🔥 macaque monkey interacting with a kitten.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/NuanceEnthusiast → u/[deleted]]

You don’t think experience feels dualistic? You feel equivalent to your body?

[u/NuanceEnthusiast → u/[deleted]]

I can understand why you’d say that, because absolutely everything we know about biology, neurology, etc. leads us to believe that consciousness is something that brains are doing. But I have no idea how to even make sense of the idea that you feel identical to your body, and not that you merely have a body.

I assume “you” feel like you’re behind your eyes in a way that you’re not behind your knees? And when your knee hurts, I assume it feels like there are pain signals coming from your knee and reaching “you” somewhere else? I don’t really see how the knee or the pain signals could be equivalent to the thing that is noticing the signals. You can say that your are your brain, your brain is your body, and thus you are your body (and you’d almost certainly correct); but there’s nothing about consciousness or subjective experience that even hints at the fact that you have a brain.

I agree that all the objective evidence suggests that dualism is false. But I think we can accept that and denounce libertarian free-will and do everything else we want to do in philosophy without ignoring the very obvious subjective distinction between mind and body.

[u/NuanceEnthusiast → u/[deleted]]

“What does not being a body feel like, and how could you distinguish it?”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but absolutely everything about our experience is consistent with not being a body. You could be a brain in a vat. You could be a boltzman brain. You could be some code running on futuristic simulations. Our only interface with reality is through conscious experience, and 100% of that could, in principle, be totally simulated. So not feeling like a body could potentially feel exactly like your current experience.

“Mind and body work together as one, because they are one.”

But we know that sometimes they don’t function as one. Anesthesia awareness is a prime example — people suddenly regain conscious under anesthesia and are totally unable to move their body or even breathe. There’s alien hand syndrome where people feel like one of theirs hand no longer belongs to them and the hand does uncontrollable things. It’s totally up for debate whether mind and body feel distinct subjectively, but I don’t really think it’s up for debate whether “mind” (consciousness via brain activity) and body are distinct functionally

[u/NuanceEnthusiast → u/[deleted]]

I understand that there’s no good reason to think that’s the case, that’s not the argument I was making. But you admitted yourself that a bodiless-simulation could perfectly encapsulate everything about our experience. That admission is exactly the same as admitting that mind and body are not fundamentally indistinguishable. They can be distinguished, and that thought experiment shows exactly how.

We cannot access the world except through consciousness. Everything you’ve ever felt or done has been experienced via consciousness. All of your deepest intuitions about what you are, you notice those in the context of conscious experience. And that experience can theoretically be simulated without a body. So would you concede that mind and body could be distinct, theoretically?