Philosophy of Mind and Dualism

I have noticed that much of the recent writing in philosophy of mind assumes that dualism is false. It assumes that some materialist version of monism is correct. Since dualism was popular in the past, one would expect that the rejection of it occurred because of good reasons. One would also expect that popular texts on philosophy of mind would present the various kinds of dualism together with the arguments that defeated it. Now I really do not know enough about the historical situation to comment on it. What I can say is that my expectations were not satisfied. I have read a few introductions to philosophy of mind and they have two glaring problems. They present bad arguments against dualism, and they fail to mention that there are historically non-Cartesian forms of dualism.

The most common arguments I have heard against dualism are the science objection and the interaction objection. You have to keep in mind that these objections should be the best. The first objection simply says that our modern scientific knowledge precludes dualism. It does nothing of the kind. It precludes naive Cartesian dualism, but not all forms of Cartesian dualism and certainly not all kinds of dualism. So that objection is a complete failure. The second objection is that it is implausible to suppose that two radically different kinds of things causally interact. Of course, the nature of causation is undefined, so this objection is vague. But on certain accounts of causation, this objection is false and a problem for the materialist in any case. Since both of these objections are horrible, one can only conclude that introductory textbook writers don't know why dualism is supposed to be false. Perhaps they are just following the crowd.

It would be bad enough if bad reasons were given to support a denial of dualism. However, when a vast section of dualistic views are ignored, it shows that most writers on introductory philosophy of mind books don't know what dualism is and certainly don't understand it. A major dualist view is that of Thomas Aquinas. For those who do not know, he was not a Cartesian dualist. His analysis of human persons followed that of Aristotle. So he believed that the body was not the mere vehicle for the soul. Thoughts could occur on the material plane, at least in some sense. Yet a person did survive the death of their body with the memories of their current life. Since Aquinas is a major figure within philosophy, there is no good reason to ignore him.

It would be a mistake to extrapolate from these facts any sort of conclusion about the field of philosophy of mind. But I do have suspicions. I suspect that the field assumes materialism without argument. If faced with a living dualist, the philosopher would first mention something about the age of the argument. If that did not work, the he would mention one of the two problems above. If the dualist is still not convinced, then the materialist philosopher would leave convinced that the dualist was irrational. I hope that this is not the case. But my experiences with introductory textbooks give me reason to suspect that it is.

An Argument for Intellectual Property

When I have objected to the idea of intellectual property, the reaction I have recieved most often is disagreement without argument. However, I have sometimes recieved an argument in support of the idea of intellectual property. This is one of those arguments.

When some writers produce a work, it is entirely their effort. Whatever one produces entirely on one's own, is owned by the one who produces it. So a writer owns the work that they produce. But the work that the writer produces is not material. It is the story or non-fiction writing that they produce. Therefore, the writer owns the ideas that they write. Since any copy of those ideas is identical with the writer's ideas, the writer owns every instance of those ideas. Therefore, some information is owned.

As it stands, the above argument is valid. However, the argument must not contain a false premise for the argument to be sound. Certainly the first premise is correct. I would not want to say that at least some writers place all of their effort into a work that they do. The second premise is false though. Consider the case of the a worker who is paid to make an item of furniture. They also put all of their effort into building the furniture, but they do not own the finished product. They are paid a monetary amount instead.

Now this is not the only problem with that argument. Let's suppose that I stole some materials to build an item of furniture. I constructed this piece of furniture entirely by my own efforts. Yet I do not own the finished product. Why? Well, because I stole the materials! So even outside of some contract situation, it is still not the case that sole effort results in ownership.

This argument can be altered so that it avoids the two problems mentioned earlier. Let's modify the second premise. It will now state that if someone has placed their sole effort into something, stolen nothing to create it and is not under any relevant kind of contract related to it, then they own it. We now have to modify the first premise as well. Some writers produce a work by their sole effort, do not steal anything to create it and are not under a contract related to it. Now is this revised argument sound?

Now there are some writers like that. Is there a case in which something is created in that manner but not owned by the creator? Well consider this scenario. Let's say there is a scientist that owns some human sperm and eggs. He decides to combine a sperm with an egg inside of an artificial womb that he also owns. He is under no contract at all at this point. Nine months later, a child is born. Does he own the child? He satisfies the conditions set out in the second premise. So if he does not own the child, then the second premise is false. Since he obviously does not own the child, the second premise must be false.

So this modified argument is also unsound. At this point I am open to suggestions as to how to improve this argument. If it cannot be improved, then it does not supply us with a good reason to believe in intellectual property. Now, there may be another good argument out there. This exercise only shows that a particular form of the argument is a failure.

Pluralism and Religion

There are three main beliefs about the relationship of one's religion to salvation/liberation. One of these options is that of the pluralist. The pluralist believes that one can obtain salvation/liberation through more than one religion. Furthermore, each of those religions offers at least a partially accurate description of the Absolute/God. Now the pluralist must understand religious belief in such a way as to allow for pluralism to be true. This obvious point means that pluralists are not able to believe just any thesis about religious belief.

Pluralists must believe that religious belief shares some form of common principle. This common principle must be consistent with a belief in pluralism. Therefore, this common principle cannot be doctrinal beliefs. Since many religious believers are in a social setting, this may be related to such a common principle. However, this social setting is also shared by other institutions, such as schools. But schools are not religious institutions by nature. So religious belief must be more than a social setting.

One of the differences between a school and a church is the different attitudes one has in both places. One is an institution of learning, but the other is a place of prayer. This different attitude is an indication that the end of each institution is also different. In a school the end is learning. In a church, the end is prayer?

There is no other set of beliefs or institution that places prayer with such importance as a religion does. So prayer is distinctive to religious belief. This does not mean that prayer is the common principle of religious belief. One way to determine if it is not is to look for a religion that lacks prayer. Now I cannot think of one that does. Perhaps there is one, but one has to remember that meditation also counts as prayer. So it is not likely that there is a religion that lacks prayer. Another way to determine if prayer is the central principle of religion is to look for a religion that places a higher emphasis on something other than prayer. This is not hard to find. In some religions, emphasis is placed on doing good works. This emphasis far exceeds any due to prayer.

So prayer is not the common principle of religious belief. However, there is one thing that good works and prayer have in common. Both of these strive to do what God desires. In prayer, one desires to know God and communicate with him. One learns to match one's own desires with his. In good works, one aims to carry out the desires of God. In an Eastern religion, one may meditate in order to achieve enlightenment. One does good works in order to help along this process. In both cases, someone who does this well is known as a holy person. Perhaps holy people are the common element in religious beliefs.

How does one know which people are holy? If one says that those who pray well and do good works, then there is another question to be asked. What sort of prayer is good? What works are good? Now various religions differ on the details of these points. In fact, religions that emphasize meditation understand it much differently than those who pray to a personal deity. Those who pray would not even count such meditation as prayer at all! So if holy men are the common principle of religions and they are understood through prayer and good works, then pluralism is false. This is because holy men would be recognized through a doctrinal system, and they would become holy only through a doctrinal system.

The pluralist does have a different way of understanding holy men. Instead of those who pray well and do good works as defined in a doctrinal system, holy men are those who have mystical experiences. Since every religion has holy men, this mean that religious belief has a common principle that is consistent with pluralism. But now two different questions arise. What is the relationship between prayer and good works in such a system of religious belief, and are there holy men who lack mystical experiences? But those questions are for later.

Tolerance and Religion

There was a blogger who recently referred to something that seems common in the Canadian public mind. This idea is that if you believe that your religion is the only true way to heaven, or that non-believers will go to hell then you are intolerant. In fact, such comments can be found in many statements, both public and private, in the Canadian world. The problem is that such comments betray a lack of understanding of what religion is.

What sort of thing would religion have to be in order for those sort of claims to be true? Well, it could not be the sort of thing to make truth claims. If a religion made a claim that "The moon is made out of cheese" as a core claim of the religion, then that religion would be false. If a religion made the claim that going to heaven could only be accomplished by suicide bombing, then such a religion would be immoral. Neither of these claims are intolerant. So if exclusivism is intolerant, then religion can't have these sort of claims.

The other major feature of religion is the social and emotional aspect. People are married in a church, die in a church and attend weekly services. In some religions, meditation is emphasized. In others, moral practice is emphasized instead. In any case, all religions do have a social aspect. If this aspect were the only aspect of religions, then exclusivism is intolerant. Exclusivism would amount to the claim that my social environment is better than yours. Since the religion would not actually contain any truth claims, this statement could not be made on the basis of religious beliefs. Since exclusivist claims are made inside religious beliefs and using religious authority, such claims could not be based on the truth. Therefore, they are intolerant.

So all of this shows that under one conception of what religious beliefs are, exclusivism is intolerant. Yet there is another way to view religious beliefs. John Hick believes that religious beliefs have an experiential encounter with the Absolute at their core. Now experiential encounters are not propositional truths either. If that is all that religion is, then exclusivism is intolerant under this understanding of religious belief as well.

Since these two views on religious belief are compatible, it is also possible to combine them to form a third view of religion. We could call this view of religion the social-emotional-mystical view. In fact, I think that this third view is more plausible than the previous two are separately. Under this conception, exclusivism is certainly immoral. However, this view is not argued for amoung Canadians. Neither is it identified as a view at all. It is presupposed. Once it has been identified, it needs argument. After all, no consistently moral exclusivist believes in any of these three conceptions of religion. So where is the argument?

The Property Question

The question of whether there is intellectual property can only be answered under a particular understanding of property. Now there are four different ways in which some information could be property. Each way understands the government and the law in different ways.

The first way is the social contract theory. Under this theory, information is property because the government says that it is. Since everyone consents to be governed, they must accept the laws of the government. Apart from the regulations of the government, no property exists at all, whether physical or intellectual. This usually means that right and wrong are defined by the laws of the government. Under this theory, the actual laws of the government create property in the same way that they create morality.

The second way is that of public property. Under this theory all information is owned by the public. However, the government is the agent of the public and decides how that information is used and by whom. So when the government says that a particular author has a copyright to a book, it is really denying copying permission to everyone but the author and those the author permits.

The third way is what I am calling source ownership. Under this theory, a person owns a piece of information that they have 'created', and all of the copies of that same information. However, if someone else should have 'created' the same piece of information on their own, then each retains information over their own piece of information.

The fourth way is what I am calling information ownership. Under this theory, a person owns a piece of information and every instance of that information. This owership extends to instances of that information that were not copied from first person to 'create' it.

The difference between the third and fourth way is not merely theoretical. In some cases patents have been filed to preempt someone who had discovered the same process at about the same time. Both persons were working independently. This has happened relatively often. In another case, altered DNA has been copyrighted. Since the DNA was altered for experimental purposes, it is not unlikely to suppose that another would alter the DNA in the same way.

The first and second ways are also different. Under social contract theory, property would not exist without the government. On the other hand, it exists in the public if it is public property. So it would exist even if the government did not. Furthermore, there may be a right or wrong way for the government to administer public property, but not if that property exists because of a social contract.

Philosophy and Copyright

I believe that there is no such thing as intellectual property. Whatever one can say of ideas and information, one cannot say that they are owned by anyone. I also believe that it is not immoral to copy someone's book, movie or other work. I am not in favor of plagiarism. The copying that I am referring to is the type banned by copyright laws.

Before explaining any of the reasons for my beliefs, it would be helpful to draw a map of the philosophical territory. There are four distinct philosophical questions that are raised by my beliefs. Answers and arguments for one question are not necessarily applicable to another.

First, can information, ideas and processes be owned as property in some sense? If so, what is the nature of this property, and how does it compare with the ownership of physical things. If not, what are the implications for copying, modifying or adding to information. This question is not about the moral implications of copying. It is only about whether information can be owned.

Second, is it ever morally permissible to copy, alter or add to information of the type that we consider copyrighted? If so, then what is the nature of this? Does it permit this copying all of the time, or only some of the time. If not, then why not?

Third, should some kinds of copying, modifying or adding to information that we would consider copyrighted be forbidden or restricted by the law. This question is not decided by the answers to the two previous questions. It would depend on why one believes laws are created and what the purpose of the government really is.

Fourth, is it permissible in any circumstances to break our present copyright laws or other copyright laws that could be made. Again, this question is not determined by the answers to the three previous questions. Likely the Christian will have something substantial to say at this point.

My beliefs mentioned earlier concern only the first and second questions. We might call the first question the property question, and the second question the moral question. I have not mentioned my beliefs on the legal question or the practical question. That ends the mapping of the philosophical territory. It would make this post too long to discuss these questions in depth.

First Post

This blog will be about the various things that I talk about with the people that I know. That means that philosophical issues, theological issues and cultural/political issues will be the main topics. The title emphasizes the connection between scripture and reason. Without scripture our view of the world is unbalanced and unreliable. Without reason scripture cannot be interpreted or understood. This phrase replaces the vague "faith and reason" phrase with some well-defined content.

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