We explore the nature of dreams. We discuss Daniel Dennett's cassette theory, which questions whether dreams are genuine experiences that occur during sleep, instead suggesting that dreams are spontaneous memory insertions at awakening. This theory contrasts with the common view that dreams involve phenomenal states in real time. However, lucid dreaming challenges the cassette theory. We also question the reality of "dreamless sleep" and examine prophetic, precognitive, and shared dreams. 

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We explore Paul Draper's "psychological aether theory" or "aetherism". In addition to gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak interactions, there is a fifth fundamental interaction: A field of consciousness, a world-soul or mental aether that interacts with our brains. 

"How does the brain produce the mind? It doesn't. Instead, mentality exists quite independently of the brain."

Draper's recent work on aetherism is a refinement of a view proposed by William James in his 1898 Ingersoll Lecture on Immortality. James doesn't deny that thought is a function of the brain. Rather, he challenges the assumption that the function in question is one of production. He defends what he calls the "transmissive function" view over the theory that thought is produced by the brain. For James, consciousness pre-exists, with our brain giving finite human shape to experience, like the pipes of an organ shape the trembling air as it escapes from the organ's air-chest. Aetherism can explain the tight correlation between mental and physical states while allowing for their conceptual and ontological distinction, and dispensing with the need for any spontaneous production of consciousness de novo by the brain. 

Both Draper and James recognize that aetherism leaves the door open to an afterlife, as well as certain psi phenomena. As Draper puts it, "perhaps William James was right to challenge the confidence that most philosophers and scientists have that there is no life after death. For if we don't know that aetherism is false, then we don't actually know that the subject of our psychological properties does not continue to exist after our bodies are destroyed.” 

William James - Human Immortality 

Paul Draper - Psychological Aether Theory

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Monistic Idealism's video

Both Sides Brigade - Interacting with the Interaction Problem

My dualism playlist

Majesty of Reason on the interaction problem

You Are A Soul w/ Ralph Stefan Weir

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We dive into the philosophy of personal identity, exploring whether a consistent "self" persists through time despite physical and mental changes. Is there an essential core that endures transformations? We examine the Ship of Theseus, the deadly and murderous teletransporter which murders people, the “no self” view associated with Hume, mind uploading, Ralph Stefan Weir’s dilemma for transhumanists, and whether Socrates could have been an alligator.

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Explore zombieland with Philip Goff and I as we discuss type-b physicalism, the link between conceivability and possibility, Goff’s differences with David Chalmers, and much else related to the conceivability argument against materialism.

First Zombie Argument Video

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Ralph Stefan Weir joins me to discuss his book, The Mind-Body Problem and Metaphysics: An Argument from Consciousness to Mental Substance. We talk about the myth of the interaction problem, the connection between theism and the soul, the implausibility of property dualism, substance dualism in Eastern thought, the causal closure argument and energy conservation, a posteriori necessities, modal rationalism, panpsychism and idealism, personal identity, transhumanism, mind-uploading, split brain cases, whether souls are eternal, and much else. 

Dustin Crummett's interview with Dr. Weir

. . .

For reference, here are the two arguments from the book we spent the most time on:

(i) The phenomenal facts do not a priori entail the existence of anything physical.

(ii) If the phenomenal facts do not a priori entail the existence of anything physical, then they do not necessitate the existence of anything physical.

(iii) Therefore, the phenomenal facts do not necessitate the existence of anything physical.

(i) If you accept the conceivability argument, you must accept the phenomenal disembodiment argument.

(ii) If you accept the phenomenal disembodiment argument, then you must accept the existence of nonphysical substances.

(iii) Therefore, if you accept the conceivability argument, then you must accept the existence of nonphysical substances.

. . .

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I am once again begging apologists to stop treating atheism and materialism as interchangeable concepts. It's intellectual laziness at best and dishonesty at worst.

This was originally a short video posted on my youtube channel.

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Today, we explore the privacy of consciousness, a feature of the mind rejected by qualia antirealists. 

(summary of the arguments begins at 43:45) 

A few of the papers and books referenced:

Is Mental Privacy Defensible? Jaffer Ahmed

Explaining Mental Privacy - Colin McGinn

Other minds are neither seen nor inferred - Mason Westfall 

Understanding Knowledge - Michael Huemer

Illusionism As A Theory of Consciousness 

Galileo's Error - Philip Goff

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Today we discuss three skeptical arguments from Wang Chong, a first-century Chinese philosopher who railed against the belief in ghosts. Although the skeptics who initially presented these arguments to me seemed to think they were decisive, I was unimpressed and wanted to explain why I think they miss the center of the spectral target. 

As summarized on Wang’s IEP entry: 

(1) Argument from physical shape:  The death of a person is the result of the body losing the animating qi (vital essence), and once the qi is separated from the body, the body decays.  All will admit to this.  If this is so, however, and the person’s qi is still existent, how can this qi itself manifest in the form of a physical shape?  It is not a body, it is qi.  But when one sees a ghost, one sees a body.  But if the person has died, they no longer have a body, so where could they get another one?  They cannot take over another living body, which will already possess its own qi.  Thus, the view that people when they die become ghosts is nonsensical. 

(2) Argument from population:  If people become ghosts when they die, there should be more ghost sightings than living people, as the number of people who have lived in the past and died is far greater than the number of people now living.  This is not true — ghost “sightings” are rare.  Thus it cannot be that people when they die become ghosts.

(3) Argument from ghostly efficacy:  If a living person is harmed, this person will immediately go to a magistrate and bring a case against the party who harmed them.  If it were the case that people become ghosts when they die and can interact with living humans, every ghostly murder victim would be seen going to a magistrate, telling him the name of the killer and the means of murder, leading him to the body, and so forth.  This is never witnessed (ever). 

Wang Chong - IEP 

Philosophy on the Fringes - Ghosts and Hauntings 

Dale Allison Interview - Encountering Mystery 

Greenbrier Ghost - Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World 

Twitter thread where I first encountered Wang Chong

Music for this episode was performed by yours truly (except the drums).

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Today we discuss Mary the color scientist, her cousin Fred, and a colorblind Norwegian neuroscientist. Specifically, we talk about why Philip Goff thinks "phenomenal curiosity" threatens the ability hypothesis and the phenomenal concept strategy, ruling out moderate forms of physicalism. 

Curiosity and the Knowledge Argument - Philip Goff

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