This isn't a defense, nor is it a claim of how the world really is. This is merely a brief sketch of a way the world might actually be that would allow for a satisfying solution to the traditional mind/body problem and would explain how libertarian-style free will could clear its primary hurdle. But that's a big enough deal, seeing as how there just aren't any other such proposals out there that explain phenomenal consciousness while also giving an account of how this phenomenal consciousness could have any sort of non-overdetermined causal efficacy; well, that aren't of the "because God says so" sort, anyway.
Despite the fact that most contemporary philosophers are physicalists, the situation is grim: not only does physicalism imply epiphenomenalism for phenomenal consciousness, it can't even give a non ad-hoc explanation for what phenomenal consciousness is or how it arises; thus the excessive hand-waving and desperate appeal to "complexity" as something that is claimed to magically create the one and only emergent property TYPE in existence, phenomenal consciousness. Nothing else that's colloquially called an emergent property, such as emergent group behavior, is a new type of property like phenomenal consciousness would have to be; group behavior is still just matter in motion, and motion is hardly an emergent property type. Phenomenal consciousness emerging from mere matter in motion, however, would represent a new type of emergent property. It does no good to appeal to something like slipperiness, either, because if you're talking about the physics of it, it's still directly reducible to the same types of properties found on the smaller scales, and if you're talking about the phenomenal feel of it, you've already invoked phenomenal consciousness.
It's relevant to point out that one of the primary reasons so many philosophers are physicalists is that the alternative seems even worse, since nobody's ever been able to paint a reasonable dualist or idealist scenario that gets past the mind/body problem. So let's see if we can change that.
Finally, I should note that these are essentially the thoughts of an undergrad. I intended to pursue these notions at a top-flight grad school, simultaneously developing and ruthlessly vetting them to see if they really could provide a solution to the mind/body problem. But after starting the PhD program at the University of Texas, I felt overwhelmingly compelled to leave grad school and work on my philanthropic goals first, so I'll just park a little summary here until I can return to it.
Let’s say Reality is composed of pixels a Planck length on each side that have both mental (M) and physical (P) properties (I mean mental in the phenomenal sense, not the psychological sense; see The Conscious Mind by David Chalmers for a lucid explanation of the distinction). The P properties 'drive the bus' and govern the interaction of the pixel's properties according to the laws of physics, while the M properties are just along for the ride. This will require a small number of brute facts of the world accounting for the consistent joining of particular M and P properties in pixels when those pixels are in a small number of various states.
Think of pixels on a TV: an object 'moves' due to the transfer of physical properties across pixels without the pixels themselves moving. Similarly, think of Reality as being composed of pixels, so that what's really occurring in our world is a change in the distribution of P and M properties across the pixels, with these movements being governed by the P properties in accordance with physical law. Perhaps there are a small number of possible states for each pixel (similar to how physicists talk of a small number of possible states for the basic building blocks of matter, and how all the complexity we see on the macro-level arises from various combinations of a relatively small number of basic building blocks that have been combined and arranged in a stupendous variety of ways).
Let's grant that the physical is causally closed (meaning if an event has a cause, then it has a physical cause), just as all experimentation indicates. And just for good measure, let's go ahead and be draconian and say that no M property can possibly interact with any P property (and vice versa).
Now let’s bring in substance dualism and say I (like you) am really a spirit. Spirits are purely mental and can't sense P properties at all, only M properties. Spirits are somehow 'tuned in' to a particular set of M properties in Reality...the set corresponding to the M properties conjoined to all the P properties that compose your physical body.
Let’s say there is not one World that moves through time, but that there are a near infinite (or maybe infinite) number of 'World-states' that are eternally frozen and unchanging. So what seems like one changing World is actually you as a spirit passing through a series of successive non-changing World-states that are slightly different, which generates an effect similar to that of seeing a movie on film.
[It's interesting to note that physicists insist that the only way for everything in the universe to be in agreement over what occurs in a given universe-wide time-slice is for absolutely nothing to be moving relative to anything else in the universe; in other words, a frozen World-state. See the bottom of pg. 134 in the paperback version of Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos for a clear explanation of this. Note that this is not simply the effect of delays in information that can only travel at the speed of light; this is a much deeper and weirder issue.]
There are rules governing how we may jump from one World-state to the next. The possible jumps allowed from one's current position are determined by our particular set of physical laws (in conjunction with the arrangement of physical properties in each World-state). Physical laws are the rules of the game, and not only are some jumps allowed and some not, but the options have various likelihoods.
The likelihood of jumping from your current World-state to a World-state where you experience X is based on the proportion of possible jumps where X occurs, and is randomized within that. If 30% of your possible jumps can result in you landing on a World-state where you experience X, then we say (and can experimentally verify) that there is a 30% chance of X. [Imagine the set of all possible paths. One’s odds of experiencing X correspond to the percent of possible paths from your current position that yield X.]
But how can a spirit know what's in store at those jumping destinations if the destinations are determined by P properties while a spirit can only sense M properties? Well, let's say that imagination is literally the ability to 'look down the paths' at the M properties attached to the P properties in those upcoming World-states. So one can use one's imagination to scout the paths a bit and see what's needed to make it down various paths.
Let's say these M properties are the source of a spirit's phenomenal consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness might literally be the experiencing of these M properties as our spirits move along from World-state to World-state. In fact, these M properties may literally be little bits of phenomenal consciousness, and spirits may just be entities with a sensory ability that allows them to experience these little bits.
[Or maybe this Reality is a video game that we're actually plugged into on a higher level of Reality, and perhaps all the M properties we encounter are replicated in our higher level brains to simulate the experience. And maybe on that higher level there isn't an issue with the mind/body problem: maybe experiments on that level clearly show that their physical isn't causally closed and that M properties are allowed to influence P properties. But I digress.]
The rich complexity of one's phenomenal experience would then correspond to the rich complexity of M properties along for the ride with the rich complexity of P properties in one's brain.
The basic Mind/Body question is this: How could an immaterial spirit composed solely of M properties have a non-redundant causal impact on a physical body, given that the physical domain is causally closed (i.e. if an event has a cause at all, then it has a physical cause)?
I would begin by re-stating the question in a way that tries to get behind its impetus: How could an immaterial spirit causally influence its own phenomenal experience in a way that would appropriately coincide with the phenomenal experiences of relevant others?
For example, how could my purely mental spirit cause it to happen that I experience myself shaking hands with David Chalmers, and for my phenomenal experience to appropriately coincide with the phenomenal experiences of Chalmers and the other people in the room (who would have the phenomenal experience of seeing me do so, and even feeling me do so in Chalmers’ case)?
And furthermore, how could I as a spirit have any non-redundant role to play, given that there is a perfectly complete, causally closed physical story that can fully explain all of the motions of my body without appeal to a causally efficacious spirit??
The answer is straightforward with my proposal: I as a spirit controlled my path through the World-states so that my experiences went the way I wanted them to go.
To make this stark, let's say there were 5 of us spirits tuned in to what I naively thought of as "my" body when I experienced entering Chalmers’ classroom (if crowds make you squeamish, this is the wrong ontology for you!). Say all 5 of us pursued different paths: #1 applauded Chalmers, #2 mooned him, #3 offered him a Foster's, and #4 called him a zombie.
Note that all 5 of us would have complete physical stories that could explain how we did what we did, and the physical would appear to be causally closed from each individual perspective. There would seemingly be no need to postulate any influence from a causally efficacious spirit, yet here we are – from our God’s eye view we see that 5 different spirits had 5 different outcomes, with the difference in outcome determined by the causal effect of the individual spirits choosing their own paths through World-states! [So we were all tuned in to the same World-state when we entered the classroom, but we quickly diverged and ended up tuned in to very different World-States.]
See, we don't need a spirit to interact with the physical world in order for the spirit to get the phenomenal experiences that it desires and in a way appropriately consistent with the phenomenal experiences of others. There's another way to get what we're really after.
And this other way is not only consistent with the very quantum randomness and multi-verse theory (with at least 10^500 universes) that state of the art physics is telling us is likely the case, it requires it. My proposed solution can’t work if there’s just one world/universe and it’s deterministic (although an alternate formulation of my strategy, one using a bazillion different deterministic worlds, would be fine; that is, it could be the case that every possible path through the World-states is actually a full-on physically deterministic world passing through time (as our world is normally conceived to pass through time) and spirits jump from deterministic World to deterministic World, rather than from frozen world-state to frozen world-state).
BTW, one weird consequence is that everybody (literally every body, e.g. the litany of other "James bodies" I jump among) is really a zombie, so I’m really a spirit jumping among a near infinite number of my zombie bodies, none of which experience phenomenal consciousness themselves (they're just matter, much like rocks and trees and stars).
BTW2, another strategic option, and perhaps the best, is to say that physicist Hugh Everett was correct with his postulation that new universes are created and branch off at every possible physical junction, to which I would offer that spirits have some control over which branch they choose to follow. This actually makes the jumping process easiest.
BTW3, a basic rule of the game seems to be that we can only manipulate our own bodies; that is, if I want my car to start, I have to do so by jumping through World-states (or through Worlds) in a way that results in my body turning the key, or asking someone to turn the key, etc. I can’t intentionally jump to a World where the car has miraculously started: it's not possible to directly aim for a particular result of an event outside one's own body. This is an important point: every jump between World-states (let’s say there are a trillion jumps per second) is randomized while conforming to its associated probabilities unless you assert influence on that jump (this influence would almost always be weak, like deflecting the course of an asteroid by asserting a weak force over millions of miles. This weakness comes from not having control over each jump, but rather over every 1,000th jump or so (sticking with the earlier 'trillion jumps a second' figure).
BTW4, in this proposal we never see the physical world, just the phenomenal world. The physical is probably forever beyond us, like with Kant's notion of the noumenal world. So why do I postulate the physical at all? Because it provides the objective grounding that allows my subjective phenomenal experiences to be relevantly consistent with those of everyone else. (Hmm...maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe in this view we could actually eliminate the physical entirely since the phenomenal M properties already have an objective nature. In such a scenario, there would be a number of laws governing the interactions of M properties, taking the place of the corresponding way that a physicalist normally thinks of the laws governing the interaction of P properties. That seems simpler; we've now reduced the number of such laws to the same number needed for physicalism. Oh boy, I think I might have just become an Idealist on you here. When I began, I was thinking that the pixels in our phenomenal world needed some sort of corresponding pixel-in-itself in the noumenal world. Now I'm not so sure I have any need for postulating a noumenal world at all. Do others agree? Regardless, let me go ahead and finish up as if that thought hadn't occurred.)
BTW5, this solution would perhaps indicate that great athletes like Michael Jordan have the ability to control more jumps per second (say, influencing every 600th jump). Greater frequency of influence would result in better reaction times and a perceived 'slowing down' of the game for him relative to the perceptions of the lesser players.
Two final points: one, we can only skew the randomness involved with our own body, and two, the ability to control even those jumps is variable and far from perfect. I think that’s what concentration is: it’s employing a force that aims your jumping. Concentrate harder and you aim better (and possibly also increase your frequency of influence). Concentrate hard over a large number of repetitions, and over time you steer yourself into situations with different probabilities for the same actions as before.
[Consider the shooting of free throws in basketball if you start off as a 50% shooter: after a million serious practice shots, the World-state paths (or World, on that alternative formulation) would have higher probabilities of made shots among the destinations for successive jumps. What happens is that you’ve moved yourself to a place where, say, 80% of your possible jumping destinations involve made shots.]
So the summary is this: classic Interactive Dualism may indeed be impossible given that M and P properties can't cross-interact, the physical is causally closed, and a spirit has only M properties, but what we were really trying to get at behind the concept of Interactive Dualism IS possible. And this route not only solves the Mind/Body problem, it also shows how Libertarian-style free will is possible. (Well, it gets libertarian-style free will over the mind/body hurdle, anyway; getting past Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument would be dicier.)
This has obviously been extremely quick and informal, but the folks who are keenly aware of the strong need for such a solution should be able to catch my drift and start doing their own thinking about this avenue of solution.
