Is mind-body dualism falsifiable?

Question

I've previously asked Is epiphenomenalism falsifiable?, which was well-received, so I’d like to explore a follow-up. Are there any versions of mind-body dualism that make testable predictions, thus being empirically falsifiable? It seems this would likely require a detailed hypothesis on how the mind causally interacts with the physical realm and vice versa—a concept that could, in principle, be tested with experiments. However, if such tests were successful, and the hypothesis achieved the status of a theory, what would stop us from simply considering the mind as another aspect of physical reality, ultimately subsuming everything under the domain of physics? In that case, dualism would no longer hold, as there would be only one unified realm containing what used to be labeled as physics + the new laws governing minds and their interactions with matter, energy, fields, spacetime, etc.

In short, I have two questions:

1. Are there versions of mind-body dualism that are empirically testable?
2. Even if such versions existed and passed empirical tests, what would prevent us from eventually reclassifying everything as part of physics, thereby dissolving the dualism?

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Definitions of mind-body dualism (from different sources)

From Britannica:

Mind-body dualism, in its original and most radical formulation, the philosophical view that mind and body (or matter) are fundamentally distinct kinds of substances or natures. That version, now often called substance dualism, implies that mind and body not only differ in meaning but refer to different kinds of entities. Thus, a mind-body (substance) dualist would oppose any theory that identifies mind with the brain, conceived as a physical mechanism.

From Wikipedia:

In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable. Thus, it encompasses a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, as well as between subject and object, and is contrasted with other positions, such as physicalism and enactivism, in the mind–body problem.

[...]

Dualism is closely associated with the thought of René Descartes (1641), who holds that the mind is a nonphysical—and therefore, non-spatial—substance. Descartes clearly identified the mind with consciousness and self-awareness and distinguished this from the physical brain as the seat of intelligence. Hence, he was the first documented Western philosopher to formulate the mind–body problem in the form in which it exists today. However, the theory of substance dualism has many advocates in contemporary philosophy such as Richard Swinburne, William Hasker, J. P. Moreland, E. J. Low, Charles Taliaferro, Seyyed Jaaber Mousavirad, and John Foster.

Dualism is contrasted with various kinds of monism. Substance dualism is contrasted with all forms of materialism, but property dualism may be considered a form of non-reductive physicalism.

From IEP, Dualism and Mind:

Dualism and Mind

Dualists in the philosophy of mind emphasize the radical difference between mind and matter. They all deny that the mind is the same as the brain, and some deny that the mind is wholly a product of the brain. This article explores the various ways that dualists attempt to explain this radical difference between the mental and the physical world. A wide range of arguments for and against the various dualistic options are discussed.

Substance dualists typically argue that the mind and the body are composed of different substances and that the mind is a thinking thing that lacks the usual attributes of physical objects: size, shape, location, solidity, motion, adherence to the laws of physics, and so on. Substance dualists fall into several camps depending upon how they think mind and body are related. Interactionists believe that minds and bodies causally affect one another. Occasionalists and parallelists, generally motivated by a concern to preserve the integrity of physical science, deny this, ultimately attributing all apparent interaction to God. Epiphenomenalists offer a compromise theory, asserting that bodily events can have mental events as effects while denying that the reverse is true, avoiding any threat to the scientific law of conservation of energy at the expense of the common sense notion that we act for reasons.

Property dualists argue that mental states are irreducible attributes of brain states. For the property dualist, mental phenomena are non-physical properties of physical substances. Consciousness is perhaps the most widely recognized example of a non-physical property of physical substances. Still other dualists argue that mental states, dispositions and episodes are brain states, although the states cannot be conceptualized in exactly the same way without loss of meaning.

Dualists commonly argue for the distinction of mind and matter by employing Leibniz’s Law of Identity, according to which two things are identical if, and only if, they simultaneously share exactly the same qualities. The dualist then attempts to identify attributes of mind that are lacked by matter (such as privacy or intentionality) or vice versa (such as having a certain temperature or electrical charge). Opponents typically argue that dualism is (a) inconsistent with known laws or truths of science (such as the aforementioned law of thermodynamics), (b) conceptually incoherent (because immaterial minds could not be individuated or because mind-body interaction is not humanly conceivable), or (c) reducible to absurdity (because it leads to solipsism, the epistemological belief that one’s self is the only existence that can be verified and known).

Answer 1

Your first question is essentially similar to the other one on the falsifiability of epiphenomenalism, and my answer to that one applies here: e.g. one could falsify mind-body dualism by giving an account of history with no recourse to ideologies as a force. That would be a purely materialistic history, a history of bodies, and not of minds, or one where minds would entirely depend / derive from bodies. It may seem impossible, but it is theoretically doable -- in fact Karl Marx gave it a try -- and hence it ticks the falsifiability box.

How would it falsify mind-body dualism? History is currently understood, at least by dualists (following Collingwood and contra Marx), as essentially about the history of thought, because it's always a narrative based mainly on previous narratives. By showing that history (ie social events) can be causaly understood within a frame where mental events play no role at all, a materialistic history would undermine belief in the causal power of mental events.

More broadly, the idea is to challenge the view that social events are built upon a foundation of mental events, that human society is essentially inter-subjective, to challenge the idea that there could be no human society worth of the name without a common culture, or at least without an intellectual exchange, a dialogue and some attempt at resolving disputes through law.

You need to prove wrong the idea that human society is premissed on the causal mental events of individual folks, such as ideas, values, fashions, desires and interests. That's my challenge for epiphenomenalists.

I find your second question more challenging. Once we uncover the mystery of the mind, we could indeed decide to call it "physical". Incidentally, that's why I personally don't use the term "physical": it means very little nowadays. Anything and everything is "physical", even probabilities.

But you go one step further than just classify the mind as physical:

what would prevent us from eventually reclassifying everything as part of physics, thereby dissolving the dualism?

And yet, modern physics are characterized by the wave-particle duality, which is NOT dissolved in any way. Rather, this duality is deemed fundamental to our physical reality. Now, it could very well be that, once we understand the mystery of the mind, we are faced with a similar fundamental duality. If this is the case, we could explain the mind "physically" yet still remain dualists.

Answer 2

I don't think so. As it says in the Wikipedia page, this dualism includes

the view that mental phenomena are non-physical

When we perform experiments or make empirical observations, we're only able to observe physical results. If mental phenomena are non-physical, we can't observe them in order to draw conclusions.

Answer 3

Of course interactive dualism is testable, and falsifiable. It is an interactive model, so one can do studies on whether brain or body affect mind, and if so how, and whether mind affects brain or body, and if so how. In both cases, the test data would include both first person reports, and externally collected data about body and brain.

Note, "falsifiable" is explicitly not true -- Quine refuted falsifiability, but one can take it as an aspirational method, which forces a theory to adapt to challenging data even if a theory is not falsified.

Two of the test suites that have been done that provide a positive set of results are tests that see if the homunculus model of a mind controlling a brain actually fits the data of consciousness or not. Dualism has been ridiculed for its "homunculus" model. But very interestingly, both the System 2 of Thinking Fast and Slow, and the somewhat mislead and pandered to chief executive of Incognito are both "homunculi" models. The best of modern decision lab tests, and neuroscience on unconscious/conscious communication both point to the dualist model of a conscious mind steering an unconscious brain (as well as the unconscious brain misleading the conscious mind!).

However, another book compiles an even larger suite of challenging test cases. Per the main spiritual dualist models, of a mind being spiritual, therefore our reasoning and personality only going "offline" when the brain shuts down, we have instead a collection of test cases where personality (and system 2 reasoning) is strongly influenced by:

• Mechanical injury to the brain (Phineas Gage, surgery, alzheimers)
• Chemical influence on the brain (drugs, both good and bad)
• Fatigue, illness, dehydration, etc.

These effects on one's ability to think and so to steer one's brain, are documented by multiple contributing authors in Section One of The Myth of an Afterlife. It is a very effective collection of test cases that show that the most common spiritual dualist models (TV broadcast station, drone operator, and filter theory) are not adequate to explain the interaction of body back onto mind. Here is my review. https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R10Z02T2ZEYPFY/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0810886774

Emergent interactive dualist models, like those of Popper and Bradley are not refuted by this test data on the brain affecting the mind. In my review, I also note that the spiritual interactive models can be tweaked to fit the data, by assuming a partial offload on mind processing to neurology by a spiritual mind (the non-zero intercept on processing capability as less brain is available, noted in the review). Augustine's goal was to rebut spiritual dualism, and he was fine with an emergent dualist model being part of his anti-afterlife argument. But his presumption that spiritual processing being dependent meant a zero intercept was untrue, and his presumption of no repurposing of spiritual thruput upon death could also be untrue, so his "refutation" had holes in it.

While emergent dualism does better on brain damage affecting personality, the parapsych data cited in section 4 of Myth of an Afterlife is challenging data for emergent dualism, and strongly supports spiritual dualism instead.

Answer 4

The definition of mind-body dualism quoted from Britannica in the OP’s post does not help much. The definition operates with mind and body as two substances.

1. IMO, from start on it is a false approach to consider “mind” as a substance. Instead, mind is a process, a concept to capture dynamics. While substance is a concept to capture static objects and properties.

   One can relate body and brain. The latter being a component of the body. But to relate body to mind, the activity of the brain, is a category error.

2. The splitting “mind-body” has a long tradition. But it is not suitable as a basis to investigate the anthropology of a human person.

   When considering the person as a whole one can distiguish the structure of its components, on one hand. And the operation of its components, on the other hand. The operation of the brain component are the mental processes, vulgo “mind”.

To build an anthropology on this basis - considering mind as the information processing of the brain - seems more promising than the Cartesion dualism of a former time for an interdiciplinary enterprise with the participation of neuroscience .

Answer 5

Yes, mind-body dualism is empirically testable.

According to this article by Harold J. Morowitz

Cartesian mind body dualism and modern versions of this viewpoint posit a mind thermodynamically unrelated to the body but informationally interactive. The relation between information and entropy developed by Leon Brillouin demonstrates that any information about the state of a system has entropic consequences. It is therefore impossible to dissociate the mind's information from the body's entropy. Knowledge of that state of the system without an energetically significant measurement would lead to a violation of the second law of thermodynamics.

To once and for all solve the problem of dualism, I propose then to perform an experiment by confining a subject to an isolation room with a carefully monitored temperature wherein the subject has to perform hard maths problems. The hypothesis for dualism is to measure a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. To do this it is necessary to calculate the change in entropy (ΔS) of the isolation room. The hypothesis holds if there is such a violation, that is ΔS < 0. If there is no such violation, that is ΔS ≥ 0, the hypothesis is false. For the null hypothesis, it is necessary to repeat the experiment with the subject under general anaesthesia. This person won't be doing any hard maths problems. The null hypothesis is no violation of the second law of thermodynamics.

I will work out the details tonight.

Answer 6

No, mind-body dualism is not falsifiable by physical experimentation, because physical models are recursive on the experience of conscious mind. The distinction between body and mind arises in the conscious mind. The experiments depend on the recognition of such distinction. Idealism is more coherent than physicalism because both theories arise in the conscious mind.

SEP Articles - Epiphenomenalism, Dualism, Monism, Idealism, Physicalism

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epiphenomenalism/

Many philosophers recognize a distinction between two kinds of mental events. (A) The first goes by many names, e.g., phenomenal experiences, occurrences of qualitative consciousness, the what-it-is-like of experience, qualia. Pains, afterimages, and tastes can serve as examples. (B) Mental events of the second kind are occurrent propositional attitudes, e.g., (occurrent) beliefs and desires.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/

The mind-body problem is the problem: what is the relationship between mind and body? Or alternatively: what is the relationship between mental properties and physical properties?

Humans have (or seem to have) both physical properties and mental properties. People have (or seem to have)the sort of properties attributed in the physical sciences. These physical properties include size, weight, shape, colour, motion through space and time, etc. But they also have (or seem to have) mental properties, which we do not attribute to typical physical objects These properties involve consciousness (including perceptual experience, emotional experience, and much else), intentionality (including beliefs, desires, and much else), and they are possessed by a subject or a self.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/monism/

Substance monism targets concrete objects and counts by highest types. This is the doctrine that all concrete objects fall under one highest type (perhaps material, or mental, or some neutral underlying type: here the way divides). This topic is covered elsewhere in the encyclopedia (Robinson 2011).

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/idealism/

Within modern philosophy there are sometimes taken to be two fundamental conceptions of idealism:

1. something mental (the mind, spirit, reason, will) is the ultimate foundation of all reality, or even exhaustive of reality, and
2. although the existence of something independent of the mind is conceded, everything that we can know about this mind-independent “reality” is held to be so permeated by the creative, formative, or constructive activities of the mind (of some kind or other) that all claims to knowledge must be considered, in some sense, to be a form of self-knowledge.

Idealism in sense (1) has been called “metaphysical” or “ontological idealism”, while idealism in sense (2) has been called “formal” or “epistemological idealism”.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/

Physicalism is, in slogan form, the thesis that everything is physical. The thesis is usually intended as a metaphysical thesis, parallel to the thesis attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, that everything is water, or the idealism of the 18th Century philosopher Berkeley, that everything is mental. The general idea is that the nature of the actual world (i.e. the universe and everything in it) conforms to a certain condition, the condition of being physical. Of course, physicalists don’t deny that the world might contain many items that at first glance don’t seem physical — items of a biological, or psychological, or moral, or social, or mathematical nature. But they insist nevertheless that at the end of the day such items are physical, or at least bear an important relation to the physical.

Limits of Conceptual Knowledge

Concepts are distinctions that arise in the conscious mind.

Mental items:

1. qualia
2. desires
3. concepts

Qualia may arise in the mind independent of concepts. But to discuss qualia one must form, recognize, and evoke concepts in the mind of self and others. Desires are somewhat distinct from qualia or concepts. But desires have no aim or goal that can be specified independent of qualia or concepts. Beliefs fit under the experience of concepts. Models of the physical world arise as maps, relations, or compound concepts in the mind.

The article on physicalism exposes the problem: conceptual knowledge arises in the mind. Like many items of conceptual knowledge the concept(s) called physicalism are fuzzy, indistinct, and uncertain. The effort to reduce the mind to a physical model fails because physical models are recursive on the conceptual knowledge of the mind.

Answer 7

OP: "Is mind-body dualism falsifiable?"

Descartes established the cogito and existence in "cogito ergo sum", and then apparently leapt to the conclusion of dualism without justification.

Descartes argues that mind and body are really distinct in two places in the Sixth Meditation. The first argument is that he has a clear and distinct understanding of the mind as a thinking, non-extended thing and of the body as an extended, non-thinking thing. . . . that these perceptions are clear and distinct indicates that the mind cannot help but believe them true, . . . Therefore, the mind can exist without the body and vice versa. IEP

In this view, since there is no hypothesis dualism is not falsifiable.

Heidegger refers to the dualism's distinction as "baseless" . . .

If, in the ontology of Dasein, we 'take our departure' from a worldless "I" in order to provide this "I" with an Object and an ontologically baseless relation to that Object, then we have 'presupposed' not too much, but too little. B&T 315-6

and says that Dasein's basic state is Being-in-the-world. In the world with discoverable things.

The compound expression 'Being-in-the-world' indicates in the very way we have coined it, that it stands for a unitary phenomenon. This primary datum must be seen as a whole. B&T 53

In this manner dualism is rendered incoherent.