How would dualist response to Churchland's argument from brain damage?

Question

If there any leak in his argument ?
After people response it , how would Churchland raise an objection against to your answers ?

Answer 1

Most modern day dualists would accept the idea that the characteristics of experience – what it is like to be a particular person – depends on the physical nature of brain activity. Thus they would have no trouble accepting the fact that brain damage can result in loss of consciousness, delusions, and so on. Of course the long-standing problem for dualists is to explain how and why there are correlations between subjective experience and brain/body functioning. All the substance dualist has to claim is that there is some sort of non-physical "life essence" or "spirit" underlying the brain's activities, and this non-physical aspect of being can continue to live beyond the death of the body. Some, like Huxley for example, saw the physical brain as a filter, so that the brain actually LIMITS consciousness (narrows it down to pretty much just biologically relevant experiences) so that after death of the body, the mind is free to experience full consciousness. Obviously this is all highly speculative.

But not all dualists are substance dualist. Most dualist are some variety of property dualists, and most do not call themselves dualist at all. For property dualists there is only one kind of substance (physical matter), but this one stuff has two fundamentally different kinds of properties – mental and physical, or subjective and objective. For them, the qualia of mind are just what it feels like to be a physical system of a certain sort (i.e., a body with a complex brain). In this case it is obvious that brain damage could result is radical modifications of experience. Most philosophers don't want anything to do with any kind of dualism, but most end up being property dualists of one sort or another (whether they admit it or not) just because the subjective qualities of experience seem to be so radically different than objectively-viewed brain processes. It is difficult (perhaps impossible) to see how my experience of blue can be NOTHING OTHER THAN a certain firing pattern of brain cells. The experience of blue-ness seems to be at least a distinct property of brain activity that stands in need of some explanation.

Paul and Patricia Churchland argue that qualia are mere illusion created by our folk-psychological language. They believe that once we have a full theory of neurological activity (so that we can pinpoint what patterns of activity correlate with certain patterns of experience), then it will no long be a mystery why blue qualia is experiences as "blue".

My own view is that experience is fundamental to Being, and that what we know as neurological activity (or any experience of material objects) is just Being's way of experiencing Itself from a certain perspective. Matter is just what Being experiences Itself as (and since there is only One Being, and there is nothing beyond Being, all experience can only be Being's experience of Itself from various perspectives). This is not exactly idealism, nor substance dualism, but you might try to call it a sort of property dualism because the nature of perspective always introduces the "other" and this other is distinct from the Self. But what if there is no "Self"? What if our sense of "self" is nothing other than Nothingness at the center of a perspective? (Kinda like the "center of gravity" of a star cluster is not an object of any sort, but just an abstract concept.) In that case, there is no dualism of self and other. There is just a plurality of perspectives, and these individual perspectives arise like "centers of gravity" as the experiences of Being (which is not really a "Self" as such) self-organize. But of course I am going off on a wild tangent, so I will stop now. (This is an example of how the "mind/body problem" keeps leading us into ever-more subtle conundrums.)

Answer 2

The main argument is that there's no proof or credible evidence that mobile phones DO damage the brain. Furthermore, mobile phones are relatively low-power transmitters, and long-term exposure to those frequencies and electro-magnetic radiation in other settings has never been shown to create negative health effects in a consistent or measurable fashion.