I like the 'evidential' version of the argument suggested by Both Sides Brigade's comment. It just seems incredible (given our current scientific knowledge) to think that physical causes are insufficient to explain the functioning of our brains and bodies, or that non-physical stuff intervenes in the domain of physics. I can't take that seriously. So that's why I find interactionist dualism non-credible.
Is it "question begging"? I guess it depends whether some people may be initially drawn to interactionism without attending to these theoretical costs. They're pretty blatant, it's true, but people do sometimes overlook obvious things, so it still seems worth highlighting.
Compare the argument against cultural relativism from the objective wrongness of genocide. It's "question begging" in the same way -- it would seem so to a sophisticated defender of the view. But it still (rightly!) persuades many students who were initially drawn to relativism, because they just hadn't thought about this obvious problem with their view.
Both sides brigade's comment explicitly relied on the assumption that consciousness is poorly understood. BSB is a type a physicalist! But I'd think a dualist like yourself would deny that consciousness is poorly understood--we may not know its causes but we know what it is. Once we think that something exists and is fundamental, it doesn't seem at all incredible to posit that it has causal effects. And there is some advantage to positing that consciousness is causal--it explains our consciousness talk better, might have some advantage in explaining psychophysical harmony, causes any problem around how we know we're conscious to vanish, has some advantage in explaining how we know that others are conscious, and has some advantage in explaining the evolution of consciousness. I don't think any of these are decisive, but they're pretty big advantages.
There's a big difference between the causal closure argument and the cultural relativism argument. An argument is question-begging if it asserts that a view, potentially along with some other views that have some feature, is wrong, absent argument. It's not question begging if it draws out a troubling feature of some view. The causal closure argument isn't drawing out a new feature of interactionist dualism--it's just asserting that it, along with some other views, is false.
> it doesn't seem at all incredible to posit that [any fundamental property] has causal effects
I disagree. It would seem incredible to posit that non-natural moral properties push people around, for example. That's just completely at odds with all we know about how the physical world works. (Imagine a biologist positing that altruism evolved because it is *good*, and goodness exerts a causal pull on genes during reproduction. That's not how the world works!)
> there is some advantage to positing that consciousness is causal--it explains our consciousness talk better, might have some advantage in explaining psychophysical harmony, causes any problem around how we know we're conscious to vanish, has some advantage in explaining how we know that others are conscious, and has some advantage in explaining the evolution of consciousness.
I actually don't think it's clear that interactionism helps with any of that. Even if non-natural PAIN exerted a causal influence on our neurons, it's not at all clear (absent divine pre-established harmony) why we should expect it to do so in a "harmonious", sensible way. You could switch around PLEASURE and PAIN (while simultaneously switching their causal powers), and our neurons would have no way of telling the difference: we'd keep saying all the same things.
And there's not any mystery surrounding the "evolution of consciousness". Biologists can explain the evolution of (physicalistic) access consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness is just a spandrel that comes along for free, given the psycho-physical bridging laws.
//(Imagine a biologist positing that altruism evolved because it is *good*, and goodness exerts a causal pull on genes during reproduction. That's not how the world works!)//
But the moral laws are necessary! Necessary things like abstract objects can't cause anything! It seems way less weird for contingent laws that give rise to consciousness to also give rise to things consciousness does. In addition, we don't observe the same systematic regularities where particular conscious states are followed by behavior with morality--if we did, if every time something was good there was some physical effect we observed in the world, it would be way more plausible.
I think the relationship between interactionism and psychophysical harmony is pretty complicated and would require more than one article. But I think that if you posit that our desires cause things, you can easily explain consciousness talk, while epiphenomenalism has to posit more stuff. I think it's puzzling and miraculous that the physical perception of consciousness pairs exactly with what we consciously experience--it's everyone's problem but maybe a bit bigger for epiphenomenalism.
I think, for most people at least, the fact that a particular theory requires rejecting a principle that is otherwise universally attested to *is* a troubling feature - especially since violating causal closure in the brain eliminates it entirely for the entire universe! You're sorta framing things as though we can have "causal closure, except for this one case" but that's like saying we could have "hedonism, except for this one pleasure." In that case, you're just... not a hedonist anymore. You have a much more complex theory that just happens to render many of the same judgments that hedonism does (at least to our eyes, because arguably any violation of causal closure would lead to cascading impacts across all systems at fine enough degrees of measurement).
I think causal closure arguments are popular primarily because so many people have the general notion that we shouldn't carve out exceptions to an extremely well-confirmed theory with tremendous explanatory power merely because we encounter a specific case in which a poorly understood phenomenon fails, at first glance, to adhere to it. I'm sure dualists are sick of this comparison, but it's a lot like the debate over vitalism in the 19th century - in that case, "All matter is governed entirely by physical and chemical laws" was begging the question against vitalists, but the persuasive power of that premise nonetheless animated many of the most powerful arguments against vitalism and we all now look back and realize the vitalists were rash in dismissing it. I don't think these nominally question-begging arguments are really meant to be convincing on their own. They're more meant to foreground the high cost of the competing theory. Maybe it would be better to think of an Evidential Argument From Causal Closure that goes something like :
1) All well-understood phenomena adheres to causal closure.
2) Consciousness is a poorly understood phenomenon.
3) If all phenomena adheres to a particular principle, with the exception of a single poorly understood phenomenon that appears not to, then it is more likely that we are misunderstanding the single poorly understood phenomenon than that the particular principle is false.
4) It is more likely that we are misunderstanding consciousness than that causal closure is false.
5) We are justified in believing that causal closure is true.
6) We are justified in believing interactionist dualism is false.
Of course, a dualist can just insist that their introspective awareness of consciousness is such that they simply cannot be mistaken and they are therefore justified in dismissing the general principle no matter how solid it seems elsewhere - much like a Christian could insist that their introspective awareness of Jesus' love is such that they simply cannot be mistaken and they are therefore justified in dismissing the idea that no one comes back to life after being dead for three days. But I definitely find that baffling, both because the introspective awareness of consciousness I do have gives me many reasons to believe it is illusory in many important respects and because my other views about evolution and human psychology give me no reason to believe introspection would reveal the true nature of my consciousness anyway. But of course that's a broader debate!
I don't think consciousness is poorly understood. In fact, I think it's very well understood--we all directly experience it. And if you agree with the arguments for dualism there already are fundamental consciousness laws--not much is lost by positing they cause things.
Consciousness is *obviously* poorly understood, no matter how directly we experience it in the course of our daily lives. Mere familiarity doesn't imply understanding. But I would also argue that it's very easy to find situations where our direct experience of consciousness reveals just how little substance it really has - I'm drawn to illusionism myself in large part because I've been a life-long meditator and feel as though I have firsthand experience of just how quickly the commonsense view of consciousness breaks down under the slightest investigation. I'm sure you've seen all the classic illusions and experiments illusionists like Dennett bring out to demonstrate these quirks of perception, memory, and so on. You might not find them convincing in their goal of demonstrating the incoherence of qualia as a concept, but they should at least challenge the idea that we all have some perfect and direct acquaintance with the larger conscious project merely because we're engaged in it all the time. How many people speak a language every day but would have no ability to draw out a conjugation table or explain the distinction between perfect and imperfect tenses?
Either way, it's true that dualists have developed some fundamental consciousness laws but they have nothing on either the specificity of empirically developed neuroscientific theories or the reliability of conservation laws with mathematical foundations. In order for me to consider interactionist dualism a reasonable theory, I'd want laws that were at least as robust. At the very least, I'd like a real account of what it means to say they "cause things." Is the idea that mental events are capable of generating energy from nowhere, and that's what ends up causing physical changes in the brain? Or is the idea that mental events cause these physical changes in the brain without energy being involved at all? Both of these positions are extremely difficult to defend, imo - not merely because they're spooky (although they are) but because they both plausibly violate mathematical constraints on the symmetry of physical systems.
This would be a terrible argument. Premise 1 is flagrantly question-begging"
Have you seen a disembodied mind? The evidence against disembodies minds is about the same as the evidence against unicorns.
"But the interactionist disputes this—they say we have observed a nonphysical cause. It’s called consciousness."
Except that the nonphysicality of consciousness isn't a directly observable empirical fact: the arguments for nonphysicality are very much about the success and failure of various kinds of explanation.
"So why is this argument convincing to many people?"
Strict physical determinism, if it were true, would be a strong argument for causal closure, since the alternative would be overdetermination, ie. the mental causing events that have already been sufficiently caused by physics.
You premise 1 immediately reminded me of the premise: "No amount of knowledge could have greater intrinsic goodness than some large finite amount of pain has intrinsic badness." What non-hedonist is going to accept that?
I like the 'evidential' version of the argument suggested by Both Sides Brigade's comment. It just seems incredible (given our current scientific knowledge) to think that physical causes are insufficient to explain the functioning of our brains and bodies, or that non-physical stuff intervenes in the domain of physics. I can't take that seriously. So that's why I find interactionist dualism non-credible.
Is it "question begging"? I guess it depends whether some people may be initially drawn to interactionism without attending to these theoretical costs. They're pretty blatant, it's true, but people do sometimes overlook obvious things, so it still seems worth highlighting.
Compare the argument against cultural relativism from the objective wrongness of genocide. It's "question begging" in the same way -- it would seem so to a sophisticated defender of the view. But it still (rightly!) persuades many students who were initially drawn to relativism, because they just hadn't thought about this obvious problem with their view.
Both sides brigade's comment explicitly relied on the assumption that consciousness is poorly understood. BSB is a type a physicalist! But I'd think a dualist like yourself would deny that consciousness is poorly understood--we may not know its causes but we know what it is. Once we think that something exists and is fundamental, it doesn't seem at all incredible to posit that it has causal effects. And there is some advantage to positing that consciousness is causal--it explains our consciousness talk better, might have some advantage in explaining psychophysical harmony, causes any problem around how we know we're conscious to vanish, has some advantage in explaining how we know that others are conscious, and has some advantage in explaining the evolution of consciousness. I don't think any of these are decisive, but they're pretty big advantages.
There's a big difference between the causal closure argument and the cultural relativism argument. An argument is question-begging if it asserts that a view, potentially along with some other views that have some feature, is wrong, absent argument. It's not question begging if it draws out a troubling feature of some view. The causal closure argument isn't drawing out a new feature of interactionist dualism--it's just asserting that it, along with some other views, is false.
> it doesn't seem at all incredible to posit that [any fundamental property] has causal effects
I disagree. It would seem incredible to posit that non-natural moral properties push people around, for example. That's just completely at odds with all we know about how the physical world works. (Imagine a biologist positing that altruism evolved because it is *good*, and goodness exerts a causal pull on genes during reproduction. That's not how the world works!)
> there is some advantage to positing that consciousness is causal--it explains our consciousness talk better, might have some advantage in explaining psychophysical harmony, causes any problem around how we know we're conscious to vanish, has some advantage in explaining how we know that others are conscious, and has some advantage in explaining the evolution of consciousness.
I actually don't think it's clear that interactionism helps with any of that. Even if non-natural PAIN exerted a causal influence on our neurons, it's not at all clear (absent divine pre-established harmony) why we should expect it to do so in a "harmonious", sensible way. You could switch around PLEASURE and PAIN (while simultaneously switching their causal powers), and our neurons would have no way of telling the difference: we'd keep saying all the same things.
And there's not any mystery surrounding the "evolution of consciousness". Biologists can explain the evolution of (physicalistic) access consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness is just a spandrel that comes along for free, given the psycho-physical bridging laws.
//(Imagine a biologist positing that altruism evolved because it is *good*, and goodness exerts a causal pull on genes during reproduction. That's not how the world works!)//
But the moral laws are necessary! Necessary things like abstract objects can't cause anything! It seems way less weird for contingent laws that give rise to consciousness to also give rise to things consciousness does. In addition, we don't observe the same systematic regularities where particular conscious states are followed by behavior with morality--if we did, if every time something was good there was some physical effect we observed in the world, it would be way more plausible.
I think the relationship between interactionism and psychophysical harmony is pretty complicated and would require more than one article. But I think that if you posit that our desires cause things, you can easily explain consciousness talk, while epiphenomenalism has to posit more stuff. I think it's puzzling and miraculous that the physical perception of consciousness pairs exactly with what we consciously experience--it's everyone's problem but maybe a bit bigger for epiphenomenalism.
I think, for most people at least, the fact that a particular theory requires rejecting a principle that is otherwise universally attested to *is* a troubling feature - especially since violating causal closure in the brain eliminates it entirely for the entire universe! You're sorta framing things as though we can have "causal closure, except for this one case" but that's like saying we could have "hedonism, except for this one pleasure." In that case, you're just... not a hedonist anymore. You have a much more complex theory that just happens to render many of the same judgments that hedonism does (at least to our eyes, because arguably any violation of causal closure would lead to cascading impacts across all systems at fine enough degrees of measurement).
I think causal closure arguments are popular primarily because so many people have the general notion that we shouldn't carve out exceptions to an extremely well-confirmed theory with tremendous explanatory power merely because we encounter a specific case in which a poorly understood phenomenon fails, at first glance, to adhere to it. I'm sure dualists are sick of this comparison, but it's a lot like the debate over vitalism in the 19th century - in that case, "All matter is governed entirely by physical and chemical laws" was begging the question against vitalists, but the persuasive power of that premise nonetheless animated many of the most powerful arguments against vitalism and we all now look back and realize the vitalists were rash in dismissing it. I don't think these nominally question-begging arguments are really meant to be convincing on their own. They're more meant to foreground the high cost of the competing theory. Maybe it would be better to think of an Evidential Argument From Causal Closure that goes something like :
1) All well-understood phenomena adheres to causal closure.
2) Consciousness is a poorly understood phenomenon.
3) If all phenomena adheres to a particular principle, with the exception of a single poorly understood phenomenon that appears not to, then it is more likely that we are misunderstanding the single poorly understood phenomenon than that the particular principle is false.
4) It is more likely that we are misunderstanding consciousness than that causal closure is false.
5) We are justified in believing that causal closure is true.
6) We are justified in believing interactionist dualism is false.
Of course, a dualist can just insist that their introspective awareness of consciousness is such that they simply cannot be mistaken and they are therefore justified in dismissing the general principle no matter how solid it seems elsewhere - much like a Christian could insist that their introspective awareness of Jesus' love is such that they simply cannot be mistaken and they are therefore justified in dismissing the idea that no one comes back to life after being dead for three days. But I definitely find that baffling, both because the introspective awareness of consciousness I do have gives me many reasons to believe it is illusory in many important respects and because my other views about evolution and human psychology give me no reason to believe introspection would reveal the true nature of my consciousness anyway. But of course that's a broader debate!
I don't think consciousness is poorly understood. In fact, I think it's very well understood--we all directly experience it. And if you agree with the arguments for dualism there already are fundamental consciousness laws--not much is lost by positing they cause things.
Consciousness is *obviously* poorly understood, no matter how directly we experience it in the course of our daily lives. Mere familiarity doesn't imply understanding. But I would also argue that it's very easy to find situations where our direct experience of consciousness reveals just how little substance it really has - I'm drawn to illusionism myself in large part because I've been a life-long meditator and feel as though I have firsthand experience of just how quickly the commonsense view of consciousness breaks down under the slightest investigation. I'm sure you've seen all the classic illusions and experiments illusionists like Dennett bring out to demonstrate these quirks of perception, memory, and so on. You might not find them convincing in their goal of demonstrating the incoherence of qualia as a concept, but they should at least challenge the idea that we all have some perfect and direct acquaintance with the larger conscious project merely because we're engaged in it all the time. How many people speak a language every day but would have no ability to draw out a conjugation table or explain the distinction between perfect and imperfect tenses?
Either way, it's true that dualists have developed some fundamental consciousness laws but they have nothing on either the specificity of empirically developed neuroscientific theories or the reliability of conservation laws with mathematical foundations. In order for me to consider interactionist dualism a reasonable theory, I'd want laws that were at least as robust. At the very least, I'd like a real account of what it means to say they "cause things." Is the idea that mental events are capable of generating energy from nowhere, and that's what ends up causing physical changes in the brain? Or is the idea that mental events cause these physical changes in the brain without energy being involved at all? Both of these positions are extremely difficult to defend, imo - not merely because they're spooky (although they are) but because they both plausibly violate mathematical constraints on the symmetry of physical systems.
""All matter is governed entirely by physical and chemical laws"
..isn't strong enough to imply casual closure: you would also need strict determinism.
Oh for sure, I'm just giving that as a view that would rule out vitalism.
"There are no disembodied minds.
If God existed, he’d be a disembodied mind.
Therefore, God doesn’t exist.
This would be a terrible argument. Premise 1 is flagrantly question-begging"
Have you seen a disembodied mind? The evidence against disembodies minds is about the same as the evidence against unicorns.
"But the interactionist disputes this—they say we have observed a nonphysical cause. It’s called consciousness."
Except that the nonphysicality of consciousness isn't a directly observable empirical fact: the arguments for nonphysicality are very much about the success and failure of various kinds of explanation.
"So why is this argument convincing to many people?"
Strict physical determinism, if it were true, would be a strong argument for causal closure, since the alternative would be overdetermination, ie. the mental causing events that have already been sufficiently caused by physics.
You premise 1 immediately reminded me of the premise: "No amount of knowledge could have greater intrinsic goodness than some large finite amount of pain has intrinsic badness." What non-hedonist is going to accept that?
I didn’t assert that--I gave an argument for it!