Article Why aren't philosophical ghosts blind? + Rise/fall of mind-body problem + Hauntology

[C C]

Why aren’t ghosts blind?
https://petemandik.substack.com/p/why-ar...osts-blind

EXCERPTS: Whereas [philosophical] zombies have all of our physical properties and none of our mental ones, ghosts have all of our mental properties and none of our physical ones. [...] Why aren’t (philosophical) ghosts blind (and deaf, etc.)? One of my physical properties ... is that light rays don’t just pass right through the spaces I occupy. I absorb light. With my eyes. But occupying spaces and interrupting the free passage of light are physical properties I have that my so-called ghost doppelgänger would lack... (MORE - details)

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The rise and fall of the mind-body problem
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/20...oblem.html

EXCERPT: There is a strange dialectic to these views. Both materialism and dualism can defend themselves from attacks from the other position and view the other position as question-begging. Neither seems to offer an overall better theory, and they don’t have empirical consequences that could distinguish between them. It is impossible to know, either on empirical or philosophical grounds, which is true, but strangely, the stakes are very low. It is even possible that there is no real disagreement between the dualist and the materialist. They might be simply two different descriptions of the same reality in terms of different conceptual schemes, each involving a different basic metaphysical concept of property... (MORE - details)

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Hauntology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology

INTRO: Hauntology (a portmanteau of haunting and ontology, also spectral studies, spectralities, or the spectral turn) is a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost. The term is a neologism first introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx. It has since been invoked in fields such as visual arts, philosophy, electronic music, anthropology, criminology, politics, fiction, and literary criticism.

[...] Derrida initially used "hauntology" for his idea of the atemporal nature of Marxism and its tendency to "haunt Western society from beyond the grave". It describes a situation of temporal and ontological disjunction in which presence, especially socially and culturally, is replaced by a deferred non-origin. The concept is derived from deconstruction, in which any attempt to locate the origin of identity or history must inevitably find itself dependent on an always-already existing set of linguistic conditions. Despite being the central focus of Spectres of Marx, the word hauntology appears only three times in the book, and there is little consistency in how other writers define the term... (MORE - details)
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COMMENT: With respect to the original context for "hauntology", it's because many if not most 20th-century literary intellectuals shifted their purpose exclusively to a moral preoccupation with social oppression and Western imperialism, and had no better "secular bible" for regulating that fixation than overall Marxist tradition (which includes both the philosophical precursors of Marxism and the various critical movements that later branched off from it.)

[Magical Realist]

I absorb light. With my eyes. But occupying spaces and interrupting the free passage of light are physical properties I have that my so-called ghost doppelgänger would lack. And seeing is one of the mental things I do. So maybe philosophical ghosts, which allegedly have all my mental properties and none of my physical ones, are inconceivable/impossible.

Just speaking from what we empirically know about ghosts, they clearly don't rely on physical light to see physical things since most paranormal investigations occur in complete darkness. So they probably don't "see" things in the same sense as we do. I would guess that it is a general clairvoyant sight of things, much like we can experience images of the world thru memory, imagination, dreaming, and esp without light hitting our eyes. IOW, a direct and unmediated extrasensory awareness of things.

[Magical Realist]

Whereas Newton allowed forces other than impact and, in principle, as far as physics was concerned, there was no barrier to the existence of special forces such as chemical, biological, or mental, it became clear by the middle of the 20th century that none of those forces are sui generis, that is, they are all explicable in terms of the forces we are familiar with from physics. During this time, in addition to discoveries in biochemistry, neurophysiological research mapped the body’s neuronal network and analyzed the electrical mechanisms responsible for neuronal activity. If there were sui generis mental forces operating inside living bodies, they should have shown up in some way in our observations of neural activity. But research has failed to uncover evidence of anything except familiar physical forces.

But then a force, even if it were mental and sui generis, is still just an objective physical thing, and so it is no surprise that neurologists never find anything like it in the brain. Can a force even be mental? That seems contradictory. We are requiring it to have totally physical effects in the world while at the same time being mental or not in the physical world at all. Essentially it is like hunting for an impossible thing, like a round square or a colorful sound, and then claiming it doesn't exist because you can't find it. It is the old story of the scientist who loses his car keys, and searches for them only under the street lamp.When asked why he is searching under the street lamp, he replies: "Because the light is better here."

[Magical Realist]

"What proved most consequential for this change is what is known as the Causal Closure Principle: that all physical effects can be completely accounted for by physical causes."

That "principle", which is really just more of a metaphysical assumption, was blown to smithereens by quantum theory, which while trying to explain all quantum events in terms of physical causes, discovered that in fact at the quantum level there are simply some events that have no determinate physical causes. And not just because we don't know the cause, but because it in principle is truly indeterminate:

"All modern science is falliblist in epistemology. That means that any scientific theory might be wrong. We all acknowledge this. But scientific theories vary a lot in how likely they are to turn out to be wrong. The present state of physics makes quantum indeterminism a very well-established theory. It may still turn out to be wrong, in the sense that any theory may turn out to be wrong. Just like the "fact" that the earth orbits the sun might turn out to be wrong.

But QI is very well established. Very few scientific theories are as well verified by experience. And remember, the evidence is not just that we don't know what the quantum causes are -- the evidence is that there are no quantum causes. Again, it might turn out to be wrong, but we still ought to take quantum indeterminacy seriously.

Quantum indeterminism asserts that certain kinds of events, call them "Q events" are indeterministic. Really really really indeterministic, not just "as far as we know" indeterministic. Q events are (approximately) events that take place at a sub-atomic level. An example is the radioactive decay of a radioactive element. (There are lots of other examples, but this is an easy one to think of.)"----
https://hilo.hawaii.edu/~ronald/310/Quanta.htm

So if there is real, "in principle" indeterminacy in the physical world, such that not all physical events are necessarily caused by other physical events, and are in effect "uncaused", what is there left to rule out mental events as also truly indeterminate acausal events. Nothing. Whether this points to some sort of self-causality of mental events or to as yet unknown and exotic causalities beyond the physical domain remains to be seen.

[C C]

I absorb light. With my eyes. But occupying spaces and interrupting the free passage of light are physical properties I have that my so-called ghost doppelgänger would lack. And seeing is one of the mental things I do. So maybe philosophical ghosts, which allegedly have all my mental properties and none of my physical ones, are inconceivable/impossible.

Just speaking from what we empirically know about ghosts, they clearly don't rely on physical light to see physical things since most paranormal investigations occur in complete darkness. So they probably don't "see" things in the same sense as we do. I would guess that it is a general clairvoyant sight of things, much like we can experience images of the world thru memory, imagination, dreaming, and esp without light hitting our eyes. IOW, a direct and unmediated extrasensory awareness of things.

Though probably not intentional, I'm not sure Pete Mandick is presenting a full or correct "ghost" counterpart of a philosophical zombie. Just as the mechanistic body behavior of the latter would be reliably pretending as if it had contact with qualia or a phenomenal representation of the world -- when it actually did not... So a philosophical ghost in turn would exhibit reliable knowledge of a physical world which it actually was not having contact with.

The question of how either one could be "acting" so flawlessly -- the zombie always accurately describing a parallel qualitative environment that was not available to it and the ghost offering quantitative descriptions of a parallel physical environment that was not available to it, just comes with territory of their conceptions. Since those unresolved abilities or the inexplicability of them is entailed in the very defined natures of the two entities -- or falls out of their identities upon closer examination.