Consciousness, psychophysical harmony, and anthropic reasoning

Abstract

The thesis, typical among dualists, that there are no necessitation relations between events of consciousness and physical events implies that it is prima facie lucky that in our world the apparently existing psychophysical laws usually match events of consciousness and physical events in a “harmonious” way. The lucky psychophysical laws argument concludes that typical dualism amounts to a psychophysical parallelism that is prima facie too improbable to be true. I argue that an anthropic reasoning in the space of possible worlds makes the appearance of a harmonious match situation unsurprising, and that this is all that is needed for the argument to be harmless to a typical dualist.

Author's Profile

Mario Gomez-Torrente
National Autonomous University of Mexico

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2023-09-28

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