Property Dualism:

a form of Agnostic Materialism

Joseph Levine’s "explanatory gap"
we do not understand how materialism can be true,
but that this doesn't show that it isn't true.
 
Colin McGinn adds that it might simply be that
evolution has not given us the conceptual resources
fully to grasp the manner in which material processes
generate mental ones.
 Definition of property dualism

the view that there is only one kind of

substance - material substance with
two kinds of properties: physical and
non-physical.
In this view, the mind, considered as a substance, is
indeed identical to the brain, but mental properties -
or at least qualia - are not physical properties of the
brain, but non-physical properties inhering in its
physical substance.
 Contents of mind:

Qualies- different aspects of experience

and

propositional attitudes –
belief, desire, hope, fear 
They involve a subject taking a certain attitude
toward a proposition.
They are susceptible of explanation in terms of
materialistic functionalism in a way qualia are
not.
 Epiphenomenalism
As a form of epiphenomenalism, property dualism
shares all the benefits and demerits of
epiphenomenalism.

Indeed, it seems that qualia, unlike propositional

attitudes, must at the end of the day be regarded as
epiphenomenal, playing no role whatever in the
production of behavior, since the behavior of a
zombie would be exactly the same as that of someone
who has qualia.
if epiphenomenalism is true, those mental
states have no effect at all on our bodies
Daniel Dennett has pointed out, the property dualist
seems committed to something even more absurd:
the conclusion that we cannot even think about our
mental states, or at least about our qualia!

For if your beliefs - including your belief that you have

qualia - are physical states of your brain, and qualia
can have no effect whatsoever on anything physical,
then whether you really have qualia has nothing to do
with whether you believe you have them.
 PD collapses in Skepticism !!!???

Property dualism thus appears to lead to a

skepticism even more radical than that
entailed by Descartes's evil spirit scenario:

if property dualism is true, then you cannot

even be certain that your-own conscious
experiences exist; you might, for all you
know, be a zombie!
The consistency problem of PD about qualias:
Chalmers response to the problem
If the theory also entails that we can never know that
there are such qualia, then how (and why) are we even
considering it?
Knowledge of qualia, Chalmers says, is absolutely certain.
Here there is no gap between appearance and reality.
Knowledge of qualia must therefore somehow be direct
and unmediated by causal chains between them and our
beliefs about them. The fact that they can have no causal
influence on our beliefs thus does not, after all, entail that
we can't think or talk about them.
MH’s observation: mere explanatory gap!?

1. Perception (physical)
– to –
2. qualia (non-physical)
– to –
3. propositional attitudes (non-physical)
– to –
4. brain-states (physical)
– to –
5. response (physical)
 Is Chalmer’s argument question-begging?
one might say, for example, that at first it seemed or appeared to
him that Chalmers' arguments were sound, but on further
reflection he concluded that they were not. Here there need be
no qualia present, but only a mistake in judgment or the having of
a false belief.
But the having of beliefs and the making of judgments are, by
Chalmers' own lights, identical with being in certain brain states,
so that there is a sense in which even a zombie has beliefs
(including false beliefs) and makes judgments (including mistakes
in judgment).
But in that case, it could "seem" or "appear" even to a zombie
that it had qualia, even though by definition it does not.
So there can be a gap between appearance and reality even
where qualia are concerned.
 Chalmer’s claim seems to amount to the
conditional: if you have qualia, then you can
know you have them!?
But that raises the question:
How one can know the antecedent of this conditional
i.e. how one can know one does in fact have qualia?
Chalmers' reply is "Because it seems to me that I do,
and its seeming that way is all the justification I
need."
But a zombie would believe the same thing!
 The Property Dualists (PD) puzzle

Property dualism would appear to lead to

absurdity as long as it concedes to materialism
the reducibility of the propositional attitudes.

Moreover, property dualism raises a puzzle of

its own, namely that of explaining exactly how
non-physical properties could inhere in a
physical substance.
Materialism, Qualia and Consciousness
the problem qualia pose for the materialist is the
problem of accounting for the existence of a conscious
subject having a first-person point of view on the world.
If consciousness in general can be explained in entirely
materialistic terms, maybe a materialist account of
qualia in particular would be possible after all, as a by-
product of this more general theory.
That, at any rate, is the hope of a number of
contemporary materialist philosophers.
Constant Gap Theory (CGT) is concerned here.