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 then we have to define agency to figure out exactly what we’re talking about. There’s a continuum of difference between a rock, a mosquito, a monkey, and a human and their ability to alter material reality (including themselves). I might say agency and consciousness are both good ways of conceptualizing that difference. What is agency to you?
What is agency to you?
To me it’s causal efficacy at the base ontological level. Under emergentism consciousness does not have agency on an ontological level but rather on an abstract one, at which point the definition is arbitrary and not very useful most of the time.
If you say matter is the only substance with causal efficacy at the ontological level then anything else you say about consciousness is just a rephrasing of the same idea.
What does it mean, in the real world, to have agency on an ontological level? If we’re drawing a distinction between an ontological versus abstract conceptualization of agency, how does that change our understanding of the world?
a rephrasing of the same idea
I think this statement is just a reduction, not an argument. I’m taking a concept (materialism) and unwrapping/restructuring it in a way that has better explanatory power, in my opinion, than any alternatives. And I’m not going so far as to say matter is the only substance with causal efficacy, in fact it’d be very difficult to pinpoint the “matter” of something like consciousness or society or whatever.
Society is something that exists, yet is made only of individuals. But when those people are organized in specific ways they produce society, a new essence or force, an entity that itself can dominate the people that comprise it. We might draw a distinction between the society and the individual to help understand the tensions at play, but we’d never go as far as to say that society is some alien being that exists removed from the individuals that make it up.
What does it mean, in the real world, to have agency on an ontological level?
In your day to day life, nothing, we’re doing a philosophy here, a discipline famous for often not being applicable to real life.
If we’re drawing a distinction between an ontological versus abstract conceptualization of agency, how does that change our understanding of the world?
Pretty hugely I’d say. Picking one metaphysic over another absolutely would massively influence actual real world research. If most cognitive scientists were say, idealists instead of physicalists they would almost certainly approach researching consciousness in a drastically different way. You’d see a lot more theories like this for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction
I’m taking a concept (materialism) and unwrapping/restructuring it in a way that has better explanatory power, in my opinion, than any alternatives.
And I think it doesn’t. You’re no closer to explaining the tiniest bit of consciousness than Daniel Dennett or anybody for that matter.
Society is something that exists, yet is made only of individuals. But when those people are organized in specific ways they produce society, a new essence or force, an entity that itself can dominate the people that comprise it.
Sure, but now you’re talking about the abstractions again. The hard problem of consciousness is fundamentally about metaphysics whether you like it or not. I fully understand that for most real life stuff it doesn’t really matter whether our consciousness is fundamental or dependent on material reality or emergent from material reality or whatever, but I think if we want to get to the bottom of what it is we need to really think hard about metaphysics. The current mood in academia seems to be “well the standard model and general relativity work really well so let’s just try to explain everything in terms of that” and I think that’s just completely inadequate for the problem at hand.
