Dear Joanthan,
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Colvin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'Stephen Paul King'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>;
<everything-list@eskimo.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 16, 2005 1:14 AM
Subject: RE: Dualism and the DA
Stephen Paul King wrote:
Pardon the intrusion, but in your opinion does every form
of dualism require that one side of the duality has properties
and behaviors that are not constrained by the other side of
the duality, as examplified by the idea of "randomly emplaced souls"?
The idea that all dualities, of say mind and body, allow
that minds and bodies can have properties and behaviours that
are not mutually constrained is, at best, an incoherent straw dog.
I don't really uderstand the question the way you've phrased it (I'm not
sure what you mean by "mutually constrained"); I *think* you are asking
whether I believe that it is necessary that any duality must have mutually
exclusive properties (if not, please elaborate).
[SPK]
The same kind of mutual constraint that exist between a given physical
object, say a IBM z990 or a 1972 Jaguar XKE or the human Stephen Paul King,
and the possible complete descriptions of such. It is upon this distiction
betwen physical object and its representations, or equivalently, between a
complete description and its possible implementations, that the duality that
I argue for is based. This is very different from the Cartesian duality of
"substances" (res extensa and res cognitas) that are seperate and
independent and yet mysteriously linked.
I think this is implied by the very concept of dualism; if the properties
of
the dual entities (say mind and body, or particle and wave) are NOT
mutually
exclusive, then there is no dualism to talk about. If the mind and the
body
are identical, there is no dualism.
[SPK]
Mutual exclusivity does not make a dualism, and it should be obvious
that identity is not the negation of mutual exclusivity!
Stephen
