I 156
Dualism/Definition Interactionist Dualism/Definition Interactionism/Chalmers: here, experience fills the causal gaps in the physical process.
ChalmersVs: that creates more problems than it solves. It does not solve the problems with epiphenomenalism.
>
Dualism, cf. >
Property dualism, >
Epiphenomenalism.
Pro: the only argument for interactionist dualism are some properties of quantum mechanics that could be better explained. (> Eccles 1986)
(1)
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ChalmersVsEccles: the effects would be much too small to effect any eventual behavioral changes. Other counter arguments:
VsInteractionist dualism/Interactionism/Chalmers:
1. it contradicts the quantum mechanical postulate that the microscopic "decisions" are random.
>
Quantum mechanics.
2. a behavior that was triggered by these microscopic influences would have to differ from behavior triggered differently.
ChalmersVsEccles: such theories are also silent on what should happen in the brain when the wave function collapses.
>
Wave function.
ChalmersVsInteractionist dualism: this makes the phenomenal irrelevant:
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ChalmersVsEccles: if there are his psychons, then they can do without purely causal interactions, without assumed phenomenal properties.
>
Phenomena, >
Experience.
VsChalmers: one might object that psychons (or ectoplasm, or whatever) are constituted by phenomenal properties.
ChalmersVsVs: even then their phenomenal properties are irrelevant to the explanation of the behavior: in the history of causation, it is only the relational properties that count. Thus it adheres to the causal unity of the physical.
ChalmersVsInteractionism/ChalmersVsEccles: Even if one were to assume psychons, one could tell a story about zombies, which involved psychons. One would then again have to assume additional phenomenal properties of psychons without being able to prove them.
>
Zombies.
I 162
Definition Interactionist Dualism/Chalmers: Chalmers accepts that consciousness is not physical (VsMaterialism) but he denies that the physical world is causally closed so that consciousness can play an autonomous causal role.
>
Causal closure, >
Consciousness/Chalmers, cf. >
Materialism.
1. Eccles, J.C. (1986) Do Mental Events Cause Neural Events Analogously to the Probability Fields of Quantum Mechanics? Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 227, 411-428.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1986.0031
