Michael Egnor tries to solve the dualist problem of interaction

This is my biggest problem with dualist models, is that its proponents do not even have a way of invesigating its claims. Even in attempting to discuss or conceptualize the "immaterial’ we are forced to do so in terms of familiar, physical terms. So we imagine “souls” or “spirits” possessing conciousness and will as we experience as embodied subjects, and having effects on the world in the same manner as physical acts and forces do. If the immaterial exists, it likely is so removed from our experience that to even speak of it is at best extremely difficult, if even possible.

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The inconsistency I see is in his position that the body is the matter to the form of the soul when we are alive, but when dead the body does not remain as matter which is now organized according to the form of “corpse”, but instead ceases to exist altogether.

Yes, and it is not hylomorphism per se that I am criticizing (I wouldn’t even know where to start), but Egnor’s use of the concept. Conceiving of form as an organizing principle does not answer the question that Egnor purports to answer, which is “How does the immaterial interact with the material?”

For instance, if I hold the form of a bicycle in my mind, in the sense of an organizing principle regarding what a bicycle is intended to do and how physical objects can be arranged to achieve this purpose, that does not bring a bicycle into existence.

An emergentist could view this form as the product of the same brain that controls the physical movements of our body that construct the bicycle and brings it into being. That still leaves the “hard problem” unsolved, ie, how do the chemical processes occurring in our brain lead to the subjective experience of understanding a design for a bicycle?

But Egnor, if I understand him correctly, is suggesting that the form of the bicycle exists immaterially and this somehow interacts with our brain to allow us to have the subjective experience of it as an idea, and then to build a bicycle. He still has not explained how this would happen. The problem of interaction remains.

I admit I may be reading more into what Egnor intended here, but my point is simply that if one accepts hylomorphism, this still does not entail that substance dualism is true. So if Egnor wishes to argue that, he needs to do more than persuade us to accept hylomorphism. Admittedly, that does not mean that hylomorphism does not provide a model that makes substance dualism coherent and resolves some of its more intractable problems. But, as I hope I have demonstrated, Egnor does not succeed with that, either.

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Agreed. The mind as a product of physical processes in the brain helps make sense of a huge number of observations that relate to the fact that physical and chemical changes to the brain affects behavior, cognitive performance, and even conscious experience.

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I don’t see a contradiction there. When the human body dies, it loses its form (organizing principle), becoming a hunk of matter with a different form (called a corpse) which immediately starts decaying. For Aristotle, to cease to exist doesn’t mean the matter goes “poof” and disappears into thin air. The matter keeps existing, but the form is different, so there is a new substance (ousia) that appears. (Note again, substance is a technical Aristotelian term referring to form + matter.)

Yes, that’s correct. But Aristotle held that form doesn’t only exist in the minds of observers. They are not just an abstraction that your mind invents in order to process sense data. Instead, forms have objective, observer-independent existence; they inhere in the things themselves. How forms affect matter to give rise to a substance is called formal causation, which is different from efficient causation, which is the more commonly known sort of causation that happens when say, one billiard ball pushes another billiard ball.

The interaction problem arises in substance dualism because it is trying to figure out how an immaterial substance (the soul) can interact with a material substance (the body) via efficient causation - a sort of “ghost in the machine”. In hylomorphism, there is only one substance: the living human body (hence we don’t call it substance dualism), which exists because the soul formally causes the matter to function as a living organism. Here, the soul is not a separate ghost in the machine but an inseparable part of the “machine” itself.

(You can think of the soul/form as organizing the bits of matter together into one coherent, unified thing. But even this might be misunderstood by a modern reader because for Aristotle, every piece of matter you encounter has some form - even lifeless grains of sand on the beach are each matter + form composites. Form is not just a concept that Aristotle invented up for the case of the soul. It pervades his entire metaphysics and is fundamental to how he conceives the way the world works.)

Of course! If hylomorphism is true, then substance dualism is false.

He does not wish to argue that substance dualism is true. He literally says:

From the modern materialist perspective, this question has no obvious answer. The materialist discards Cartesian dualism on that basis. I am not a Cartesian dualist and I believe that Cartesian dualism is on the whole an unsatisfactory metaphysical framework but it is a stronger framework that materialists claim.

Of course it doesn’t! Hylomorphism is not a subset of substance dualism. Neither is it the same as materialism. It’s an entirely different philosophical framework. The Aristotelian notion of the soul is different from the Cartesian, substance dualist notion.

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That seems to me to be essentially materialism. What you’re describing are the laws of physics. There are the materials and how they act according to the laws of physics.

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It depends on what you understand the laws of physics to be. What causes the laws of physics to be true - what makes things behave according to the laws? An Aristotelian would say that the laws of nature arise from the intrinsic causal powers of things. A Cartesian would say that the laws exist in the mind of God, who directly moves every particle in the universe. Clearly this is not an option for the materialist, although today we still feel the aftereffects of the Cartesian view. I’m not sure what you believe as a naturalist materialist.

(A helpful past discussion on this is What are Laws of Nature?, started in response to a lecture by Feser on the different philosophical frameworks to understand a law of nature.)

That being said, Aristotelianism is very different from most conceptions of modern materialism. Firstly, form is not merely an abstraction in the mind, but inheres in the things themselves. Each thing has its own principle which is spatially localized to where the thing is. (Forms don’t exist in some abstract Platonic space.) Secondly, the top-down, holistic character of hylemorphism distinguishes it from the bottom-up, reductionist modern philosophy which is more commonly assumed among modern materialists.

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That’s the part that is unclear. Some scholars seem to read him as saying that body, which is the matter of a human, ceases to exist on death (i.e. after the body has lost the form of the soul). As you say, it should be that the matter persists thru the change, and in this case “matter” is the “body.”

Now, that could of course be a misreading. I’m just going by what other sources have said.

Yes. But does he understand “Cartesian dualism” to mean “substance dualism”? I am not sure that he does. For instance, he recently endorsed the video I discussed in another post:

Not only does the video explicitly argue for substance dualism, but at 50:10 the lecturer cites Michael Egnor (and only him) as a contemporary proponent of substance dualism. Now, I would find it very odd if Egnor failed to correct such an error when going to the trouble to post the video on his own blog post.

This is all consistent with my perception that Egnor is trying to use a non-dualist concept to support dualism. I don’t think we can presume he is well-versed in the details and nuances of the ideas he attempts to discuss. (Not that one should presume that about me, either!)

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I’m not familiar with Egnor’s previously articulated views. You may be right that Egnor’s views are not fully coherent, or he is still not very decided on what to believe. He certainly doesn’t seem deeply acquainted with hylomorphism at this point, despite invoking it to defend substance dualism. I think Feser is a much better contemporary defender of the hylomorphic view of the soul. Here is him on the interaction problem specifically: Part I, Part II, Part III. I am very confident that hylomorphism is diametrically opposed to substance dualism, regardless of what Egnor thinks. If he wants to become a hylomorphist, he should stop thinking of the soul in Cartesian terms.

Substance dualism almost always refers to Cartesian dualism (see here for an example). Basically, it believes that the soul can exist on its own outside of a body, in contrast to Aristotle’s belief that the soul is always attached to something.

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I am fairly surprised, to be honest. I thought Catholics are dualists, but you are saying they aren’t. Are Thomists anti-dualist? Is there any version of Thomism that is dualist?

Thomists are not substance dualists, for sure. Hylomorphism is sometimes classed as a type of dualism (as Thomas does regard the human intellect as immaterial, and that the soul is immortal), but it’s normally considered its own thing. Hylomorphism is fundamental to Thomistic anthropology; I don’t think a substance dualist philosophy can be called Thomist at all.

Hylomorphism seems to be endorsed by the Catholic Church even today, see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part 1, Section 2, Chapter 1, Article 1, 365:

The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the “form” of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.

This cites the decision from the ecumenical Council of Vienne (1312), which gives an even stronger endorsement:

We, therefore, directing our apostolic attention, to which alone it belongs to define these things , to such splendid testimony and to the common opinion of the holy fathers and doctors, declare with the approval of the sacred council that the said apostle and evangelist, John, observed the right order of events in saying that when Christ was already dead one of the soldiers opened his side with a spear. Moreover, with the approval of the said council, we reject as erroneous and contrary to the truth of the catholic faith every doctrine or proposition rashly asserting that the substance of the rational or intellectual soul is not of itself and essentially the form of the human body, or casting doubt on this matter. In order that all may know the truth of the faith in its purity and all error may be excluded, we define that anyone who presumes henceforth to assert defend or hold stubbornly that the rational or intellectual soul is not the form of the human body of itself and essentially, is to be considered a heretic.

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What do you mean by materialism?

One of the smartest things I heard from @Faizal_Ali was when he pointed out that as a physician, he did not know enough about the complexities of philosophy to know whether he was a materialist or not, even though he is an atheist. That seems to be on point.

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I would add that, given the the continued lack of even a semblance of consensus on this issue among the experts, that no one has sufficient reason to commit to a position either way.

That said, this does not mean that @Rumraket cannot determine whether a particular claim entails the truth of materialism.

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Ontic Structural Realism is a form of scientific realism that claims structures, not material objects, are the fundamental constituents of realty. This metaphysics is based on an understanding of current fundamental physics.

The structures in question are modal structures. That is, they capture information not only about this world, but also about other nomologically possible worlds.

Some believers in OSR go further and claim that casual powers ground that modality. That is, causal powers are primary, and laws of nature follow from them (some claim the reverse).

So this causal form of OSR says that only structures are real and that causation (and hence laws) are all based in structure only.

Since it has structures only, and no material objects, could this approach to scientific realism be considered hylomorphism, but with the dials turned up to 11?

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/36445335_The_Modal_Nature_of_Structures_in_Ontic_Structural_Realism

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Hylomorphism comes from hule (matter) + morpe (form). According to OSR, only structure exists, not matter, so it wouldn’t be considered a hylomorphic. In fact, Aristotelianism seems to be diametrically opposed to views which try to claim that the abstraction (in this case, mathematical structure) is real over as opposed to the things themselves and their qualities.

That being said, OSR is intriguing. If only mathematical structures are real, how do I have what seems to be an experience of real matter when I touch a tree, for example? Is reality a simulation like the Matrix where the mathematical structures corresponding to the tree interacts with the structures in my brain to create the illusion of a solid material object?

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In this case I’m saying the statement is consistent with the world as described by physics. That both the individual constituents, or “bits” of matter, and the overall “coherent, unified thing” have “form” in terms of their fundamental physical attributes. To pick an example, some particles have charge (which would be one aspect of their “form”), and they can be combined into larger things that have their own “form” (the charges of the individual bits cancel out so the larger thing is electromagnetically neutral, for example).

The fact that the “unified whole” has a “form” that keeps it together and gives it it’s properties is explained in terms of it’s constituents having their own “forms”, their own physical attributes.

The concept of forms, at least as described by dga471 in the post I was responding to, is totally compatible with the world as it is described by the laws of physics as we know them. That is one definition of materialism.

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That isn’t a coherent definition. Substance dualism is consistent with the world as described by physics too. A lot of non materialist positions are consistent with the world as described by physics.

Some help here? @dga471 @Philosurfer @structureoftruth

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In what way is it incoherent then?

If you mean merely to say that physics is not making the claim that no other things exist besides those already described by physics, and so some idea or concept that posits something in addition to the known, is not necessarily contradicting the known, then I agree with you.

My post was meant as a bit of intellectual fun based on some vague analogies. I don’t think it would stand up to serious examination by someone who had a deeper understanding of hylomorphism than I do.

However, I do think my post shows that scientific “materialism”, or better scientific realism, need not have anything to do with the everyday conception of material objects.

If by experiences you mean the phenomenal feels of subjectivity, then OSR cannot help. That’s a philosophy of mind discussion of which would take us way off topic.

If you mean only the explanations of the neural correlates of experience, then most OSR adherents are happy to leave that to neuroscience. For example, Ladyman and Ross advocate “rainforest realism”, which claims that all scientific domains have equal claims about the scale of reality which their theories address. L&R have a complicated theory of how entities postulated by those various theories are still structural, with the structures being based on an algorithmic information formalization of Dennett’s Real Patterns, and causation explained as information flow. Don’t ask me to for more details: I am pretty sure I got the order of the words right, but I do not claim any deep understanding of what L&R mean.

You do raise a common concern with OSR: does it imply that reality is, at bottom, mathematics. L&R say no, but are not very precise on the details why, at least to my understanding. On the other hand, there are those like Tegmark who are quite happy to accept that reality is mathematics, in some sense.

By the way, upthread someone linked Jaworski’s work. His book on philosophy of mind is an excellent introduction both to the standard views as well as to hylomorphism in general and in particular how it addresses philosophy of mind challenges. He also has a whole book devoted to hylomorphism and philosophy of mind, but I have not looked at it. I’m happy for now trying to puzzle out OSR in its various versions.

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I think what Joshua is saying is that saying “my view of philosophy of mind is that which is consistent with physics” is not an informative description of what you believe. All philosophers of mind think that their philosophy is consistent with physics, as consistency is a low bar.

I think Aristotle can be viewed as a materialist of some kind, especially in contrast to Plato, but it is a very different type of materialism that modern analytic philosophers tend to defend. In particular Aquinas, despite basing his philosophy on Aristotle, believed that there is an immaterial component of the human soul - that the soul is the form of the human being which includes the material body but is not identical to it. See here: Edward Feser: Was Aquinas a materialist? Aquinas also held that forms could exist on their own without matter (as in the case of angels), so he was definitely not a complete materialist.

EDIT: there’s also the caveat that forms are technically immaterial (i.e. not-matter), in the sense that they are literally not matter. But the sense in which forms are not material is different from the sense in which the intellect or God is not material.

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