Property Dualism (incomplete)

This is my favourite topic in all of Philosophy A-Level.

Qualia: The subjective, felt qualities of experience, what it’s like to taste, see, feel, or smell something.
Supervenience: A relationship between two sets of properties where the higher-level properties depend on the lower-level properties such that there cannot be a difference in the higher-level properties without some difference in the lower-level ones.
Interactionism: The mind can interact with the physical world and the physical world can interact with the mind
Epiphenomenalism: The physical world can cause mental states but mental states cannot cause changes in the physical world

The painfulness of pain is an example of qualia. Everyone knows what pain feels like, but you can’t describe that feeling to someone who has never felt it. That feeling is only accessible to you and everyone experiences it differently

Qualia

Qualia can be a tricky concept to understand, but basically they are just your subjective experiences, what it is like to sense something.
They are how you interpret the stimuli you encounter: what it’s like for you to taste, smell, see, or feel something.
Qualia are often described using adjectives, for example, the redness of an apple when you look at it, or the softness of a dog when you stroke it.
Important: these qualities are not properties of the object itself, but properties of your experience of that object.
Knowledge of qualia is sometimes called phenomenal knowledge.

Interactionism vs Epiphenomenalism

Interactionism is that mental can cause physical and the physical can cause the mental (like in substance dualism):

- mental (tiredness) causes physical (go to bed).
- physical (touching hot pan) causes mental (feeling of pain).
Epiphenomenalism is that causal interaction only works one way, the physical causes the mental and not the other way around.
Most Property Dualists are Epiphenomenalists as they believe that qualia are caused by physical things but that qualia doesn’t cause anything itself.
Epiphenomenalism avoids the interaction problem of substance dualism because it does not have to explain how the mental causes the physical, because that does not happen in Property Dualism

Good to know for AQA: You can use Property Dualism as a counter to Substance Dualism and say it is better because it avoids the interaction problem

Credit: Davidl, Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

David Chalmers & The Zombie Argument

A philosophical zombie is a being that is physically and functionally identical to a normal human, but lacks any qualia.
A zombie will have physical reaction, like saying “ouch!” when stabbed for example, and its brain will fire in exactly the same way as a normal human’s. However there is no inner experience of pain.
We can adapt Descartes’ conceivability argument to support the zombie argument for property dualism:
Philosophical zombies are conceivable.
If zombies are conceivable, then they are metaphysically possible.
If zombies are metaphysically possible, then qualia must be non-physical (because you can have all the physical facts without the qualia).
If qualia are non-physical, then property dualism is true.
Therefore, property dualism is true.
Why this supports Property Dualism: it tries to show that physical facts are not enough to account for consciousness. The Zombies can be explained fully physically, but they are missing something - the non physical part. This means consciousness is not explained physically.

Problem: Zombies are not Conceivable

The zombie argument might only seem convincing because we currently lack a complete physical explanation of qualia.
If qualia are ultimately physical, then two physically identical beings must have identical qualia.
In that case, philosophical zombies would be inconceivable, and the argument fails to establish property dualism.