The “self” that you’re talking about with it’s believing and digesting is intended as a totality. But when you’re talking about body parts, that totality is gone. This is where the ambiguity is. If you change the two first sentences to “My brain believes” or “My stomache digests” then you’ve shattered the ambiguity, along with the need for dualism.

Heh – if you think that bit is brain-busting, try out Sartre’s essay on nothingness. I couldn’t think straight for a couple days afterwards. Better then drugs, it was

Well maybe it isn’t different at all – in both cases we’re saying “one part of me does X and another part does not” – believing in one case, digesting in the other. If the digesting example is silly then maybe the believing one is too, since they are parallel arguments?

Well. All I can say is this stuff is hard. I just read a little chapter on space and time and I must say it was the weirdest one yet. Moving back and forth in time… yeeee, that’s hard to wrap my head around.

I am not a dualist… I’m not sure if that actually makes me a materialist, but it’s as good a definition as any. And no worries, I love long philosophical discussions
As for that particular argument, it rests upon a bit of ambiguity in what is meant when one is refering to themselves. As you’ll see in the logic book, self-reference can be rather tricky. That being said, my counter argument would be this: I can digest food. My eyeball does not digest food. Therefore, digestion is a non-physical phenomenon, seperate from my corporeal being.
I’ve yet to see a defence of dualism that didn’t turn on something silly

I am heading down town today for some shopping (my cousin is getting hitched and I need a shower gift) and will be hitting the Chapters for the book you recommended. I don’t suppose you have at hand a recommendation for something on metaphysics? I think I am still in the realm of survey works but could go beyond Taylor, which is a 125 page intro. I seem to have abandoned psychology wholesale…!

I agree that “how” we think is a fascinating question on a scientific level, however as a philosophical question I find it much less interesting. But that’s probably because I think that Mind/Body dualism is just silly – yet another annoying artifact of Descartes’ obstruction of useful philosophical discourse.

Metaphysics can indeed be much fun

So when you talk about numbers and triangles, is there a term for things that necessarily must “be”, in the sense that 3’s and circles “are”?

Thinking out loud… How can the “how” be irrelevant? is what comes to mind – thus far in my (limited) philosophical discussion experience people posit the mind as the thinker as though it’s obvious that minds can think and bodies cannot… but why? What does a mind have that a body doesn’t? And just defining a mind as that which thinks seems unsatisfyingly tautological to me, and fails to differentiate from the body anyway, since the body could be what’s thinking. There must be a how! Mustn’t there…?

Taylor’s book is my first intro to metaphysics other than watching religious debates. It’s a pretty neat little survey of the metaphysical issues, just to give you a taste of the landscape so to speak. I am liking it quite a bit.

The main hole in it that a dualist (heh, arguments at dawn!) would use is this: The mind is that which thinks, in the same way that triangles are triangular, that blue is coloured. “How” is irrelevant, it just is.

A perhaps better question of “How” is “How does this non-physical thing that you posit affect and get affected by physical things.” The answers that come up for that one can be rather amusing, actually