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Comment by samd | Hacker News Reader

My mileage did vary. Nobody in modern academic philosophy is a dualist.

Facts are nice, but philosophical debates tend to be about things that are fundamentally unprovable, unobservable, etc. I think a lot of people that come from the sciences and other "hard" disciplines are frustrated by how useless their facts are in solving these debates.

As someone with degrees in both a hard science and philosophy I'd say that philosophy is more useful to other disciplines than other disciplines are to philosophy.

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> My mileage did vary. Nobody in modern academic philosophy is a dualist.

That may not be as true as you think. Notice the high percentages of internalism, libertarianism, and other positions associated with dualism. (Unfortunately, the survey didn't ask flat out about dualism):

http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl

Note that "libertarianism" here refers to an argument about free will, not political libertarianism.

? I know perfectly well what libertarianism refers to here, that's why I mentioned it in the context of a philosophy of mind discussion.

Since you're the one who used it, I assumed you knew what it means. :)

I was confused, because (not having taken any philosophy classes since 1990) I didn't recognize the term as anything but political. I thought other people might similarly be confused if they weren't familiar with the philosophical use of "libertarian".

  Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?
  Accept or lean toward: physicalism      526 / 931 (56.4%)
  Accept or lean toward: non-physicalism  252 / 931 (27%)
  Other                                   153 / 931 (16.4%)

Not sure how you can pick "other" from those options, but there you have it. (Physicalism implies non-dualism. Non-physicalism does not imply dualism.)

> Physicalism implies non-dualism. Non-physicalism does not imply dualism.

Since they didn't ask about dualism directly, nor, as far as I can tell, any position that logically entails dualism, obviously there is no deductive implication here.

I'm making a probabilistic point - non-physicalism is heavily represented (more than a quarter) among the group Samd specified, and thus there are pretty good odds that at least one academic philosopher espouses the specific non-physicalist theory of dualism.

Yes lots of them do (e.g. Chalmers), but most of them don't by a fair margin.

Let's go with: nobody's a Cartesian dualist.

Good philosophical debates tend to be about things that are, at least currently, unprovable or unobservable. I think a lot of people that come from the sciences are frustrated by how ignorant many philosophers are that the things they're debating have been observed in repeatable experiments and are no longer suitable fodder for philosophical debate.

Have any examples? I'm curious which philosophical problems have been solved by science.

Edit: To be fair, I'll provide an example of what I mean. David Chalmer's "hard problem of consciousness" is about why we have qualitative experiences. You can explain all of our brain states in functional ways, like pain's function is to prevent damage, but that would still not answer the question of why pain hurts. I don't think science can answer that question, at least not in a way that is observable and testable.

For one simple example, I believe there are still serious incompatibilists/philosophical libertarians--even after experiments showing that physical stimulation of the brain and even transcranial magnetic stimulation can alter perceptions, actions, and even cognitive processes. Daniel Dennett is a great example of a philosopher of mind who takes cognitive neuroscience seriously, but I don't think he's in the majority.

How is that fundamentally different from someone observing 2500 years ago that drinking wine could affect the same processes?

That is the point many in this thread are trying to make. The essence of the question is usually more persistent than it first seems.

That the physical can influence or even determine the mental has been known for at least as long as 3000 years. Those particular experiments you reference don't add much to the philosophical discussion of libertarianism at all.

I'm sure there are still some out there, but I haven't run into any. Most philosophers I know are compatibalists. Though to be fair predictable is not the same thing as determined, and we mostly think that determinism is false.

However, I think the true philosophical problem of free will is deciding what exactly a "will" is and what it means to be "free". You've got to answer that question before you can decide whether free will is compatible or incompatible with determinism.

When I was in school, there were still some debate about ontology.

That doesn't mean there were serious papers about how much the soul weighs, etc., but rather that some were still puzzling over whether strict materialism is fully satisfying or not.

edit: I now see your comment about Chalmers below. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.

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