Different in degree or kind: An essay captures Adler (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, November 15, 2015, 13:32 (3296 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I agree again about abstract thinking, but what grounds does he have for claiming that our intellect and will are wholly immaterial? Has he magically stumbled upon the source of consciousness?-DAVID: Consciousness and abstract thought are not immaterial? Really? Then what are they?-That is not what I wrote. As you know very well, the question is whether the SOURCE is material or not.-dhw Strangely, he includes imagination among the material attributes. The imagination is as “abstract” a faculty as the will and the intellect, so why can't abstract reasoning also be a "material power"? I'm not saying it is - I'm saying nobody knows the source. But this article treats dualism as a fact, and it is not.
DAVID: It is to me. The brain is the substrate for consciousness. I still accept: 'I think therefore I am'.-But even you do not claim that dualism is a fact, whereas your author states his case as if it is. A materialist response to the dead Descartes might be: ‘You are not, and therefore you do not think.'
 
dhw: What, then, is the point of it? Let us all agree that we are humans and not apes. But do we therefore have an immaterial identity whereas apes do not? ..... Perhaps I am doing the author an injustice, but belief in dualism is usually connected to some kind of religious agenda, and if so we should hear it together with all its unproven and unprovable assumptions.... I would argue that our mental superiority denotes absolutely nothing except that we are mentally superior.-DAVID: Spoken like a true agnostic. Egnor and I are both physicians and view humans from a different perspective than you do. And Adler obviously accepted dualism.-And lots of philosophers do not accept dualism, and I'd be very surprised if all your fellow physicians accepted it. Nobody has a clue. Anyone who states categorically that the mind (intellect, will etc.) is immaterial is offering subjective opinion as if it were fact. This is precisely the kind of distorted logic criticized with much ado by the lawyer (“Is Darwinian Evolution a ‘fact'?”) in his discussion of materialist evolution: “...it is very often the case that materialist evolutionists [substitute dualists] not only fail to acknowledge an unstated assumption that is absolutely critical to their argument; but also they fail to even know that they've made that assumption in the first place and that that assumption might possibly be false.” Incidentally, it's a great shame the lawyer does not acknowledge that evolution is not in itself a materialistic theory - an omission that you have rectified in your comment. But perhaps he has an agenda of his own.