David Chalmers' Arguments for Property Dualism

Abstract

David Chalmers' philosophy of mind exemplifies a trend in much recent scholarship that puts the phenomenon of consciousness, what it feels like to be a cognitive agent experiencing things, at the center of our understanding of mind.' This movement itself is a reaction against those theories of mind that have represented philosophical orthodoxy for the last forty years or so, for which is reducible to, explicable in terms of, physical phenomena. Behaviorism, the theory, common to the American psychologists J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner, that all human behavior can be explained as a set of responses to stimuli, is a major bogey word in this context.2 In philosophical circles the logical behaviorists argued that what it means to be in a mental state is to be in a behavioral state. Thinking, hoping, perceiving, remembering, and so on are all to be understood as either behaving or else possessing a complex disposition or propensity to behave. Gilbert Ryle, for example, argued that dualism involves what he calls a category mistake. Dualists, in mistaking the way in which our language functions in everyday contexts, have been led to postulate the existence of entities which do not in fact exist: strange ghostly non-physical entities. In fact, Ryle claimed, when we describe people as exercising qualities of mind, we are not referring to occult episodes of which their overt acts and utterances are effects; we are referring to those overt acts and utterances themselves.3 Ryle, on his own account, was not trying to deny that we all live a fully fledged mental life; however, it is easy to see how materialist, reductionist accounts, like his, lend themselves to the accusation that, to borrow a phrase from Chalmers, they are not taking seriously. Chalmers argues for property dualism, the theory that, experience involves properties of an individual that are not entailed by the physical properties of that individual, although they may depend lawfully on those properties.4 According to Chalmers: is a feature of the world over and above the physical features of the world. This is not to say it is a separate substance. . . all we know is that there are properties of individuals in this world-the phenomenal properties -that are ontologically independent of physical properties.5 He begins his case with a particular phenomenology, a series of descriptions of what we can be said to know intuitively about our mental life. He identifies certain features of experience, which all involve the subjective quality of experience, those aspects of experience which give the impression of what it feels like to be that experiencer, and which he labels phenomenal. A mental state is conscious, i.e., is a phenomenal state, if it can be said to have a qualitative feel-an associated quality of experience. A good example of such a qualitative feel would be what it feels like to be tickled. These phenomenal states he contrasts to the aspect of mind, by which he means the mind conceived as the causal or explanatory basis for behavior. The psychological aspect of mind is thus that which admits of functional explanation. This aspect includes abilities such as voluntary control and the direction of attention for which the term consciousness is often used. As Chalmers uses it, however, being conscious is synonymous with being in a phenomenal state and no state considered as a phenomenal/conscious state is also a psychological state. Having made this distinction, Chalmers, in his next chapter, moves on to discuss what it means for a property to be logically supervenient on the physical6 and develops an argument to the effect that, apart from consciousness/the phenomenal mind, physical laws, and perhaps indexibility, every property is logically supervenient on the physical. Having demonstrated that phenomenal properties do not supervene logically on the physical, he believes his position (i. …