It’s literally like this:
Materialists/Physicalists: “The thoughts in your head come from your conditions and are ultimately the result of your organs and nervous system. Your consciousness is linked to your brain activity and other parts of your body interacting with the physical real world.”
Dualists: “Ok but what if there were an imaginary zombie that has the same organs and molecular structure as a living person but somehow isn’t alive on some metaphysical level. If this zombie is conceivable, that means it must be metaphysically true somehow.”
Materialists: “That’s circular and imaginary, isn’t it?”
Other dualists: “Ok but what if I were in a swamp and lightning strikes a tree and magically creates a copy of me but it’s not actually me because it doesn’t have my soul.”
Am I reading this stuff wrong or are these actually the best arguments for mind-body dualism
Well that’s the explanatory power of emergence in my mind, that something can qualitatively change when its more basic parts reach a critical mass of complexity. Consciousness seems to possess an essence or nature that defies explanation or examination, and in my reading and talking with people they seem to either reduce it to nothing more than its parts (consciousness doesn’t exist except conceptually, everything is simply material) or ascribe some form of alienating dualism to it (consciousness exists external to the body).
And the synthesis that works for me is that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. It’s an attempt at a sort of dialectical dualism, where the consciousness exists (more than just a conceptualization or construct of material mechanisms but actually exists in reality) and can exert influence on other things that actually exist, while also springing from and being influenced by material mechanisms. Causality is complex and dialectical, not linearly one dimensional.
and can exert influence on other things that actually exist
But, again, it doesn’t. You say it does because you arbitrarily claimed certain physical processes to have a life of their own even though they still act according to the same set of relatively simple rules governing all of material reality, all of the complexity of those systems still fundamentally is due to the workings of those relatively simple rules. You did not resolve the dialectic, you just obfuscated it a bit more.
Are a monkey and a human equally capable of influencing their material world? Are both equally capable of examining and reflecting on their own consciousness and altering or refocusing the processes that make up their own consciousness?
No, but not sure where you’re going with that, my point still stands. You still claim both the monkey and the human are wholly subservient to physical laws. Just because both do something more interesting than just colliding with other matter in a predictable, and one of them does even more interesting stuff, doesn’t automatically mean their consciousness has agency under emergentism, you attributing agency to either is arbitrary because when it comes down to it you still believe physical laws rule everything.
The only way to properly go about this dialectic is acknowledge the specific character of consciousness and that it exists separately from but is heavily intertwined with the material world.
