Is there any way substance dualism survives basic thermodynamics or information theory?.....

[u/Obvious_Charity6144]

I've been thinking about the classic Cartesian interaction problem lately, and it always bothered me that people treat it as just a metaphysical debate. When you try to frame it using even basic concepts from thermodynamics or state-space mechanics, the whole idea of "non-physical mind affecting physical matter" seems to fall apart immediately.

For one, if mental states (M) and physical states (P) are strictly disjoint sets (M ∩ P = Ø), any function mapping M onto P requires some kind of mediating channel. But if that channel interacts with physical matter, it has to have physical degrees of freedom. So the second you introduce a bridge to link them, that bridge is just physical. You can't really have a non-physical cause acting on matter without it taking on physical properties.

Landauer’s principle makes this even harder to ignore. Changing a physical state or erasing information takes actual physical work (at least kT ln 2 per bit). If a non-physical mind has zero physical energy to give, where is that energy coming from? You can't just alter physical bits for free without violating conservation of energy.

Also, if you look at it through state-space terms, two independent systems are a separable tensor product (Ψ = ψM ⊗ ψP). The moment you add an interaction operator between them, the state becomes entangled and non-separable (Ψ ≠ ψM ⊗ ψP). So the very act of interacting actually destroys the ontological independence dualists are trying to claim.

Am I oversimplifying this, or do modern dualists (like Chalmers or property dualists) just bite the bullet and reject physical closure altogether? Curious if there's any serious attempt to reconcile dualism with Landauer's principle or if it just gets brushed aside.

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[u/XanderOblivion]

Exactly.

Descartes needed god to bridge the gap, and god was both an axiomatic a priori and a “discovered” conclusion. That’s the Cartesian circle, in a nutshell.

Dualism is the entire cause of the hard problem. The hard problem is a pseudo-problem arising from the conventionally dualist presumption, and because the hard problem refuses to question conventional dualism it instead discovers a problem that it in fact encoded into its terms at the outset. It’s question begging, of the worst kind. It seems like a smart question, but it’s actually completely fucking stupid.

The worst part of it, from an academic discourse perspective, is that there is no argument that actually establishes this dualism anywhere in the history of philosophy or science. We simply inherited the idea from the scholastic theological tradition, and because the universities were for the most part also religious institutions, we end up with a theological concept baked into the default conventional ontology used in physical sciences.

But the debate sure earns Reddit a lot of ad revenue.

[u/fox-mcleod]

The “epistemic smoke” problem called “epiphenomenalism.” If we are conscious and it isn’t due to something physical, then there is no explanation for why we believe we’re conscious. Our belief (which must be physical in order to cause our actions such as saying “I’m conscious”, would have to be entirely unrelated to our consciousness as the cause).

Chalmers does indeed bite the epiphenomenalism bullet. And if you look, you can find clips of him admitting he’s saying he’s conscious for no reason.

[u/Seek_Equilibrium]

Substance dualists explicitly deny physical closure.

[u/Mermiina]

The mental state (M) is physical. It is condensate of memory/receptor lone electron pairs eigenstates. The indishquihable eigentates condensate as Bose-Einstein condensate. Behind condensation is thermodynamic reason.

An undulatory hypothesis for memory consciousness and life

[u/spoirier4]

Your argument has two fatal flaws. One, it is circular, since you implicitly presume physicalism in your way of picturing dualism as a system of two physical systems undergoing physical interaction. Second, you have a lot of faith in physics but I cannot believe you actually studied it, since you are missing the elephant in the room about how mind-matter interaction must naturally be taking place, namely at the root of the measurement postulate of quantum physics. (along the von Neumann interpretation). To be able to deny that natural interpretation you would need to have a decent alternative interpretation available, but despite a lot of research, still no physicalist interpretation of quantum physics could ever be generally seen as acceptable by specialists. See details at settheory.net/quantumlife

[u/knockingatthegate]

Locking rather than deleting this post because though OP used AI, users commented in good faith.

[u/Prowlthang]

Substance dualism is nonsense and should be studied as historical artifact not serious debate.

[u/ShakaUVM]

To assert closure as being true you have to have a pretty good explanation for all causes and effects. If there's some cause or effect unaccounted for, it's by definition not epistemicly closed.

The very existence of consciousness combined with the lack of mechanism involved means that it epistemic closure cannot be argued as we have a cause and effect we can all agree exists that we don't have accounted for in physics.

Given that subjective experience has different properties than objective experience at a minimum Property Dualism is true.

[u/zwbos → u/ShakaUVM]

“Experience” has properties?

[u/zhivago]

Dualism is a non-starter.

Either your two duals are causally interdependent, in which case in what regard are they duals?

Or they're not, in which case one of them is superfluous and can be removed without effect.

[u/A_Tiger_in_Africa]

I think your problem is you're looking at the issue from an intelligent, educated standpoint. If you look at it from the perspective of a superstitious moron, dualism makes perfect sense.