Alvin Plantinga is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading Christian philosophers. Watch the video below and ask yourself, WTF?
So as not to spoil your fun, I’ll refrain from offering my take on the argument until readers have had a chance to comment.
I concur, but I’d put the point slightly more provocatively: without an account of the detailed causal processes that instantiate the interaction between mind and body, dualism runs the risk of making perception and action completely unintelligible.
If Plantinga is right, then dualism is analytically possibly true, and if modal realism is right, then there exists a world at which minds do not depend for their existence on bodies. Now, if there’s no solution to the causal interaction problem — if we’re basically in Locke’s position, epistemologically, with regard to dualism (e.g. “I don’t understand how minds and bodies causally interact, but clearly they do!”), then the persons at that world are completely unable to understand the nature of perception and action. For once the person is metaphysically split between mind and body, there’s no putting it back together again.
For such metaphysically split beings, perceiving and acting would be unintelligible to themselves — and given the central role of perceiving and acting to all of our norm-governed activities (language, morality, science) — the beings at this world would be completely unable to make sense of themselves at the most fundamental levels. They would complete mysteries to themselves.
That implication does not show that dualism is not true, of course, but it does strike me as extremely good reason for wanting dualism to not be true. Or, put otherwise, for hoping that the world at which dualism is true is not the actual world.
(Here I’m just assuming that the Kripke/Plantinga argument against mind-brain identity would yield Cartesian dualism, and that’s what I’m arguing against. I have no complaints if their argument against identity is also consistent with hylomorphism or some other non-materialist theory.)
That’s related to my point, though it’s more keiths than mine — since the question in keiths argument with Walter is about whether Plantinga is mistakenly slipping from de dicto to de re talk. I don’t think he is; I think the whole argument is de re from the beginning.
If it were de dicto, the premise would be, “I am conceiving of X as having property P”. That tells nothing about the world. But the premise isn’t that; it’s “the object X, of which I am conceiving, has property P”. So the bit about conceiving or imagining isn’t specifying the nature of the object; it’s specifying the nature of our cognitive access to the object.
Just as perceiving puts us in the right cognitive access to determine the sensible properties of objects, conceiving puts us in the right cognitive access to determine the modal properties of objects. The problem is that once you’ve determined the modal properties of objects through conceiving alone, in this wholly a priori method, you haven’t accomplished very much.
Let me try a slightly different tack.
If you raise a child from birth to age two or so, you observe the development of I-ness in the infant. It isn’t really there at birth. I-ness is some not well understood result of development and learning. It seems related to language and language acquisition.
Prior to this, it is obvious that an infant experiences pleasure and pain, but it isn’t obvious that such experiences are qualitatively different from those experienced by dogs or cats.
A related phenomenon is childhood amnesia, the absence of memories of early childhood. It’s pretty rare to remember anything at all from before age three, and most people have few reliable memories from before age five.
Anyone who cares for a three-year old would certainly think aof that child as a person, and yet nearly all awareness of that person will evaporate over time.
As you get older, you experience an odd inversion of this phenomenon. Memories of youth and middle age tend to stick, but memories of yesterday fade quickly.
The body-brain is what experiences things and remembers things. the thing we call I is not in any way independent of the body, and it is certainly not independent of the health and correct functioning of the body-brain.
I wish to avoid breaking website rules, but I fail to see how one can honestly maintain that it is possible for I-ness to be independent of the physical body and brain doing the I-ing.
I agree with that.It really is one of those exercises like arguing whether Godzilla can beat King Kong. The moment you start taking it seriously is the moment you become silly.
This kind of apologetics is the reason science diverged from theology in the first place.
I will concede that science has no good answer to the problem of consciousness, but science is the only player with chips in the game.
I’m not sure if that’s the point of dualism, but in this case it seems that the argument assumes its conclusion.
Cool, I haven’t completely missed something important, then.
(BTW, I’m enjoying the comments I have time to read in this thread, yours in particular.)
The findings and implications of scientific investigation don’t seem to carry much weight in many of these forms of sectarian apologetics or philosophy; facts apparently have a much lower status than “reasoning” and logic.
Even “mundane” phenomena – such as the temperature dependence of thought, as well as the susceptibility of thought to chemical and physical influences – have profound implications that are often ignored in these religious/philosophical arguments. Yet these phenomena point to where the real research activities are taking place.
Some of this research suggests that self-identity and “free will” may not be what they are naively thought to be. Decisions take place even before conscious awareness of these decisions takes place. It may turn out that we “make decisions” by an unconscious “selection process” that minimizes “stress among available choices”, and only afterwards do we “rationalize” the selection as having been consciously decided because the stress among choices has been “minimized” within the myriad of choices available to the neural network.
Bruce, to walto:
Don’t say that even in jest, or walto will wet his big-boy pants. 🙂
KN,
My claim is that Plantinga uses a possibility de dicto as if it were a possibility de re. Let me explain this first in terms of my Obama example, then in terms of Plantinga’s argument.
Here’s my Obama example. Luca is a jungle-dweller returning to civilization after 15 years:
Luca can say “it’s possible that the current president of the US is white” because he doesn’t know who is currently filling the role of president. He is really saying “it is possible that there is some person who is filling the role of president and who is also white”, and that’s true. His statement does not single out a particular individual. It’s de dicto, not de re.
You run into a problem if you try to interpret his statement de re, because then it translates to “the person who is currently filling the role of president is possibly white”, which is not true. Luca can’t make the assertion de re without knowing who in particular is filling the role of president.
Luca has mistakenly applied Leibniz’s Law to a possibility de dicto when it really only applies to possibilities de re. The result is an unsound conclusion: that Barack Obama is not the current president of the United States.
Plantinga makes the same mistake. The statement “it’s possible that Alvin could continue to exist when Alvin’s body has been destroyed” can be interpreted de dicto, in which case it translates to “it is possible that there is an entity that fills the role of Alvin and can exist when Alvin’s body doesn’t.” That is true.
It can also be interpreted de re, in which case it means “the entity filling the role of Alvin can possibly exist when Alvin’s body doesn’t.” That isn’t necessarily true, and Plantinga could only make the assertion de re if he already knew that Alvin was not identical to Alvin’s body, which of course is what the argument is supposed to demonstrate. He would be assuming his conclusion.
Plantinga has mistakenly applied Leibniz’s law to a possibility de dicto when it really only applies to possibilities de re. The result is an unsound conclusion: that Alvin is not identical to Alvin’s body.
However, be advised that you can safely ignore my argument above, because walto has already determined that I’m wrong.
walto says:
…and…
…and…
(In case you’re wondering, he’s referring to me.)
…and…
Since walto obviously understands this stuff so much better than someone “who first heard about de re and de dicto a couple of days ago and is still trying to get it straight”, I’m sure he’ll be along any minute to post a devastating refutation of my argument. 🙂
I’m sorry keith but repeating that stuff doesn’t make it any less confused. But, I don’t know, maybe a tenth confused repetition will be the difference-maker.
walto,
Well, if my confusion is so obvious to you, then it will be easy for you to help me out. Point out the many flaws in my argument. If that’s too much work, then just tackle the first three or four errors. I’m still “trying to get it straight”, and I could really benefit from your superior understanding.
How about quoting a section of my argument, explaining exactly what the flaw in it is, and showing us what a corrected version would look like?
I’d appreciate it, and I’m sure the onlookers would too. The Skeptical Zone is a place for debate and discussion, after all.
I don’t see too many supporters of holymorphism in the Phil of Mind I read, but there is one book I have whose author takes that position.
It turns out that his version of holymorphism incorporates many of the philosophical positions that I understand you have sympathy for:
– strong emergentism (living systems are not even in principle explainable by physics although they cannot break physical laws)
– disjunctivism regarding the nature of illusion versus reality in perception
– embodiment of mental life and perception
– supervenience of mental states on both brain and external-world states
But his form of strong emergentism requires structures, and particular living structures, to have types of causal powers beyond those used by standard science. Basically, he supports a return the Aristotelian ideas of four types of cause to make his version holymorphism work.
I don’t know if it is possible to have a holymorphic theory that sticks with cause as used by existing science unless it is just some form of anti-reductionism based on weak emergentism.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the author of the book is a prof at a Jesuit-affiliated school (Fordham).
–
From the 2009 survey of philosophers:
I agree that science is the only way we’ll know for sure, but it is conceivable (to some respondents, at least) that this may require science to incorporate “mental properties” outside of current physicalism; I think that is one reason for the non-physicalism expressed by 27% of responding philosophers.
I don’t know if any of those respondents post here.
I’m not sure what you mean by “often” in the above, or exactly what research on consciousness you are referring to.
But if it is that research by Libet and its followups, then, even as a duffer, I see these topics addressed in a lot of the (very basic) philosophy I read.
One may disagree with how the philosophers interpret the evidence in light of their approach to free will, but it would not be correct to say they are unaware of it or that they ignore it.
keiths,
“Well, if my confusion is so obvious to you, then it will be easy for you to help me out. Point out the many flaws in my argument.”
I’ve already done so a couple of times. I think KN has as well.
I read that to mean we’ll have to incorporate a mental principle, analogous to the vital principle and philostogen.
I don’t think science decides thing for sure, but I think science gradually reduces the number of active non-physical entities required to explain phenomena.
I would bet on an emergentism equivalent to the prospects of exceeding the speed of light. There are theoretical ways of beating light speed — wormholes and such — but in practical terms, not likely.
BruceS,
That sounds interesting, BruceS! What’s the book, please?
To be honest, I haven’t been following the exchange between walto and ketihs on modality de re and de dicto, and I’m still fuzzy on the distinction myself. I’m certainly in no position to explain it to anyone.
Kantian Naturalist,
I was referring to this post
I believe you made a similar point in one or two other posts as well. But in any case, I’ve responded to keith’s Alvin biz a couple times myself. There’s a sense, in any case, in which criticisms of these Cartesian dualist arguments kind of collapse into each other anyhow. If one insists that one CAN’T make de re reference to, e.g., Alvin’s body, one is basically making the same point as somebody who says, “well, let’s say one COULD make such reference–the second premise would be highly doubtful in that case.” And that’s so because without the importation of concepts we’re not really in any position to be sure what the hell we’re believing. So, there’s a sense in which it doesn’t really matter one way or the other.
My point, however, is that Plantinga understands all this and would simply insist that (i) one can make de re reference to things (and, as you say in the above-quoted post, that’s what he’s doing); and (ii) his second premise IS true (whether I think so or not). He’d also point out that if someone can make de re reference to himself, and people are identical to their bodies, it simply follows from Leibniz’s Law that one can make de re reference to one’s body. And he’d point out that even keith thinks he can make de re reference to himself. So it’s kind of an around and around thing.
Anyhow, Plantinga has heard all these criticisms in many forms for many years and from many people. There’s nothing at all new here except keith’s incredible one-day mastery of modal logic and his (admittedly endearing, if irrelevant) Snoopy story.
walto,
I’m somewhat surprised you thought my way of parsing the de re/de dicto distinction was on the right track! That’s really good to know!
Philosophy of Mind
I’d expect you would find it very basic stuff, KN, but I found the overview of the various philosophical approaches clear and well done. In presenting the arguments and counter-arguments to each, I suspect he gives the last word to viewpoints he agrees with, but then again that is likely true of many introductory overviews.
Peter van Inwagen gets several references in the authors explanation of the role structure and life in holymorphism in the book.
Well, except the mental properties would actually be true! Or at least part of the best science.
I agree that science has been very successful so far with its definition of physicalism, but of course I am sure you know the story of the turkey on a farm who woke on thanksgiving day morning being happy with his life (so far).
walto, to KN:
Therefore he can’t possibly make a mistake in this area? Seriously, walto?
I haven’t claimed a “one-day mastery of modal logic”. However, I understand the concepts well enough to have spotted a flaw in Plantinga’s argument that continues to elude you, apparently.
Thank you for responding, at least obliquely, to my argument. You wrote:
Nobody has made that claim, as far as I can see. Who are you thinking of?
I think Plantinga can and does make a de re reference to Alvin’s body. That’s fine; the problem is with his reference to ‘Alvin’, not with his reference to ‘Alvin’s body’, as I explained above:
walto:
Of course one can. That’s what the Latin means, after all.
He’s making a de re reference to Alvin’s body, but his reference to Alvin is de dicto. If it were de re, then his mistake would be even sillier than the one I’m ascribing to him. He’d be assuming his conclusion. Surely you don’t want to accuse him of that.
Again, nobody has claimed that one can’t make a de re reference to one’s body. Who are you arguing against?
In a nutshell:
Let S be the statement “it’s possible that Alvin could continue to exist when Alvin’s body has been destroyed”. If S is a de re reference, then Plantinga is assuming his conclusion. If it’s de dicto, then he is misapplying Leibniz’s Law — a danger he actually warned against in his 1969 paper!
It’s one or the other. Pick your poison, walto.
Actually, I DO think there’s a sense in which Plantinga assumes what he’s trying to prove and that he would say that that de re assertion is necessarily true. Of course, he’d deny that (not the necessity but the claim that he’s begging the question), so I guess whether or not it’s a sillier mistake than the one of which you accuse him is in the eye of the beholder. As I indicated in my last post, I think these two “poisons” are more similar than is obvious on the surface. The more one gets into these issues, the more one sees that they involve the structure of belief and understanding. I think the accusation that Plantinga commits a kind of disguised petitio principii as you note above is an important point. And I think musing on that will show that will show that our critiques are related; but it’s a long and tired old story.
Edit: Also, as some wise person once said hundreds of years ago, there’s a sense in which EVERY valid argument assumes its conclusion, at least insofar as one can’t get anything ENTIRELY new in the conclusion of any valid argument.
I think it must be de re, but I’m not convinced that this amounts to “assuming the conclusion” (though it might be) — I think this is the conclusion, not one of the premises.
Exactly. The information content of the conclusion must be identical with the information content of all the premises — if it weren’t, it couldn’t be valid at all!
If you want to get new information into your premises, you have to look at the world — logic alone can only rearrange the information you’ve already got.
walto,
It’s fine to edit your comments to fix spelling, punctuation, formatting, etc., without notification, but if you’re making substantive changes — particularly after others have had time to read and quote your original comment — then it is customary to note the changes you are making (by use of “ETA”, for example).
ETA: I was referring to this comment. In your next comment, you honored the convention.
What would you say philosophers make of the temperature dependence of thought (e.g., hypothermia or hyperthermia)?
keiths:
KN:
Here’s Plantinga’s statement of his conclusion, from around 4:05 in the video:
Here’s the explicit premise, from around 2:50 in the video:
If you interpret that statement de re, then it is equivalent to
…and that is only true if you assume that Alvin is not identical to Alvin’s body, which is the conclusion of the argument.
So again, if S is de re then Plantinga is assuming his conclusion. If it’s de dicto, then he’s misapplying Leibniz’s Law.
Mike Elzinga, to Bruce:
I would say most of them take it as strong evidence for physicalism or property dualism. There aren’t a lot of substance dualists these days.
Yes, that was my take. But I see keiths doing the same thing. That is, keiths is assuming his view that person is identical with his body, and because of that he concludes that Plantinga must be using a de dicto premise.
Right. That’s why I never can take these purely conceptual arguments at all seriously.
walto, KN,
Of course the conclusion is implicit in the premises of a valid argument, in that it can be derived from them, but that’s not what is meant by “assuming one’s conclusion”. If it were, then every valid argument would commit the fallacy!
What “assuming one’s conclusion” really means is that you assume C in order to conclude C. In effect, the argument reduces to “C; intermediate steps; therefore C”.
That is what Plantinga is doing if you interpret his premise de re. (As I’ve said, I think he means it de dicto, not de re, but either way it’s a silly mistake>)
Here’s the argument de re, stated explicitly:
1. Alvin is not identical to Alvin’s body.
2. Therefore, Alvin could possibly continue to exist when Alvin’s body doesn’t.
3. If so, then there is something true of Alvin that is not true of Alvin’s body, so we can invoke Leibniz’s Law to conclude:
4. Therefore, Alvin is not identical to Alvin’s body.
I don’t know, I have not read any references to that. I am not really sure what relationship between temperature and thought you had in mind.
I assume you are not referring to decoherence and Penrose’s theory of quantum consciousness (which is not taken seriously by any philosopher I have read).
ETA: Or if you just met that nature of chemical processes in the brain affect our thoughts, I would assume that would be another example of the sort of arguments for supervenience on the mind on the brain that one sees in introduction philosophy stuff (ie what I mostly read).
Although the usual stuff uses alcohol or drugs or brain diseases not temperature.
Bruce,
Mike is simply referring to the fact that our thoughts cease when our brains get too hot or too cold.
I actually wrote that in my first draft, but I did not think Mike would be making such a basic point. I have not read any non-dualists that think otherwise, and, as Walt noted earlier, dualists these days have explanations to account for the relation of mind to brain while we live and how it changes when we die, or for violation of conservation laws, or for violation of causal closure, all the usual stuff. Not that the arguments are very convincing for those who want to preserve current science. But the dualists don’t just ignore these situations.
Neil Rickert,
I think I mostly agree with that. I wouldn’t quite say that the arguments shouldn’t be taken seriously, though. I’d put it that you can’t learn anything important about the world from them alone. I take the arguments seriously because looking at them carefully can often show us whether somebody has gone off the rails. The premises are where the important fights have to take place, but people get confused about what actually follows from what more than you might think.
Bruce,
Mike has a pretty low opinion of philosophers generally, and dualists in particular. 🙂
Neil,
Not at all. I think Plantinga’s premise is de dicto because it’s the more charitable view. If it’s de re, then he is obviously assuming his conclusion (see this comment for an explanation).
If it’s de dicto, then he is making the much more respectable mistake of either 1) failing to remember that Leibniz’s Law doesn’t apply to possibility de dicto, or 2) failing to recognize that his premise is de dicto, not de re.
Plantinga isn’t stupid, so I think ihe’s probably making one of the more respectable mistakes, not the obvious one.
Also, I’m not sure where you got the idea that I can’t interpret the premise de dicto without assuming that Alvin is identical to his body. That’s simply not true.
Here’s the de dicto interpretation:
How on earth does that premise require a physicalist assumption?
I find the conceptual arguments interesting and I take seriously as conceptual arguments — as making explicit the inferential structure of (in this case) the concepts of “conceivability” and “analytically necessary”/”analytically possible”.
But what I don’t take seriously is the assumption that explication of inferential relations is by itself all that informative about reality. Once you’ve eliminated the impossible (contra Holmes), inquiry is not resolved — on the contrary, it’s when the impossible has been eliminated that inquiry into the actual can begin.
Physicists don’t believe it either. Quantum coherence is observed at temperatures far below those at which living organisms – as we know them – exist.
At the temperature ranges in which the living systems exist, quantum coherence lengths are far too short to have any global effects; far shorter than the molecules themselves. They are completely swamped by the thermal motions of the molecules that make up the neural networks of living systems. It’s an easy calculation that is egregiously overlooked by those proposing such a notion.
At best, quantum coherence may serve as a mere metaphor for other synchronized effects in complex systems that are perfectly well-described by classical physics and chemistry. But the suggestion of real quantum coherence borders on being woo-woo “science.”
Again keiths completely misunderstands and misrepresents my understandings of philosophy.
Quite, and that was my point.
What makes it appear more charitable to you, is that your metaphysics disagrees with Plantinga.
Fair enough. That’s really all that I meant. I don’t deny the usefulness of conceptual inferences, if the aim is to explore the concepts themselves.
P&H are of course aware of the decoherence argument but they have not given up yet; here is a story on a Jan 2014 update they published apparently trying to incorporate recent discoveries about “quantum vibrations in “microtubules” inside brain neurons”.
The details in the actual paper are beyond me and I have to admit I don’t want to try to puzzle them out unless their theory gets more traction among philosophers and physicists..
I have to admit that some of your comments come across as “philosophy-bashing” to me. Good to know they are not meant that way. But then I suppose I must still missing more subtle point that your are making.
[I found this in the spam folder, along with several duplicate attempts to post the same thing. Apologies for the delay in noticing — Neil Rickert]
For what it’s worth, Mike, I never thought you had a low opinion of philosophy or philosophers.
I interpret your insistence on temperature-dependent effects as a way of urging “materialists” of various stripes to actually take seriously what they are committed to once they think of mental properties as properties of a biological system. Neurophysiological processes are easily perturbed by temperature, chemical imbalances, radiation, gravitational stresses, and so on.
Neil,
No, because the de dicto interpretation does not in any way depend on a physicalist metaphysics.
Here’s the de dicto interpretation:
How on earth could an assertion about the possibility of dualism depend on a physicalist assumption?
walto,
It’s a brand new story. Yesterday, you were writing things like this:
And this:
Now you tell me I’m making “an important point” and that “our critiques are related”.
Looks like a 180 to me.
Your unwarranted condescension has bitten you twice now (the other instance being the “wet your big-boy pants” episode). I hope you’re learning your lesson, and that in the future you won’t be so quick to assume that your opponents are mistaken. You might be the one in error, as so vividly demonstrated by these two spectacles.
keiths:
Mike:
Mike, on March 26th:
keiths,
As your posts on this topic have gotten gradually less confused (you really should go back and read some of them–they’re pretty funny), I don’t think it’s really that surprising that I’ve gotten less critical. Also I’m nice (:>}), or at least very much less interested in fighting than you are. To be honest (if condescending) your behavior on both this thread and the last one in which we interacted has seemed pretty sophomoric to me–to be even blunter, sometimes just plain obno–and not just to me. Perhaps others enjoy that kind of thing, but I didn’t come here to fight. And if that’s going to be your regular way, I’ll probably just end up ignoring your posts.
FWIW, I think you’re a bright guy and are probably better than that kind of crap indicates, in spite of a ton of available evidence to the contrary.
We’ll see, though.
Take a look at the following to figure out the context of those observations.
An Anatomy of Thought by Ian Glynn encompasses much of what is being discussed here; but in the context of the research that is being done on the brain.
As a 1999 publication the book doesn’t capture some of the more recent kinds of research going on with living systems; but it is an excellent starting point for philosophers to see their arguments within a research context.
If one wants to get a flavor of other research going on in living systems, Life’s Ratchet by Peter M. Hoffmann gives considerable insight into how living systems depend on the laws of thermodynamics and extract order from thermal motion. You can get a pretty big hint of the importance of temperature for living systems. If one doesn’t have time to read it, there is a review of the book over on Panda’s Thumb.
While the philosophy of mind is interesting, most of the stuff is something like 20 to 50 years behind the research. If one looks only at the well-worn arguments in philosophy, one is not prepared for an entirely different perspective that is being provided by the research that has been going on for the last 50 years or so; and that research is accelerating. The switch in perspective is mind-boggling compared to all the classical philosophical arguments.