Try to defend dualism as a viable philosophical position. Entertain Essay

Try to defend dualism as a viable philosophical position. Entertain objections to your arguments and reply showing how dualism c - Essay Example Dualism is the concept that declares that the brain is not everything and that there is a mind that exists apart from it. In fact, the idea of dualism has extended from metaphysics to religion, psychology and phenomenology. Dualism is not only about the physical and the nonphysical; it is also about good and evil, mental states and outward behavior, as well as neural connections and physical action. One of the arguments for dualism is the Knowledge Argument, or the idea that the physical and mental substances seem to have properties which are irreconcilable, or that the mental substances have properties that can never be reduced to physical forms. Thus, as the goal of the Knowledge Argument is to argue for the existence of the â€Å"irreducible [and] immaterial nature of the mind† (Robinson), then it is an argument for dualism. In a thought experiment that demonstrates the validity of the Knowledge Argument, a scientist who is deaf from birth has learned all the perfect scient ific understanding of the mechanism of hearing, but when this scientist undergoes an operation to restore his hearing, â€Å"it is suggested that he will then learn ‘something’ he did not known before† (Robinson). ... It is true that the knowledge one has of hearing, such as its anatomical and physiological aspects – or â€Å"how to hear,† can be reduced to the physical and can be proven by physical experiments. Nevertheless, â€Å"what it is like to hear† can only remain mental and the existence of such somehow prove the validity of the Knowledge Argument and of Dualism as well. However, one objection to this argument is the idea that â€Å"physical concepts [such as â€Å"how to hear†] and phenomenal concepts [such as â€Å"what it is like to hear†] are cognitively independent† (Nida-Rumelin). Based on the previously discussed thought experiment, it is possible for the scientist to know phenomenal hearing or â€Å"what it is like to hear† simply from knowing the physical concept of â€Å"how to hear.† This therefore means that â€Å"what it is like to hear† is actually an entirely different piece of information from â€Å"how to hea r† and thus the former cannot be regarded as the irreducible mental property of the latter. My reply to this objection is that although the physical may be considered different from or unrelated to the phenomenal, the mere fact that the phenomenal is distinct from the physical is a proof that there are indeed two aspects of something: the physical and the nonphysical. The objection presented against dualism is weak as it simply evades the issue by criticizing the connection between the physical and the phenomenal. Aside from the Knowledge Argument, dualism is also argued for by the validity of predicate dualism. Predicate dualism is the concept which states that â€Å"psychological predicates are not reducible to physical