Dualism or idealist monism as the best model for survival after death data

Curious where you see Chalmer's arguing for property dualism?

The man has even written favorably about Idealism and, IIRC, Substance Dualism.

I have never seen him write favorably about any of these stances, but here’s a list of resources  pointing to his stance on property dualism:

https://consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf

https://mindmatters.ai/2023/01/philosoph...-the-soul/

https://philosophy-science-humanities-co...%20Dualism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers

Even though these people don’t belief the mental can be reduced to energy, forces and their interactions, they don’t believe any imaginary spritual substance is needed.

I think that might be a charitable interpretation.  After all, if they don't believe in reductionism then what do they believe is "needed"?  And, more directly I suspect, I would guess they are a bit more evasive about "imaginary spiritual substances" than the ardent reductionist, atheists.

I think that might be a charitable interpretation.  After all, if they don't believe in reductionism then what do they believe is "needed"?  And, more directly I suspect, I would guess they are a bit more evasive about "imaginary spiritual substances" than the ardent reductionist, atheists.

As I wrote earlier I believe all philosophies of their mind have their share of issues. Property dualists can't explain what's needed for the mind to emerge. They also have an interaction problem to solve. But I believe their position is easier to reconcile with the changes to consciousness that can follow brain damage like persistent vegetative state etc.

Yes exactly like substance dualism which is religiously motivated in faith in some kind of spiritualism.

Fundamentally, Substance Dualism takes no position regarding any kind of faith in any religion or spiritualism. Those are rather different questions than what Substance Dualism asks. Substance Dualism simply recognizes that there are two base substances ~ mind and matter, the mental and the physical, to say nothing about faith or deities or spirituality.

I just love when people believes themselves more clever than others…

Something something pot, meet kettle...

let’s list some prominent proponents of property dualism:

David Chalmers: He is well-known for his formulation of the "hard problem" of consciousness, which addresses why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience. Chalmers argues for a form of property dualism in which mental states are irreducible to physical states.

Chalmers, a Property Dualist??? He's a pretty famous Substance Dualist who has made various arguments against Physicalism.

Thomas Nagel: He is famous for his paper "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" which argues that there is a subjective aspect to the mind that escapes physicalist explanations.

Nagel is not a Property Dualist, either.

Even though these people don’t belief the mental can be reduced to energy, forces and their interactions, they don’t believe any imaginary spritual substance is needed.

The mind is not an "imaginary spiritual substance" ~ it is a non-physical, non-phenomenological something that we, well, are. Evidence being that we, the observer, nor the contents of our mind, have any observable physical qualities of any kind, nor are we, the observer, able to observe ourself, unlike the contents of our mind, which we can often perceive at our leisure.

I have never seen him write favorably about any of these stances, but here’s a list of resources  pointing to his stance on property dualism:

https://consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf

https://mindmatters.ai/2023/01/philosoph...-the-soul/

https://philosophy-science-humanities-co...%20Dualism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers

Interesting

As I wrote earlier I believe all philosophies of their mind have their share of issues. Property dualists can't explain what's needed for the mind to emerge. They also have an interaction problem to solve. But I believe their position is easier to reconcile with the changes to consciousness that can follow brain damage like persistent vegetative state etc.

Problem with this is that brain damage can just as easily explained via filter theory and receiver theory as it can by emergence theory.

So it is not at all obvious that Property Dualism has any stronger position.

@Valmar you would come accross a lot more convincing if you had any references to backup your claims.

Maybe you know Thomas Nagel personally? no, well let's look at some source:

Property dualists claim that mental phenomena are non-physical properties of physical phenomena, but not properties of non-physical substances. Property dualists are not committed to the existence of non-physical substances, but are committed to the irreducibility of mental phenomena to physical phenomena.

An argument for property dualism, derived from Thomas Nagel and Saul Kripke, is as follows: We can assert that warmth is identical to mean kinetic molecular energy, despite appearances, by claiming that warmth is how molecular energy is perceived or manifested in consciousness....

https://iep.utm.edu/dualism-and-mind/

Providing references for claims makes a difference.

@Valmar you would come accross a lot more convincing if you had any references to backup your claims.

Maybe you know Thomas Nagel personally? no, well let's look at some source:


https://iep.utm.edu/dualism-and-mind/

Providing references for claims makes a difference.

Interesting. Previously, you made no reference when making the claim, and I hadn't previously seen any mention of him being a Property Dualist. His position didn't strike me of one as a Property Dualist, as I had no reason to assume so.

Besides that... does Nagel himself state anywhere that he himself is explicitly a Property Dualist?

[Laird]

A lot to consider. My thinking on this so far.  

I appreciate your ongoing engagement.

Your view as expressed here is that both the conscious mind and the subconscious are "in some sense, not "ineffable" but in fact "effable", having some objective substantive form which "functions" within (as) the mind..."

I would still hold that mind simply can't have an objective, substantive aspect or property or component, because mind is of another entire level of reality than the physical, at least when considering the incommensurability of all known aspects of the two. This means they are totally unsuitable for comparison - that is, they are lacking any features that can be conceivably compared. Like the inner experience of red as opposed to the objective measurable wavelength of the corresponding light waves.

It seems that what bothers you here is the "physicality" that you presume of that which I've termed "mental energy". I've tried to make clear that it's not "physical" in the sense of having such properties as, say, mass, and presumably not wavelength either - and I add that it isn't comprised of particles such as atoms as physical matter is - but I guess it's difficult to dispel the association totally given that I've referred to it as "substantive" in some sense.

Having thought it over, it seems to me to be useful to try to bridge our way to what might or might not turn out to be the necessity of the concept of mental energy even on interactionist (substance) dualism, albeit that the bridge might not be completable (I don't want to presume in advance). Let's do this by removing the "substantive" property from mental energy, and then renaming the new concept "experience representation" (let me know if you can think of a better name).

An "experience representation" is purely abstract, rather than substantive (energetic). It is the objective conceptual, informational, and/or mathematical structure that perfectly represents and correlates with subjective, inner experience (I have more in mind for the definition, to make it more rigorous, and some comments on how it relates to existing work on consciousness, but that's enough to introduce it).

Now, I think we have reason to believe that such a perfectly correlated representation might at least in theory be possible, and that reason is that we have partial representations of experience in various forms already, for example (roughly from lowest fidelity to highest):

1. Psychological diagnostic tools: simple scales such as "rate your pain from zero to ten" objectively represent aspects of subjective experience with a crude level of fidelity.
   
2. Thought inference from brain scanning: given that even the physical brain represents at least some inner thoughts to a degree of fidelity that they can, with current technology, be pretty reliably inferred or used to control devices, it is conceivable that abstract structures can represent such subjective experiences with higher fidelity.
   
3. Human language: each of us can partially, with imperfect fidelity, represent his/her subjective, inner experience in words.
   
4. Virtual reality: an individual's visual perspective on physical reality can be represented via data structures - which, again, qualify as objective informational and/or mathematical structures - implemented in a computer.
   
5. Large-language models: these appear to be capable of representing meaning itself in artificial neural networks, to such a degree of fidelity that highly cogent human-level dialogue is possible. Meaning, of course, is a large part of human experience, and an artificial neural network meets our definition of an objective informational and/or mathematical structure.
   

Those might all be challenged in various ways, but the point is not that they're perfect examples, just that they're at the least suggestive ones.

My impression of your "mental energy" is that it is a feat of imagination, a sort of philosophical device invented for the purpose of solving a problem, but something that is actually inconceivable when deeply considered. 

Maybe, given the examples above after stripping substantiveness from the concept of "mental energy", to end up with the concept of "experience representation", it is more conceivable than at first it seems to be. Then again, maybe you think that after stripping substantiveness, the point is moot.

Unfortunately, interactional dualism similarly has features that are inconceivable to the logical mind conditioned to the physical world, but it seems to be considerably simpler. 

I'd be interested in your enumeration of those features.

There is then the Ockham's Razor principle of parsimony to be considered.

Your suggested mental energy or objective substantive aspect of mind would presumably exist for all states and conditions within the physical world, not just in the special case of embodiment, that is, in the interface between the mind and the physical brain that allows the mind to be causally efficacious in the world. Why isn't "mind energy" always manifesting itself all over the physical world? This would inevitably complicate the theory with all sorts of rules governing how this interface works, and a required explanation as to why the interface normally only works for embodiment. So there would be no simplicity, or principle of parsimony, advantage to the theory over interactional dualism.

First up: as I conceive of them, "mental energy" is compatible with interactionist (substance) dualism. It seems to me that the real comparison is between an interactionist dualism in which consciousness has only an inner, subjective aspect, and one in which it also has an objective "outer" aspect.

That said, I agree that there is no advantage for the "mental energy" version of interactionist dualism in the respect which you point out.

But in fact, your theory would seem to be more complicated by far than interactive dualism, because now instead of two, there are three different levels or kinds of existence whose interrelationships have to be explained: (1) consciousness or mind, (2) a hybrid - a mental energy which may be multidimensional that somehow (inconceivably) shares aspects of both physical objectivity and the immaterial mental realms, and (3) the physical realm.

Of course, Ockham's Razor isn't a hard and fast law of nature, it just has a strong tendency to be fulfilled.

Indeed: this is why I wrote in the post to which you were responding that the concept of mental energy would need to be justified on the basis of some sort of necessity or enhanced explanatory power. Right now, I'm focussed - via the bridging concept of "experience representation" - on exploring whether it is in some sense necessary.