The subtitle of this blog is, ‘A quiet place for Brentanian mind/body dualism.’ So nobody will be surprised as to where my sympathies lie in the mind-body question.
For a while I toyed with property dualism rather than substance dualism. Yet, in the end I formed the view that there was no considerable theoretical benefit to the former position over the latter.
Recently, I have been thinking about Fodor’s doorknob/DOORKNOB problem: “Why is it so often experiences of doorknobs, and so rarely experiences with whipped cream or giraffes, that leads one to lock to DOORKNOB?”
It occurs to me that a Cartesian dualism that considers mind-stuff to be spatially unextended could be employed to solve this problem. Whatever the solution is to the mind-body interaction problem need not be solely localised to a mind’s body. There could be comparable interactions between concepts grasped by the mind and the actual extension of those concepts, spread spatially well beyond the body. Of course, this goes well beyond Descartes’ ‘point-of-interaction’ speculation regarding the pineal gland.
All we need now is a set of psycho-physical laws that do not interfere with the conservation of energy. This might be do-able if it can be argued that the it is the inter-definability of various concepts in the physical sciences such as energy and mass (read ‘circularity’) that produces conservation laws out of physical regularities. That is, the quantities involved are defined and measured with the assumption of such conservation. If this is so then psycho-physical laws will not interfere with the conservation of energy because, by definition, such laws do not deal with interactions between solely physical things.
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