William Robinson

Dualism is the view that our world contains two irreducible kinds of entities, the physical and the non-physical. Its main contemporary rival is physicalism (also known as “materialism”). According to this view, everything there is, notably including conscious minds, is physical. To understand the distinction between the physical and what is not physical, let us begin with something that is uncontroversially physical – say, a rock. It is uncertain what the very smallest parts of a rock are, but in this article, I’ll assume that the Standard Model of physics gives us the fundamental physical things. These are particles such as photons, electrons, and quarks. Physical objects, then, are the fundamental physical objects together with everything that is composed exclusively of those. A representative list that can be generated from this definition includes elec- trons, protons, atoms, molecules, crystals, cells, rocks, corals, bricks, buildings, planets, and stars. The physical includes more than physical objects. It includes events that happen in physical objects, such as lightning flashes, muscle contractions, and landslides. It includes properties of fun- damental physical objects, such as charge, mass, and spin. It includes properties of composites, such as liquidity of water and the temperature of the air. Spatial properties (e.g., distance, shape), tempo- ral properties (e.g., age) and spatio-temporal properties (e.g., velocity) are also physical properties. The key dualist claim is that when it comes to minds – in particular, our consciousness – we cannot give a full accounting that uses only physical objects and laws among physical events and properties. Dualists hold that something needs to be added to what physical science provides, if we are to have a satisfactory account of everything there is. There are several versions of dualism, and several kinds of arguments for supposing that dual- ism is true. The first two sections below introduce the main divisions among dualistic views. Later sections will examine some important arguments.

Stimulations of our sense organs are events that cause brain events that cause our experiences, which are also events. The first part of this paper explains commitments required for the best form of dualism that keeps these facts clearly in view. The second part of this paper addresses two matters that may seem to threaten the viability of the view established in the first part: unity of consciousness and alleged pre‐reflective self‐consciousness. It is shown how to account for these matters in a way that is consistent with the dualism described in the first part of the paper. The resulting view supports fundamental clarifications in our understanding of consciousness.

Contemporaries often reject epiphenomenalism (EPI) out of hand, while Russellian Monism (RM) is regarded as worthy of further development. It is argued here that this difference of attitudes is indefensible, because the easy rejection of EPI is due to its violating a certain Causal Intuition, and RM implicitly violates that same intuition. An enriched version of RM mitigates the violation, but the same mitigation results if we make a parallel enrichment of EPI. If RM and EPI are approached on a level playing field, it is not obvious which will prove to be the better view.

Im Rahmen seiner Verteidigung der physikalistischen Sichtweise der Erfahrung bot David Papineau 2002 die Erklärung an, dass bei der Intuition die erfahrungsmäßigen Eigenschaften anders geartet seien als neuronale Eigenschaften. Nach einer Schilderung des notwendigen Kontextes vertritt der Autor die These, dass Papineaus Erklärung zur Intuition der Gewissheit nicht die beste sei. Angeboten wird eine alternative, mit dem Dualismus kompatible Erklärung. Im Unterschied zu Papineaus Standpunkt setzt diese Alternative nicht die Annahme voraus, dass die Intuition der Gewissheit auf trugschlüssigen Gedankengängen beruhe. Es wird das Verhältnis der angeführten alternativen Sichtweise zum Repräsentationalismus sowie zu Fällen erörtert, in denen eine Identität angeborener Eigenschaften vorliegt

Abstract: Receptivity is a foundational concept in the analysis of causation given in Gregg Rosenberg’s A Place for Consciousness and it enters, directly or indirectly, into the definitions of a host of other terms in the book. This commentary raises a problem (which I call “the triviality problem”) about how we are to understand receptivity. Search for a solution proceeds by examination of several contexts in which the concept of receptivity is used. Although a satisfactory solution remains elusive, it is hoped that making the problem clear will lead to its eventual resolution.

Some philosophers have regarded the connection between hues and certain arousal or affective qualities as so intimate as to make them inseparable, and this “necessary concomitance view” has been invoked to defend functionalism against arguments based on inverted spectra. Support for the necessary concomitance view has sometimes been thought to accrue from experiments in psychology. This paper examines three experiments, two of which apparently offer support for the view. It argues that careful consideration of these experiments undermines this appearance of support. General lessons are drawn concerning the problem that individual differences present for functionalism, and the difficulty of supporting strong conclusions about concomitance by using the methods of experimental psychology