Why I Am Not a Property Dualist

I have argued in a number of writings that the philosophical part (though not the neurobiological part) of the traditional mind-body problem has a fairly simple and obvious solution: All of our mental phenomena are caused by lower level neuronal processes in the brain and are themselves realized in the brain as higher level, or system, features. The form of causation is “bottom up,” whereby the behavior of lower level elements, presumably neurons and synapses, causes the higher level or system features of consciousness and intentionality. (This form of causation, by the way, is common in nature; for example, the higher level feature of solidity is causally explained by the behavior of the lower level elements, the molecules.) Because this view emphasizes the biological character of the mental, and because it treats mental phenomena as ordinary parts of nature, I have labeled it “biological naturalism.” To many people biological naturalism looks a lot like property dualism. Because I believe property dualism is mistaken, I would like to try to clarify the differences between the two accounts and try to expose the weaknesses in property dualism. This short paper then has the two subjects expressed by the double meanings in its title: why my views are not the same as property dualism, and why I find property dualism unacceptable. There are, of course, several different “mind-body” problems. The one that most concerns me in this article is the relationship between consciousness and brain processes. I think that the conclusions of the discussion will extend to other features of the mind-body problem, such as, for example, the relationship between intentionality and brain processes, but for the sake of simplicity I will concentrate on consciousness. For the purposes of this discussion, the “mind-body problem” is a problem about how consciousness relates to the brain. The mind-body problem, so construed persists in philosophy because of two intellectual limitations on our part. First, we really do not understand how brain processes cause consciousness. Second, we continue to accept a traditional vocabulary that contrasts the mental and the physical, the mind and the body, the soul and the flesh, in a way that I think is confused and obsolete. I cannot overcome our neurobiological ignorance, but I can at least try to overcome our conceptual confusion, and that is one of the things that I will attempt to do in this article. I think it is because of these two limitations, our ignorance of how the brain works and our acceptance of the traditional vocabulary, that many people find property dualism appealing. Before criticizing it, I want to try to account for its appeal by stating the thesis with as much plausibility as I can. Of course, there are different versions of property dualism, but what I hope to state is the version that is closest to my own views and consequently the one I find most challenging. I will say nothing about “neutral monism”, panpsychism, or the various forms of “dual aspect” theories. Notice that in presenting arguments for property dualism I have to use the traditional terminology that later on I will reject.