The Failures of Property Dualism

Why property dualism (non-reductive physicalism) fails to maintain mental causation, substance monism, and emergence.

Timestamps
00:00 – Introduction
00:24 – The Interaction Problem
02:24 – The Exclusion Problem
03:40 – A Lapse into Substance Dualism
06:52 – The Incoherence/Inexplicability of Strong Emergence
09:05 – Conclusion

Sources:

(The Interaction Problem)

Sally Latham – Property Dualism

Ralph Weir – Why Property Dualists Should be Cartesians

Elliot Goodine – Discussing Property Dualism

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – Mental Causation – 4. Problem I: Property Dualism

William Lycan – Is Property Dualism Better Off than Substance Dualism?

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – Mental Causation – 6.2 The Exclusion Problem

(A Lapse into Substance Dualism)

Susan Schneider – Non-Reductive Physicalism and the Mind Problem

Dean Zimmerman – From Property Dualism to Substance Dualism

John Searle – Why I Am Not a Property Dualist

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – Emergent Properties – 4.3 Strong emergence: from property to substance dualism?

(The Incoherence/Inexplicability of Strong Emergence)

Godehard Brüntrup – What is Panpsychism?

William Seager – Panpsychism vs. Strong Emergence?

Mark Bedau – Weak Emergence

(Conclusion)

Jaegwon Kim – The Myth of Non-Reductive Materialism

Music Credits:

SilverHawk – Girls of Summer

SilverHawk – Pumping Iron

Movie Credits:

Casper (1995)

Ghost (1990)

The Mask (1994)

#dualism #materialism #emergence #strongemergence #reductionism #physicalism #propertydualism

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[WorldviewDesignChannel]

Nice video. Objection: a property dualist could think there is a single physical substratum with mental and physical properties. Reply: why call the substratum "physical"? Reply to reply: because the physical properties are more fundamental. Reply to reply to reply: but that leads to the causal exclusion problem... Those are my thoughts, which support your main thesis. Again, nice work!

[anduinxbym]

Well done! The ridiculousness of "strong emergence" cannot be overstated!

[werrkowalski]

I tend towards property dualism (we observe physical world, but our consciousness is clearly not physical), but this is really well done.

[rogerhelou]

I wish Kyle had brought up the monism objection in his debate with Ben Watkins because he was so excited about the fact his view was monistic.

[drchaffee]

I'm exploring the idea of the Concrete (or Physical/Material) and the Abstract as being co-emergent and entangled (i.e. not causally separated). And, just like software can run on a computer without violating physical law, I'm not sure why evolution couldn't have fashioned algorithms (which seem to have abstract properties) hosted by the brain. If our minds recognize the Abstract and the Abstract is (necessarily) represented physically in the brain, then the mental and the physical can be in a one-to-one and onto condition, allowing causality the freedom to proceed from either direction.

[TheBrunarr]

I need to amp up my video production if I'm going to compete with you lol

3:15 I would actually disagree here. I think the overdetermination only comes about when a person _accepts_ causal closure but then _also_ posits separate mental causation in addition to physical causation. To deny causal closure is to deny the sufficiency of physical causes, so it cannot be overdetermination to posit non-physical causes when your position _requires_ that there be some, there is only overdetermination when you posit non-physical causes while also believing that physical causes are in fact sufficient and so accept causal closure.

Other than that, great video.

[deistrevolution]

This is a very good video. I think you’ve demonstrated the pressures against the position because the non-reductive physicalist doesn’t want to deny that some mental events cause physical events. This is because it either leads to a non-interactive form of dualism (like epiphenomenalism, parallelism) or eliminative materialism. The second thing they don’t want to deny is that every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause because this is what the substance dualists/emergentists also commonly deny. If you also say the mental properties are just the same as the physical properties to escape causal closure, then the position has collapsed into a form of reductive physicalism — defeating the goal and purpose of non-reductive physicalism. I do think though its possible for the non-reductive physicalist/property dualist to escape the Exclusion Problem. The non-reductive physicalist can simply maintain there is no systematic causal-overdetermination within their model.

The non-reductive physicalist commonly distinguishes between worrying and non-worrying case in which an event has more than one sufficient cause. The non-worrying cases are not cases of genuine overdetermination.
*Worrying cases:* these are cases where each of the causes would have been sufficient to bring about the effect in the absence of the other. That is, cases in which the two causes are independent from each other.
*Non-worrying cases:* these are cases in which two causes are not independent.

According to the non-reductive physicalist, mental properties depend on physical properties for their existence and hence mental causes depend on physical causes for their existence. Hence mental and physical causes depend are not independent from each other. Hence, given non-reductive physicalism, psychophysical causation does not give rise to worrying overdetermination.

I have a feeling though you will respond by questioning whether the non-reductive physicalist/property dualist can provide a plausible account of the dependence relation between mental and physical properties. In the past, non-reductive physicalists used to appeal to supervenience to capture this property dependence relation. This view has now fallen out of favour in modern times because the supervenience of one property on another merely indicates a correlation between the two properties, and property correlation does not entail property dependence. This shows something more is needed.

I believe we can solve the problem with Sydney Shoemaker’s type of non-reductive physicalism.
Shoemaker has a unique account of properties. Properties bestow powers on the things that have them. Where X and Y are properties, X is identical with Y if and only if X and Y bestow the same *set* of powers on their bearers.
This now leads into Shoemaker’s account of dependence.
Property Y depends on Property X if Y is realized by X.
Y is realized by X if and only if *the powers that Y bestows are a subset of the powers that X bestows.*
Hence where X has powers P1 and P2 and Y had Power P1, Y is realized by X because Y’s powers are a subset of X’s.
According to Shoemaker, mental properties are realized by physical properties.

This, therefore, solves the problem of mental causation.
1. Non-reductive physicalism maintains that mental and physical properties are distinct. If mental properties are realized by physical properties they are distinct (assuming Shoemaker’s account of properties).
2. In accordance with non-reductive physicalism, mental properties depend on physical properties, because they are realized by them.
3. This provides a potent response to the argument from causal overdetermination. Say that physical Property P bestows powers P1 and P2 and that mental property M bestows power P1. Say P1 is the power to move your hand. Then: *(1)* Mental properties are causally relevant in the physical domain as M bestows P1. *(2)* Despite this there is no violation of the causal closure principle — every power that M bestows is a power that P bestows. *(3)* There is no worrying overdetermination. The power that M bestows is the very same power that P bestows.

[practicalzombie]

I doubt property-dualism necessarily has to collapse into substance-dualism (albeit they both share the interaction problem)
Mind and body being separate substances means they can exist independently.
What differentiates the property-dualist philosophical scheme from cartesian dualism, is the mental properties can only exist when realized by something physical and cease to exist when the body dies.

[restorationofidentity]

Hi everyone and to monistic idealism what's your thoughts on process philosophy, you know whiteheads panpsychism or any naturalist view on process philosophy of how life and consciousness could function? It does appear that consciousness studies at times seem to point to a more idealist view of mind as everything?

[jamalleshaun]

At 6:52 you argue against emergentism. It is a popular view in philosophy today. It is seen as an alternative to reductionism and there are significant cases of alleged emergence, such as:

- Life emerging from lifeless components.
- Mind emerging from mindless components.
- Meaning emerging from meaningless components.
- Free will emerging from nomologically-constrained components.
- Social phenomena emerging from groups of individuals.

You use the common “weak” and “strong” emergence distinction used today in philosophy of mind and you have argued that the “strong” form is magic. It was popularized by David Chalmers and he thinks the same way by saying emergentism is opposed to naturalism (it is hence “magic”).

*Weak emergence:* A phenomenon is weakly emergent when its appearance is surprising or unpredictable, given what we know about the lower-level phenomenon. E.g. you could see a brain and not understand in the slightest how it could give rise to consciousness.

*Strong emergence:* A phenomenon is strongly emergent when it is not even predictable or explicable in-principle how it emerges from lower-level phenomena. You could know everything about B but still be in no position to predict or explain E.

However, I am skeptical of this distinction. Given how explanation and prediction are two of the major tasks of science, Chalmers’s account sets strong emergence directly against naturalism. I don’t like this distinction because understanding real (strong) emergence in this way is not helpful. Understanding weak emergence in this way is not helpful either since a reductionist will just dismiss it as a merely epistemic claim, hence not ontologically genuine.

Now another argument against emergentism (by Strawson) is presented as an objection from bruteness: There has to be some intelligible sense in which E (an emergent phenomenon) emerges from B (a lower-level emergent base for E), rather than from anything else. Nor should it be just free floating, as in dualism. The emergence of E cannot be just a brute fact (as in what C. D. Broad argued, for instance). What are at stake are the naturalistic credentials of E specifically but emergence generally. If commitment to emergence is a rejection of the scientific view of the world then it does not look good for emergentism nor emergentist accounts of any specific phenomena.

Many variations of emergentism run into problems and don’t seem to be compatible with a scientific or naturalistic view of the world (such as mere composition, non-linear composition, and new properties models).
I am going to defend the position that emergentism is compatible with naturalism and is not “magic” as you claim. This model of emergence is known as the ‘causal transformative (CT) model’.

As in Wilson (2016), it is best to articulate claims of emergence in terms of causal powers. Some powers of wholes emerge only from the powers of the components being together and interacting, hence being changed by their participation in the whole (Anjum 2017). Simple example: chemical bonding involves changes in the elements. The original components only exist ‘virtually’ in the whole, as the scholastics said. This means that in forming the whole, they have to undergo changes. In this sense, there is neither pure hydrogen nor pure oxygen in H2O, once they have formed the molecule. This explains why the powers of wholes are not simply aggregates of the powers of their parts. E.g. chlorine is a poisonous gas; sodium ignites spontaneously on water. But sodium chloride has neither of these causal powers. And it tastes salty, which none of its components do.
Water has a power to extinguish fire but neither of its components have that power. Hydrogen and oxygen have the opposite power, of fuelling fire.

Here we get a radical kind emergence. The coming together of the parts to form a whole involves a transformation of the parts through their interaction. Emergent powers of wholes cannot then be mere aggregates of the powers of parts because those parts themselves change, losing their qualitative identity, in order to enter into that whole. And it is by a power entering into a relation with another that a new, holistic power emerges.

I think this model is potentially the best for highlighting the importance and intellectual potency of emergence. The account seems to give us a strong ontological emergence in a perfectly naturalistic way, without resorting to any deus ex machina ‘magical’, ‘spooky’ or ‘whacky’ device. The argument from bruteness is defeated. Emergence is not just some brute fact about higher-level phenomena but is perfectly naturalistically explicable. Hence, the scientific project of understanding how life emerges from lifeless parts or mind emerging from mindless parts makes sense. Similarly, it could in theory be scientifically explained how consciousness emerges from conscious parts but this still count as emergence.
Emergence also suggests a discontinuity in nature that rejects reductionism. Although the lower-level base phenomena produce the higher-level emergent phenomena, once those emergent phenomena exist, they have a degree of causal independence from their lower-level base.
E.g. I can decide to leave the room and when I do so I take my molecules with me. My molecules do not take me out of the room. My mental powers have a degree of causal independence from my body and are capable of exercising downward causal influence. So knowing the fundamental facts is not to know all the facts.

[ihaveatonofnames]

As a fellow monistic idealist, the irony in this video is the clip of Peter Tse. Who is himself a property dualist, and you are clipping a part of him, to show why it is false!

[CMVMic]

Why must the monism be either Physical or Mental? Why not something unknown? Also, what are your problems with Spinoza's Substance Monism and naming two properties i.e. extension and mental. Why should these be the only two properties possible? Is it because they are currently unknown, we are justified in saying it doesn't or cannot exist?

[anteodedi]

Lmao, the argument against property dualism is grounded in a quite controversial view about the relationship of substances and properties. That's precisely what property dualists reject, so in the end you are just begging the question against the property dualism.