Lesson 4 Flashcards
What is DAM not?
Dual-aspect Monism is not dualism, since it holds that there is only one kind of substance.
Neither is it physicalism, which reduces mind to matter.
What is DAM?
It is monist, meaning that there is only one kind of ontological entity, but that entity has two aspects, and neither reduces to the other. Mind and brain are two aspects of the same substance.
Aspects of DAM?
-One aspect (mind) is first-person subjective awareness, so is the perspective of consciousness.
-If we take qualia (what it is like to smell a rose or to feel pain), we cannot know their subjective feeling - what these things are like - by observing atoms or molecules or the activity of the neurons in the brain.
-The other perspective is that of third-person objective experience. For example, we could put somebody in a brain- scanner to look at the brain’s physical state, but however hard you look at the brain images, and even if you could see all the electrical activity going on inside the brain, this would never tell you what the brain is experiencing subjectively.
Dual-aspect Monism avoids one obvious problem with substance dualism.
That is, how separate mental and physical substances can interact, because there are no separate substances: there is only one substance with two aspects- mental and physical.
It avoids physicalism’s problem with qualia.
No matter how hard physicalism tries, it does not succeed in reducing consciousness or qualia to a purely physical description.
The single substance of Dual-aspect Monism is unknown.
-In quantum theory (the science of the universe at its smallest levels), entities such as quarks are unobservable, yet the ‘standard model’ of particle physics does not make sense without quarks, so they must exist in some manner.
-The idea that mind and matter are underpinned by a single, as-yet unknown substance, is therefore not unlikely
Dual-aspect Monism does receive powerful support from quantum theory in describing the relationship between the two aspects.
-It can be described not as one of dependency but of complementarity
-In quantum mechanics, the behaviour of light and electrons is sometimes wave-like and sometimes particle-like, i.e. it exhibits wave- particle duality.
-The wave and particle aspects cannot be observed simultaneously, yet together they provide a fuller description than either on its own.
-The physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the psychologist C.G. Jung applied this concept to the mind-brain relationship, theorising that the mental and the physical are complementary aspects of one psycho-physical reality.
-In other words, there is scientific support for Dual-aspect Monism through one of the basic principles of quantum mechanics.
To clarify: Dual-aspect Monism holds that the fundamental reality is a single substance with mental and physical aspects. Quantum mechanics shows that reality at its basic level has a dual aspect.
When it comes to persons, Dual-aspect Monism becomes yet more interesting when combined with Panpsychism.
-Panpsychism is the view that there is a level of consciousness/mentality in all entities in the universe, down to and including quantum particles.
-You can see that where Dual-aspect Monism holds that the fundamental reality is a single substance with mental and physical aspects, Panpsychism and Dual-aspect Monism are mutually supporting.
-Where even the smallest entities have a dual aspect, then their appearance in persons looks simply like one of development through increasing complexity.
-This solves the problem (brought about largely by Aristotelian and Christian thinking) of the conscious states of other animals.
-They are conscious, but to a lesser degree, since their brain structures are less complex. It also solves the problem of finding a cut-off point for which animals are conscious and which are not: they all are.
What, then, is a self?
-We might describe a self as a complex psycho-physical arrangement with first-person subjective and third-person characteristics: the former being characterised by self-awareness/consciousness; the latter by the brain’s physical/electrical/neuronal states.
-For example, imagine you can choose the chocolate you want. Bite into it.
-This will produce a state of your brain that has two aspects:
1) the mental aspect of the flavour, taste and texture of the chocolate and
2) the physical aspect involving electrical and chemical changes in your brain.
2) is third-person observable by science
and 1) is first-person subjective and unobservable.
In DAM the idea of souls becomes redundant.
-In DAM thinking, souls are unnecessary entities.
-Persons are bodies and brains but bodies/brains are not just physical systems they are objects with both mental and physical aspects.
-All forms of dualism, including substance dualism are unnecessary since subjective mental life can be explained as one aspect of one underlying substance.
