Originally posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos
The reason dualism is intuitive is that the brain does not perceive itself and so ascribes mental activity to a separate source
To me, 'intuitive' refers to something you know without knowing how you know it. When it comes right down to it, the vast majority of our perceptions could be said to be intuitive in this sense; they are sums of outputs from countless cognitive subprocesses, the inner workings of which are unknown to us. Their results are estimates, but overall quite reliable. Truly amazing is the speed at which these mysterious internal genies work, and how little information they require to get started.
Sometimes we do know how we know something, especially when that knowledge comes to us from an external source. For instance, we often learn a difficult skill by rigidly following a set of instructions provided to us by someone else. At first, we may not understand much about what we are doing, or why the rules say we should do a certain thing. Considerable effort may be required to override what our internal genies tell us when it conflicts with the rules. Gradually, what was external becomes internal; what was a sequence of careful, deliberate steps is integrated into a seamless flow; rules once recited without comprehension are replaced with understanding which cannot be articulated.
Infants are not capable of percieving subtle patterns in the behavior of other humans. This is an aquired ability; in fact, it is
learned. The earliest observations made with regard to patterns our own behavior are therefore made by others, and
taught to us, at a stage in our development when we are extremely malleable. Lesson number one, "You are a self", is absorbed and integrated before we even master language.
The self is an internalized third-person perspective.
Having said all that, I do not think the idea of a self can be entirely explained as a pedagogy, and I don't agree with Shermer that it's just a dumb mistake on the part of the brain, either. The 'self' is indispensible as a tool for understanding and interacting with other humans. I believe that the human brain supports this useful fiction by explicit design, an underlying assumption being that the initial configuration will be performed by other humans.
Originally posted by Batman Jr.
It's my belief that debates about ontological problems such as the dualism quandary are useless because we'll never have sufficient information to come to any sort of scientifically testable conclusions for them.
I think it's worse than that. It isn't merely a matter of insufficient information that prevents us from testing any claim for dualism scientifically; untestability is part of its
definition.
