental and the non-mental together. This option will not do however since there is interaction between what the dualist is calling mental and non-mental. If they both existed independently then one should exist without the other, like a pianist and a piano. If you damage the piano then you haven't damaged the pianist in this scenario. However, in real life we can see how brain damage does indeed damage the mind and can alter personality.3 Taking drugs doesn't just alter behavior yet leaves your mind intact. Your mental states themselves are altered along with behavior and neurological states. This doesn't make any sense if the mental and the non-mental existed independently.
P5.) From the rejection of substance dualism, most people seem to think this brain damage altering consciousness implies materialism/physicalism: that we are nothing more than our physical makeup and our mind is either housed in our brains (almost like dualism) or is identical to our brains and/or its functions. This is a non-sequitur however. This only implies that substance dualism is false. What is not a non-sequitur however is the monistic intuition that comes from the mistaken materialist assumption. The interaction of mind and what we call non-mind is does indeed entail a kind of monism. If they were two fundamental substances they couldn't interact, but they do interact, so there must be one fundamental substance.
If causal domains are restricted to closed domains, then anything that can be interacted with must all be in the same domain. So there is one substance, one type of stuff that makes up all of reality.
P6.) We've established the mind exists, is not reducible, and there is only one substance with a closed causal domain. We still seem to be left with the mental and the non-mental, so perhaps we could say there is a monism of substance but a dualism of properties: a non-reductive physicalism of sorts that sees the non-mental as fundamental with the mental emerging from it. This position falls flat on its face as Jaegwon Kim:
If what they call the physical world is causally closed, and the mental is distinct in type from the physical, then there would be no mental causation. But there is mental causation. Even if you want to bite the bullet like the epiphenomenalist and say there is no mental causation, you're right back to the mind-body problem given that you're saying the non-mental still causes mental phenomenon and we've established this interaction cannot happen even from the bottom-up. It is not clear how non-reductive physicalists can maintain substance monism here as others like John Searle have noted.5,6,7
P7.) This premise is arrived at mainly through introspection like P1+P2. The debate around mental causation today is not whether it exists, but how mental properties can interact with physical properties.7 We have a common sense understanding that we are conscious and that we can will ourselves to behave in certain. Our conscious thoughts and volitions cause bodily actions. But how can this be given the exclusion problem?
P8.) If we know the mind exists, is irreducible, causal domains are closed, monism is true, and mental causation exists, well then this would have to mean there is only the mental. We can't have both the mental and the non-mental as that would be substance dualism, and non-reductive physicalism would contradict our commitment to mental causation, so we are left with idealism. Anything that exists would fundamentally be mental in nature and is either conscious or a property of consciousness. There's only one type of substance and one type of property: the mental.
P1-P8, Conclusion.) Idealism is true.
This is just a general case for idealism. There are many versions of idealism as outlined by David Chalmers.8 I subscribe to what he called Cosmic Idealism, but that I can argue for in another post.
Bibliography
1. "Hard Problem of Consciousness," by Josh Weisberg, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://www.iep.utm.edu/hard-con/
2. Thomas Nagel (2012). “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False". p. 41. Oxford University Press.
3: Garcia PG, Mielke MM, Rosenberg P, Bergey A, Rao V. PERSONALITY CHANGES IN BRAIN INJURY. The Journal of neuropsychiatry and clinical neurosciences. 2011;23(2):E14. doi:10.1176/appi.neuropsych.23.2.E14.
4. Kim, Jaegwon (1989). The myth of non-reductive materialism. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 63 (3):31-47.
5. Searle, John R. (2002). Why I am not a property dualist. Journal of Consciousness Studies 9 (12):57-64.
6. Zimmerman, Dean (2010). From Property Dualism to Substance Dualism. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 84 (1):119 - 150.
7. Robb, David and Heil, John, "Mental Causation", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/mental-causation/>.
8. Chalmers, David (forthcoming). Idealism and the Mind-Body Problem. In William Seager (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism. Routledge.
I will lay out a rough sketch of the argument in formal terms and explain how I arrive at each premise and in order:
P1.) Mind exists (Introspection).
P2.) Eliminating Consciousness is self-refuting (P1).
P3.) Mind cannot be reduced to non-mind (Hard Problem of Consciousness).
P4.) Substance Dualism is false (Mind-Body Problem).
P5.) Mind-Body Problem implies Monism (P4, Causal Closure).
P6.) Non-Reductive Physicalism is false (Exclusion Problem).
P7.) There is mental causation (Introspection/Mind-Body Interaction).
P8.) There is only mental causation (P5-P7, Exclusion Problem).
Conclusion: Monistic Idealism is true (P1-P8).
P1.+P2.) We are conscious. There is first-person subjective awareness. Even if you're skeptical about whether you're in the matrix or if this is a dream, you're still aware that you're aware in each scenario. No matter what you're still conscious, this you definitely know for sure if there is anything that can be said to be known for sure. To claim otherwise would be a contradiction: you would be consciously denying that you're conscious and those who think otherwise are not only mistaken in their thinking but aren't actually thinking at all.
P3.) Given that we know the mental exists, we surely would like to explain it the same way we normally do by reducing it to something more fundamental than itself. The problem is the mental resists this reduction. As explained in the internet encyclopedia of philosophy (a peer-reviewed academic resource):
"In more detail, the challenge arises because it does not seem that the qualitative and subjective aspects of conscious experience—how consciousness “feels” and the fact that it is directly “for me”—fit into a physicalist ontology, one consisting of just the basic elements of physics plus structural, dynamical, and functional combinations of those basic elements. It appears that even a complete specification of a creature in physical terms leaves unanswered the question of whether or not the creature is conscious. And it seems that we can easily conceive of creatures just like us physically and functionally that nonetheless lack consciousness. This indicates that a physical explanation of consciousness is fundamentally incomplete: it leaves out what it is like to be the subject, for the subject."1
Thomas Nagel gives us a good example of this:
... If a mental event really is a physical event in this sense, and nothing else, then the physical event by itself, once its physical properties are understood, should likewise be sufficient for the taste of sugar, the feeling of pain, or whatever it is supposed to be identical with. But it doesn't seem to be. It seems conceivable, for any physical event, there should be a physical event without any experience at all. Experience of taste seems to be something extra, contingently related to the brain state- something produced rather than constituted by the brain state. So it cannot be identical to the brain state in the way water is identical to H20.”2
Neurons and their cells are just other cells that performs functions like any other cells. They're not magical, they're not special, they are describable with observation just like any other cell. If the mind were identical to such, then describing such would be enough, but we know that it's not. And no, you cannot appeal to some possible future discovery to bridge this because if the mental were identical to such then there would be nothing to bridge. You could bite the bullet and say there is nothing to bridge but you will just wind up an eliminativist and deny the existence of the mental which we've already established exists.
P4.) So the mind exists and is not reducible to non-mind. Perhaps from here we could accept substance dualism by believing there is both the mental and the non-mental together. This option will not do however since there is interaction between what the dualist is calling mental and non-mental. If they both existed independently then one should exist without the other, like a pianist and a piano. If you damage the piano then you haven't damaged the pianist in this scenario. However, in real life we can see how brain damage does indeed damage the mind and can alter personality.3 Taking drugs doesn't just alter behavior yet leaves your mind intact. Your mental states themselves are altered along with behavior and neurological states. This doesn't make any sense if the mental and the non-mental existed independently.
P5.) From the rejection of substance dualism, most people seem to think this brain damage altering consciousness implies materialism/physicalism: that we are nothing more than our physical makeup and our mind is either housed in our brains (almost like dualism) or is identical to our brains and/or its functions. This is a non-sequitur however. This only implies that substance dualism is false. What is not a non-sequitur however is the monistic intuition that comes from the mistaken materialist assumption. The interaction of mind and what we call non-mind is does indeed entail a kind of monism. If they were two fundamental substances they couldn't interact, but they do interact, so there must be one fundamental substance.
If causal domains are restricted to closed domains, then anything that can be interacted with must all be in the same domain. So there is one substance, one type of stuff that makes up all of reality.
P6.) We've established the mind exists, is not reducible, and there is only one substance with a closed causal domain. We still seem to be left with the mental and the non-mental, so perhaps we could say there is a monism of substance but a dualism of properties: a non-reductive physicalism of sorts that sees the non-mental as fundamental with the mental emerging from it. This position falls flat on its face as Jaegwon Kim:
"If nonreductive physicalists accept the causal closure of the physical domain, therefore, they have no visible way of accounting for the possibility of psychophysical causation. This means that they must either give up their antireductionism or else reject the possibility of psychophysical causal relations.The denial of psychophysical causation can come about in two ways: first, you make such a denial because you don't believe there are mental events; or second, you keep faith with mental events even though you acknowledge that they never enter into causal transactions with physical processes, constituting their own autonomous causal world. So either you have espoused eliminativism, or else you are moving further in the direction of dualism, a dualism that posits a realm of the mental in total causal isolation from the physical realm. This doesn't look to me much like materialism. Is the abandonment of the causal closure of the physical domain an option for the materialist? I think not: to reject the closure principle is to embrace irreducible nonphysical causes of physical phenomena. It would be a retrogression to Cartesian interactionist dualism, something that is definitive of the denial of materialism. Our conclusion, therefore, has to be this: nonreductive materialism is not a stable position. There are pressures of various sorts that push it either in the direction of outright eliminativism or in the direction of an explicit form of dualism."4
If what they call the physical world is causally closed, and the mental is distinct in type from the physical, then there would be no mental causation. But there is mental causation. Even if you want to bite the bullet like the epiphenomenalist and say there is no mental causation, you're right back to the mind-body problem given that you're saying the non-mental still causes mental phenomenon and we've established this interaction cannot happen even from the bottom-up. It is not clear how non-reductive physicalists can maintain substance monism here as others like John Searle have noted.5,6,7
P7.) This premise is arrived at mainly through introspection like P1+P2. The debate around mental causation today is not whether it exists, but how mental properties can interact with physical properties.7 We have a common sense understanding that we are conscious and that we can will ourselves to behave in certain. Our conscious thoughts and volitions cause bodily actions. But how can this be given the exclusion problem?
P8.) If we know the mind exists, is irreducible, causal domains are closed, monism is true, and mental causation exists, well then this would have to mean there is only the mental. We can't have both the mental and the non-mental as that would be substance dualism, and non-reductive physicalism would contradict our commitment to mental causation, so we are left with idealism. Anything that exists would fundamentally be mental in nature and is either conscious or a property of consciousness. There's only one type of substance and one type of property: the mental.
P1-P8, Conclusion.) Idealism is true.
This is just a general case for idealism. There are many versions of idealism as outlined by David Chalmers.8 I subscribe to what he called Cosmic Idealism, but that I can argue for in another post.
Bibliography
1. "Hard Problem of Consciousness," by Josh Weisberg, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://www.iep.utm.edu/hard-con/
2. Thomas Nagel (2012). “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False". p. 41. Oxford University Press.
3: Garcia PG, Mielke MM, Rosenberg P, Bergey A, Rao V. PERSONALITY CHANGES IN BRAIN INJURY. The Journal of neuropsychiatry and clinical neurosciences. 2011;23(2):E14. doi:10.1176/appi.neuropsych.23.2.E14.
4. Kim, Jaegwon (1989). The myth of non-reductive materialism. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 63 (3):31-47.
5. Searle, John R. (2002). Why I am not a property dualist. Journal of Consciousness Studies 9 (12):57-64.
6. Zimmerman, Dean (2010). From Property Dualism to Substance Dualism. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 84 (1):119 - 150.
7. Robb, David and Heil, John, "Mental Causation", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/mental-causation/>.
8. Chalmers, David (forthcoming). Idealism and the Mind-Body Problem. In William Seager (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism. Routledge.