Howdy! I was thinking a lot about Property Dualism. Pretty much, Property Dualism is the belief that consciousness, or the mind (your first person subjectivity) is an emergent property of the brain. It emerges from the underlying grey stuff. However, I'd like to argue that dreams show this idea to be definitively false.
Leibniz Law
I've written this elsewhere on my blog, but I'll re-post it here for convenience.
Who was Leibniz? Well, he's an old dead dude. But he came up with a lot of neat math stuff...you know, Calculus? He was one of the key people in advancing mathematics to the modern place. He was also a kick-butt philosopher. He came up with a very intuitive law called "Leibniz Law" (-_-). It goes like this:
Let A be some entity/property/process. A = whatever placeholder you want it to be.
If A = A, then whatever is true of A will be true of A. Shocked? It goes on.
If A = A, whatever is possibly true of A will be possibly true of A. Shocked yet? Just wait.
Really quick, we need to understand what philosophers mean by "possible worlds". Possible worlds are the way the world could have been, or the way the world may be. They are semantic tools for philosophers to describe possibility. So, for example, if I say "it's possible that in the future, I may buy a dog", I can say that because in my mind, that's a perfectly coherent scenario. That is, there is nothing internally contradictory about the possibility that I may buy a dog sometime in the future. Thus, because this is possible, there is a possible world where I own a dog. Let's make one more application. Suppose I say "it's possible that God exists." That's because I can envision that as a possible scenario in my mind, and there's nothing logically incoherent about that possibility (all attempts to prove God to be logically incoherent have been abject failures). Hence, there is a possible world where God exists. This is the essence of modal logic-the logic of possibilities. So let's apply that Leibniz Law. If A = God, whenever I talk about God, God must be God in all possible worlds (duh). I can't envision any non-God entity and call that God (duh). So here's what that means for Leibniz's Law:
If A = A, then whatever is true of A will be true of A.
If A = A, then whatever is possibly true of A will be possibly true of A.
If A = A, in all possible worlds, A will always be A.
This is intuitive enough. As a side note, if something is true in all possible worlds, it is necessarily true. That is to say that there is no other possible way it could have been. For example, take 1 + 1 = 2. We could have had any symbols we wanted to represent that, but as for the concept itself-one object plus another object equaling a consistent quantity of two objects-there is no other way the world could have been. One object could never have equaled two objects, etc. Back to Leibnuts, suppose you have A and B. If someone claims they are identical, then this is what should follow:
If A = B, whatever is true of A will be true of B
Whatever is possibly true of A will be possibly true of B
In all possible worlds, A = B
The Argument
Alright, now that we've got that silliness out of the way, let's continue. I will define Consciousness as M (for Mind), and Property/Process as P. If the Mind is a Property (If M = P), then whatever is true of M must be true of P. With that in mind (heh), let me put forth this argument:
1.) P cannot exist alone in any possible world.
Justification: You can't have a world of "redness" without their being something red, or "tall" without something being tall
2.) It is possible that idealism is true.
3.) There is a possible world where M is the only thing that actually exists (from 2)
4.) Therefore, there is something true of M that's not true of P (compare 1 and 3)
5.) Therefore, M is not P
This argument is logically valid-4 and 5 follow necessarily if the premises are true. Property dualists will likely dispute 2 and therefore 3. I want to demonstrate that there are possible worlds where consciousness is the only thing that exists: your dreams.
Dreamy Dualism, or Monistic Idealism?
Consider with me a dream. When you're asleep at night, and dreaming sweet dreams of sugar cubes and candy canes and Oprah, you're in an interesting "world" of sorts. Now surely, there are neuro-correlates to dreams that we can find on the brain. There are blood fluctuations and such. However, if you look at the grey matter, the actual content of the dream itself is nowhere to be found. Interesting. In fact, none of the content of your dream actually reduces to the grey matter from which it supposedly emerges. Yet no one would say that the dream doesn't exist, or doesn't have characteristics or qualities (except maybe Daniel Dennett....which goes to show why his views are sorta loony). Correct me if I'm wrong then...but the construct of the dream world then seems to be comprised of...your consciousness. It is a mental construct.
Pointing out correlates on the brain necessary to have a dream actually won't prove anything, since correlation does not equal identity. Just because brain states and mental states are undeniably correlated says nothing about whether those brain states are mental states. And interestingly, given what we have surveyed about dreams (you won't find a smiling Oprah Winfrey in the grey matter of your brain!), it is clearly true that brain states are not mental states (as I've argued elsewhere). That shoots physicalism in the face. Ouch. I pity that fool. However, that also shoots Property Dualism in the face. (I pity that fool too) Why? Because Property Dualism, if true, would suggest that the mind is a property. But if the mental is a property/process, then how is it that an entire possible world (i.e dreams) can be comprised solely of one's...mind? They clearly are, since dreams don't reduce to grey matter. By describing the grey matter, you only describe the neuro correlates to the dream, not the content of the dream or the dream in and of itself. Yet this fact alone renders Property Dualism a farce. As I've argued, substance dualism (as physicalists and Property Dualists happily agree) is incoherent as well; how is it possible that an immaterial soul/mind, which is supposed to be a fundamentally different substance than matter, can interact with it? Interaction happens only via a shared property-but the interaction problem, in my view, disqualifies substance dualism.
And that leaves Monistic Idealism as the only viable option.
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