by flipflop » Wed Oct 21, 2009 6:42 am
Attribute/property dualism
Substance - a thing that exists that needs no other thing to exist
Property - a property can't exist on it's own, but is a property of a substance (contrast between substance and property).
Attribute - an invariant type of property, uniformly present in a substance - e.g. all material things have the attribute of existence in time.
Mode - a variable property, e.g. ginger, black, brown + blackness etc, are all modes. Having a colour is an attribute of a cat, having a particular colour (i.e. ginger) is a mode.
Assertions of this kind of dualism:
(i) A human being is a singular material substance
(ii) This substance has non-material properties, i.e properties which are irreducibly different from physical ones and which can't in principle be analysed in terms of any properties of matter.
(iii) It is the possession of these properties which allows us to say that an entity has a mind, these properties are the mind.
Problems
At what point in the development of an organism do these immaterial properties arise? At which level of complexity, and for what reason?
Attribute/property dualism can't give an intuitively satisfying account of mind-body interaction. It states mental states are merely non-material properties of the brain; once stated thus it is hard to stop the view that the state of the mind is uniquely determined by the state of the brain, and not the other way round. Like epiphenomenalism, attribute/property dualism reduces the mind, counterintuitively, to the condition of causal impotence.
With this form of dualism there is no clear account of how immaterial properties are related to the brain. With physical properties - e.g. having electromagnetic dischrages, it makes sense to ask "Does the brain have this property all over or not?" You can't ask that of an immaterial property. Non-material properties are describable only in negative terms, i.e. of what they're not, this is odd (again) in the same way as the connection with non-material substance. It's not logically impossible, but it's still not that acceptable to the deep-rooted intuitive mind, therefore I have to conclude that attribute/property dualism is not a convinccing account of mind.
That pretty much wraps it up for dualism, next up for you cynics are the various monistic theories of mind. Are we all just lumps of meat, or is there no such thing as "material substance" at all, and the universe is mental only?
Cheers
Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country - Bertrand Russell