Some of the best evidence against dualism is the experience of stroke victims — in an instant, a small biological incident can completely change who you are. This story by Christina Hyung-Oak Lee, about her stroke at the age of 33, is fascinating and terrible. Also a bit scary, since her stroke symptoms didn’t fit any of the standard easy diagnostics, and it was days before she went in for treatment.
Just a tip: if your brain starts malfunctioning in confusing ways, or if someone you know begins to behave in bewilderingly different ways, see a doctor.
This is fascinating and scary. It also brings to mind a This American Life story about a fellow who, unbeknownst to him, had his testosterone level drop to something like zero.
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I don’t know how representative his experience is, but I recall it being an interesting listen.
Life At Zero
Professor Myers:
“Some of the best evidence against dualism is the experience of stroke victims”
Actually, no it isn’t. Most dualists hold that the Mind and Body interact, and get connected (somehow!) in the brain. Strokes and other classes of brain damage, on a dualistic perspective, demonstrate that the this connection is damaged, not that the mind is identical (or supervenes on) the brain. Put it this way, the server(s) that FTB is on is not identical to the CPU of the computer I am using to read the blog, and you can’t demonstrate otherwise by cutting my internet connection.
The best evidence against dualism is the mind-body problem is intractable on dualistic terms.
[@1]
Hm, playback segued into act two, an “interview with Griffin Hansbury, who started life as a woman, but began taking massive testosterone injections seven years ago, and now lives as a man”.
direct link to transcript for whole show
@michael
I disagree. And I think you are confusing possible and probable. Evidence is probability.
Your “most dualists” have ad hoc details in their hypothesis to account for facts such as those in the OP. Such facts are unlikely and unpredicted by a less ad hoc version of the dualism hypothesis (which would resemble dolls possessed by spirits). As such, these facts have decreased the likelihood of dualism, but are necessary in the mind=brain hypothesis. Therefore these facts are evidence against dualism.
What does one call the belief that all of what makes a person themselves is located in the brain? Is that dualism? (My pc got hit by lightning so I’m having trouble getting info)
You absolutely could. The CPU still works fine even without an internet connection, so you can create a situation where you can selectively cut out access to FTB without harming the function of the rest of your computer. You could even bring down the FTB servers and not affect access to other sites, showing the two are distinct.
If strokes and other types of brain damage were merely causing a bad connection to the real mind, then the function of that mind would not be damaged when the connection is. Pick a function you think exists in the mind and not the body, and that function should still work fine during a stroke or something similar.
Thing is, I doubt there’s a function that hasn’t been impaired by brain damage for at least one person. And if every function is found to exist in the body (and therefore be susceptible to impairment), then what is left for the mind?
Well, what exactly do you mean by “makes a person themselves” and how much emphasis are you putting on location “in” the brain?
You’re thinking of “physicalism.” (Or you could say “monism” in contrast to dualism, but that’s vague because you could be another sort of monist. That’s saying enough if you just mean there’s no soul (or immaterial/nonphysical mind) which constitutes who/what you are.
And more specifically, that’s “internalism,” as opposed to externalism which says some of your self/identity/etc. also in some sense exists elsewhere in your brain’s (physical) environment, so it isn’t simply “located in your brain.” It’s hard for me to tell how externalism could be a coherent and substantial claim (about your mind, not where you record your memories, create reminders, use tools to aid in your thinking/calculating/etc, or some such thing like that), but that’s what it means, in case you’re asking.
Of course, you could also say that events in your past in some sense “made you who you are,” or how being situated in a particular society, at a certain time on a certain planet, made of these molecules over here instead of those one over there, etc., also “make you yourself.” But that sort of thing is just linguistic ambiguity at work more than anything else, and I don’t think it’s meant to be about what literally exists as your subjective experience. They make up your “personal identity” at some level, but it’s not a response to a lot of the questions philosophers of mind are trying to deal with.
@brian
“I disagree. And I think you are confusing possible and probable. Evidence is probability.”
Sure on a scientific understanding of knowledge, but we are not discussing science are we? What the universe fundamentally is, is not susceptible to the scientific method and must be decided a priori from my view.
“Your “most dualists” have ad hoc details in their hypothesis to account for facts such as those in the OP. Such facts are unlikely and unpredicted by a less ad hoc version of the dualism hypothesis (which would resemble dolls possessed by spirits). ”
It is not ad hoc as the interaction, and connection, between Mind and Body has always been part and parcel of dualism since (at least) Descartes formalized the concept in Discourse on Method/Meditations on First Philosophy. The opening post only speaks to an extremely naive version of the concept that literally no thinker has held in the last 400 years. Hell, Descartes, famously, thought the connecting point was the pituitary gland.
@Chris
“If strokes and other types of brain damage were merely causing a bad connection to the real mind, then the function of that mind would not be damaged when the connection is.”
From the third person perspective, we only have access to how a mind is functioning through a single physical connection. I.e. we only have one receiver. If dualism is true, we should never be able to tell if another’s mind is functioning well, but only if the connection is up and running. It’s like saying a radio station is off the air because my only radio broke. It doesn’t follow.
@9, Michael
Wut? Well, that’s your problem. You’re just wrong.
As for “ad hoc”, I didn’t mean chronologically ad hoc, merely being added later. I meant complexity of the hypothesis that is unsupported.
As for michael’s reply to Chris…is that supposed to be disagreement?
But Chris isn’t talking about being able to tell if another’s mind is this or that. Chris is talking about the account in the OP. Which was not about “another”. It was a first person account. Did you read it?
Or Chris could even be talking of any other account, really.
You don’t get to just assert yet another vague piece of a priori bullshit to support your first piece of vague a priori bullshit, especially not to support the claim that this isn’t evidence. It is. It should increase your estimation of the likelihood that physicalism about the mind is true, because this is exactly the sort of prediction physicalism makes.
If dualism is right, there is apparently no mechanism at work at all. You can mouth the words “there’s a connection,” but you have not said what the interaction is, how it works, what to expect from it, or really anything. So, this doesn’t similarly raise the probability of dualism (because you only have a cheap imitation of an actual idea), not until you can specify what we supposedly can and can’t expect if your dogmatic beliefs are true.
Furthermore, fundamental physics in this area is basically closed for business now. We’ve looked, and there are no violations of physics here: no energy coming in or out of the physical world whenever there are brains nearby. No crazy stuff happening at all, in fact. We don’t see brains doing any magic, so why claim that they do? Because you believe it, because you believe it, because it’s your perspective, because you have a theory and it is yours? Not good reasons.
You can’t tell anything, in fact.
Nothing follows, because it’s utterly vacuous. It makes zero predictions. Like I just said.
@michael kellymiecielica
This analogy is so bad. Only somoene who has never taken a moment to actually think about it could say something that obviously wrong.
So, you posit that there’s a free-floating soul out there, with some connections to the brain, and when connections to the brain are damaged, the soul is unable to express itself. Ok.
Well, what about the kind of brain damage which causes you to be unable to understand spoken English? I’m not talking about the inability to hear. Instead, I’m talking about the ability to hear, but inability to process the grammar of English. (It’s really quite fascinating.) Similarly, what about the kind of brain damage which causes you to be unable to speak grammatically correct English? Again, here, you can understand the grammar of spoken English, but you are unable to generate new grammatically correct English? How about the kind of brain damage which makes you unable to recognize faces? Or the brain damage which impairs or disables your ability to do basic math? Or the brain damage which prevents the formation of new long term memories? And so on.
If you want to posit that there’s a soul which does something, and brain damage just damages some sort of matter-spiritual connection, then that means we should be able to identify some sort of functionality of the mind which is not impaired by brain damage. In the context of the analogy, the CPU is still able to process and display pages saved from FTB, but is unable to retrieve new pages. However, there no such piece of the mind.
In short, what we see is not consistent at all with the idea of a free-floating soul that takes on some of the functionality of the mind. Instead, everything attributable to the mind belong to the brain, and when that part of the brain is gone, that part of the mind is gone. Nothing is left for the soul. “I have no need of that hypothesis.”
Put another way: When I damage certain parts of the brain to take away the functionality identified above, it’s gone, but when the whole brain shuts down, you think that your free-floating soul will go to heaven and recognize the face of grandma, be able to speak and understand her speak, be able to form long term memories, be able to do basic math, etc.? Preposterous.
…
@michael kellymiecielica
Yes we are discussing science. I agree that talk about what is the “fundamental substance” of reality is bullcrap, but “dualism” carries a bit more baggage than that. Dualism carries the connotation of a free-floating soul which is more than a mere manifestation of the physical brain.
Science is the only acceptable way to learn about the existence and properties of material things or things with material causal power in our shared reality. That includes any purported gods, and your mind.
My argument goes: If you think that the mind is a mere physical machine like any other physical machine, then great, you’re with me. If you don’t think the mind is a mere physical machine, that means you think that you can either have thoughts or take action in a way which a physical machine could not. Now, for simplicity, I’ll assume that you can vocalize any thought, which means on the dualist position it follows that you think that you can take action in a way which a mere physical machine cannot. That means that some part of your body – presumably the brain – regularly violates conventional particle physics. That means if we look hard enough, we should be able to find the pieces of the brain which regularly violate conventional particle physics.
Consider the alternative: You think that the brain does not violate conventional particle physics, but you also think that your mind has more functionality than a mere physical machine. I just set up the contradiction. If your brain does not regularly violate conventional particle physics, then your brain is a mere physical machine, which means a mere physical machine is capable of performing all of your actions, and consequently a mere physical machine is capable of representing all of your thoughts as all. In my positivist epistemology, that means your mind is just a physical machine.
Alternatively, you may take the god of the gaps argument of Ken Miller, who argues that the brain does regularly violate conventional particle physics, but does so in the seemingly random fluctuations of quantum mechanics, and in such a way so that Ken Miller purports it’s undetectable. Again, I have to argue that either it’s actually undetectable in principle, which means it’s just a physical machine and I have no need of the hypothesis of a soul which does anything, or it is detectable in principle and we should look for it. Even if it’s just a slight perturbation to the seemingly random distribution of quantum events in the brain, that’s detectable. Get enough data, and you will find a statistically significant difference. I’m going to take the bet that we’ll never find such a thing, because it does not exist.
Besides, if something like that were true, we should be suspicious that every particle in every possible physical system might be sentient, because they all have that same “wiggle room,” since QM (random or not) applies literally everywhere to everything. As soon as you start talking about what makes a brain the specific kind of object that can wiggle like this while other things can’t, you have to start doing real cognitive science and give up the ghost.
I see nothing to indicate that I am a mind separate from a body.
to be a mind separate from a body is a religious idea. religious ideas we came up with to try and explain what a mysterious and amazing thing to live and think. We took the images from our dreams and they do make descriptions of the experience of living that are true images in all the surreal glory of dreams. The problem is we take the dream images for real and try to explain the world from within the dreams images that we cherish.
I am in awe at the amazing and marvelous event of being this pile of star stuff that can make ideas and them string together and communicate with the rest of the universe it is no less miraculous or unexpected than all the stories of all the gods ever dreamed of. I can even verify what we have discovered through experiments by repeating the experiments of others. I do not have to take anyone’s word for it.
uncle frogy
@CR
Well, I’d argue that it predicts that we shouldn’t find a brain performing al these functions. And so it should predict that random rocks and water and junk should also sometimes be controlled by these supernatural minds, by their same telekinesis they must have to interact with neurons.
Oh, you already basically said that in 15.
Ah, but you see, they choose not to interact with rocks and water and junk, except indirectly through their chosen conduit of otherwise-useless pieces of tissue inside our heads. They can do that, because they’re magic intelligences and don’t have to follow any particular rules or train of logic. As long as you’re allowed to simply make new shit up on a whim like that, it really is like playing tennis without a net.
But sure, if telekinesis or something like that were an actual phenomenon, that would be evidence for supernaturalism. I wasn’t suggesting that finding such evidence is impossible (but michael kellymiecielica does seem to be saying that he somehow knows a priori that’s impossible and it’s also no problem), but we don’t have in fact have anything like that. To that extent (if a believer really wants to bite the bullet), you can make those claims but they all happen to be false. That significantly lowers the chances their flavor of dualism is right, but of course they might push it anyway.
EnlightenmentLiberal @14:
For QM to play any role in brain function, a quantum state has to be able to survive for at least the time scales appropriate to brain activity (e.g. neuron firing). I thought Max Tegmark put this to rest 15 years ago, when he showed that decoherence time scales in the brain are at least 10 orders of magnitude smaller than brain dynamics time scales. In other words, the brain is thoroughly classical.
Come on, what’s 10 orders of magnitude between friends, eh? And well… maybe souls are so far away from brains (in the non-space where souls exist) that transmission back and forth just takes a long time. But it makes me wonder… Is the speed of magic constant, like the speed of light? If this extends in time somehow, then why assume souls must be eternal? Doesn’t all of this “transmission/connection/radio-receiver” bullshit kind of defeat the purpose?
But seriously, I don’t even get how “quantum did it” is a form of dualism at all. If it’s just “random” (or seems random) interactions of particles and we can’t tell the difference, whatever floats your boat I guess…. I still have no clue how that would have anything to do with gods or souls or free will or whatever the fuck it is.
@Rob Grigjanis
@consciousness razor
Devil’s advocate:
CR: Imagine that the soul touches and pushes a few trillions subatomic particles every second. With enough data, we would detect this. It would look like some new fundamental force (except one that would presumably not be modelable by simple particle-pair interaction). (PS: It’s my understanding that the strong force may not be modelable by simple particle-pair interaction either, but that the math is still “simple” in some way that I haven’t yet found a way to properly quantify.)
Rob, your argument is about how quantum mechanics is. I have no quarrel with your source. However, your argument simply does not refute the notion the soul does nudge a trillion subatomic particles a second, and that then determines macroscopic behavior like speech.
Err, hit continue too early. Rob, the problem is that Ken Miller’s position is basically Carl Sagan’s garage dragon. Ken Miller’s hypothesis is purposefully designed to be untestable, but also to purport something which has a real and observable effect on our reality. It’s a sign of incredibly bad science. Citing actual evidence about how quantum mechanics is doesn’t really address the argument, any more than waving a heat-detector at the purported garage dragon addresses that hypothesis.
I feel dirty for arguing in devil’s advocate, but I think you didn’t quite grasp what Ken Miller was putting forth.
Yeah, and its an idiot argument. By that “definition”, one could argue that this blog is merely an end point for the internet connection PZ has to the resulting page contents, therefor its still PZ posting to it, if somehow the wiring in between got mangled so badly that PZ himself is unable to get to the page, but all of Rush Limbaugh’s twitter rants started being published to the site instead. It is, after all, merely a “malfunction in the connection”, right?
EnlightenmentLiberal @23:
I’ll try not to feel too disappointed at that :)
This is fascinating in a way that always leaves me feeling a bit guilty because brain science learns a lot from people that have been harmed. I see pieces of myself in this article. I have an enlarged right thalamus and often you see similar issues when you have a single side over activity, or a reduction or absence of activity on the opposite side.
Tourette’s feels like this in ways. Parts of me are separate from myself and I have to find ways that are hard to describe to pull pieces of myself together to think my way through things. Things that have to do with emotional processing, non-literal language and other things. It’s a strange way to live.
Yeah, we would. If that’s a response to me not getting what it has to do with dualism, I guess it counts on a technicality, but it’s not what I had in mind. Maybe souls behave classically. (Why not? Because it’d be a lot easier to demonstrate it’s wrong?) Maybe they hit things with sledgehammers. Maybe they just float around in Platonic heaven and do nothing at all. For all I know, they just don’t exist, but what I don’t get is why you’d look at quantum mechanics (and apparently never look at a brain at all) and say to yourself, “yep, just as I thought: souls. It’s definitely souls.” That’s just absurd. I mean, the nonsense about conscious observers causing wavefunction “collapse” is obviously part of the sad backstory in all this, so I get what some the motivation is on that level, but I still can’t make any sense out of it.
I’ll agree to what Rob said just above – there is no more sense to make of it. It’s desperate people clinging to their dragon in their garage.
One fatal flaw in any discussion of soul or a general mind, and trying to use QM to describe it, it that QM works though particle/waves, and until that unit of transfer is described enough so some properties of the soulon/mindon can be described, even mathematically, the idea can’t be taken seriously. The real problem is those trying for souls/mind are determined to claim their speculation is beyond the reach of science. Well, now it is, as it is in the realm of fantansy/fiction. But any meaningful description would allow for some scientists to examine it. And find out a 10 orders of magnitude problem.
A Nobel prize awaits, but before that happens, you must be ready to be wrong.
Dualism arguments always seem strikingly similar to god of the gaps arguments. E.G., there is little or no evidence to explain X about the mind with physicalism but a just so story about how dualism can explain it isn’t logically impossible therefore dualism is true or likely true.
Dualism of the gaps.
…well. That hit home in a very uncomfortable way. I think I might need to take my migraines and shortness of breath a bit more seriously.
God of the Gaps is dead.
Long live Soul of the Gaps!
TMM:
Scared me a bit, too. I need to schedule a full heart check anyway, because it’s a good thing to do at my age. Avoiding a terrifying event like that would be pure bonus.
@ consciousness razor 7 and 8, thanks so much for your explanation. I’m trying to get to a theory of mind that does not depend on a “soul”, basically the opposite of dualism then, but I have no background at all in philosophy so it’s hard going.
#26 Brony, you and others here might be interested what an expert has to say. UCSD neurobiologist Dr. Ramachadran has written a book largly concerned withthe effects of strokes and other brain damage, “Phantoms in the Mind”.
He gives many examples of experiments withpeople whose brains have been damaged, along with much else.
Good advice, but as that article indicates, it is not always so easy to tell that that’s what is going on. Most people I know, including myself, wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a stroke victim and someone just acting introverted. The fact is, this sort of confusion as to even WHETHER someone is acting weird is inevitable, but eventually people DID catch on. I mean, sure after the fact his wife being quite and not saying much comes off as a sign, but how on earth is one to know? How?
The theory of mind* and dualism conversations are ones that I wanted to jump into, but have been unsure how because I come to it from a very strange place that is very different from everyone else here. I’ve been fortunate in that I am able to read about my own theory of mind issues, and been able to tie what I am to anatomy and physiology (at least partially). My problem tends to be that I’m not very familiar with all the philosophical thought (and jargon) on the issue because the brain science has been far more meaningful to me. It’s meaningful to many others, but to me it’s mostly been inapplicable to my experience.
With respect to dualism (depending on the meaning), no. A very big NO. If anything the ends of the “duality” are in fact the edges of opponent processes that blend into each other at multiple levels to produce behavior we see and what we feel. The major participants in the duo may change from example to example and hide a greater diversity of players. Damasio’s “Self on the Mind” does a great job of outlining how the body and mind map into one another with respect to emotion and the self and I see no duality there. I see a multiplicity, and I feel one.
*If I’m misunderstanding Gen’s use of “theory of mind” I apologize.
@ randay
Thanks. I’ll check it out.
I’ve actually spent a lot of time pouring over literature that describes the role different parts of anatomy in cognition in order to make sense of papers like this. I’m starting to get a pretty good feel for how the anatomical differences in the stratum lead to how I perceive the world differently and I’ve been working my way through other tissues like the palladium, amygdala, insula and parts of the cortex. Any general information on effects of damage on cognition is welcome.
I’m as certain as I can be, given what I’ve read on the subject from both sides and my experiences with people who have suffered various kinds of brain-damage, that mind is an emergent property of the brain and not the product of a soul. The soul story simply doesn’t explain what we actually see in acquired brain injury, nor in those brains, like mine, which are not neurotypical from birth.
As for the hole in the heart stuff, I find that fascinating, not just because of the stroke (I was on coumadin, now aspirin, for AF; without blood-thinning, the lack of blood flow during an episode can lead to clots forming in the heart) but also for another reason – two years ago this month, I had a procedure, RF ablation, that reduced the incidence of AF to where it is now almost totally controlled medically.
Like the procedure in the OP, it is carried out by threading the instruments up through the femoral vein from an incision in the right groin; once in the right atrium, a hole is drilled through the septum to carry out the procedure in the left atrium, and repaired on the way out.
What is interesting is that I was having frequent and debilitating variant migraines before the procedure, including hemiplegia and aphasia, up to three times a week. I was on prophylactic migraine meds to control them.
I haven’t had a single migraine since, and stopped taking the medication two months ago.
Random stuff about PFOs: About 27% of the population has a PFO*. 27% of the population does not have a stroke in their 30s. There are specific risk factors, but most of the time we don’t even know if the PFO is to blame or incidental. Closing a PFO sometimes helps migraines. Other times it doesn’t. Again, no one knows why (or didn’t last time I looked this up). It probably doesn’t have to do with whether or not you’ve got factor V leiden.
*Including me.