Typology of dualisms in philosophy

Ontological dualisms

Ontological dualism consists of the affirmation of the dual character of existence in relation to spirit and matter, and can be divided into three categories:

Substance dualism posits that mind and matter are fundamentally distinct types of substance.
Property dualism suggests that an ontological distinction lies in the difference between the properties of mind and matter (as proposed by emergentism).
Attribute dualism is the idea that mental attributes are irreducible to physical attributes.

Substance dualism

Substance dualism is a form of dualism made famous by Descartes, who asserted that there are two types of substance: mental substance and material substance. Mental substance has no spatial extent, and material substance cannot think.

Substance dualism is a view that contradicts physicalism, one of the most popular views in modern cognitive philosophy. However, one can consider the historical importance of substance dualism, which has given rise to many thoughts on the mind-body problem.

It can also be noted that the philosophical interpretations of quantum physics, and in particular the interpretation according to which consciousness leads to the collapse of a system consisting of the superposition of several quantum states, are not reminiscences of substance dualism, since these interpretations generally start from the principle that the observer is entangled in the observed object, and not a separate substance as in the case of substance dualism.

Substance dualism is a position consistent with most theologies that assert that immortal souls occupy a realm of existence independent and distinct from the physical world. David Chalmers recently developed a thought experiment inspired by the movie Matrix, in which substance dualism might be true: Consider a computer simulation in which the bodies of all creatures are controlled by their minds, and the minds remain strictly outside the simulation. The creatures can then do all the research they want, they will never be able to find where their spirits are located, since they do not exist in their observable universe. This is a case of substance dualism in relation to computer simulation. This is naturally different from a computer simulation in which the mind is part of the simulation. In such a case, we are dealing with a monism of substance.

Property dualism

Property dualism assumes that when matter is organized appropriately (i.e. the way human bodies are organized), mental properties emerge. Thus, it is a sub-branch of emergent materialism. Different versions of property dualism describe these in different ways. Epiphenomenalism assumes that while matter gives rise to sensations, volitions, ideas, etc., these mental phenomena themselves do not cause anything in return: they are causal stopping points. Interactionism, on the other hand, allows mental phenomena to cause material effects, and vice versa.

Attribute dualism

Attribute dualism is the view espoused by most non-reductionist physicalists, such as Donald Davidson and Jerry Fodor, who argue that while there is only one ontological category of substance and properties of substance (usually physical), the attributes that we use to describe mental events cannot in turn be described using physical attributes by natural language, nor be reduced to them. If one characterizes attribute monism as the view espoused by eliminative materialists, who maintain that intentional attributes such as belief, desire, feeling, etc., will inevitably be removed from the language of science and ordinary language because the entities they refer to do not exist, then attribute dualism is more easily defined as the negation of this position. Attribute dualists believe that what may be called “people’s psychology”, with all its attributions of propositional attitudes, is an inevitable part of the enterprise of describing, explaining and understanding mental states. and human behavior.

For example, Davidson adheres to an anomalous view of monism, according to which there cannot be strict psychophysical laws linking mental and physical events according to their descriptions as mental and physical events. However, each of these mental events has a physical description. It is according to this last description that such events can be connected by causal relations with other physical events. Mental attributes (rational, holistic and necessary) are therefore irreducibly different from physical attributes (contingent, atomic and causal).

Dualistic conceptions of causality

(Three kinds of dualism. The arrow indicates the direction of the causal interaction. )

Interactionism

Interactionism is the view that mental states, such as belief and desire, interact causally with physical states. This is a very attractive position that supports the intuitive view of our common sense, despite the fact that it is very difficult to establish its validity by means of logical argument or empirical evidence. She seems attractive to us because we are surrounded by such daily events, such as the child touching a hot stove (physical event), which makes him feel pain (mental event), then scream and cry (physical event ), which has the consequence of causing in his parents a feeling of fear and a need to protect him (mental event) and so on.

Epiphenomenalism

According to the epiphenomenal view, all mental events are caused by physical events and they have no physical consequences. So the mental event of wanting to pick up a stone (let’s call this event M) is caused by the firing of specific neurons in the brain (let’s call this event P); however, when the arm and hand move to pick up the stone (call this event E), this latter event is caused only by P. The physical causes are therefore in principle reducible to fundamental physics, and therefore the mental causes are eliminated through this reductionist explanation. If P is the cause of E and also of M, there is no overdetermination by “M” for the explanation of E.

Parallelism

Psychophysical parallelism is a very unusual view of the interaction between physical and mental events, a view that has been supported primarily, and perhaps for the only time truly, by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Like Malebranche and others before him, Leibniz recognized the weakness of Descartes’ consideration of causal interactions occurring at a defined place in the brain. Malebranche decided that invoking a material medium such as the pineal gland to explain the interactions between the material and the immaterial was impossible, and he subsequently formulated his doctrine of occasionalism, assuming that the interactions were actually caused by the intervention of God on each of the individual occasions. Leibniz’s idea is that God created, once and for all, a pre-established harmony in such a way that everything happens as if the physical and mental events were the cause, and were mutually caused by each other. In reality, mental causes only have mental effects and physical causes only have physical effects. This is the reason why this point of view has been called parallelism.

Occasionalism

In philosophy and theology, occasionalism is the doctrine or thesis that natural causes are not true causes, but only “occasional causes” that cause God, the only true cause, to act.

For the partisans of occasionalism, no created thing is truly the cause of an action or a movement. The movements of the body are conceived as the occasions for God to produce the correlative thoughts in the soul or the spirit, and the thoughts as the occasions for him to produce the correlative movements in the body. It would therefore only be in an illusory way that we would take our desires or our wills for the real causes of our actions.

(Includes texts from Wikipedia translated and adapted by Nicolae Sfetcu)