If there was disharmony, we could pursue acts which can harm us, yet, the harmony allows us to pursue acts which are advantagous (or rather, natural) to us.
I do mostly pursue acts that harm me psychologically. I don't think the standard "pleasures" are necessarily particularly good. So I am not sure if there is any interesting sense of harmony at all.
There need not be any mapping between the physical and non-physical mental states.
In idealism all is mind. So there is no dualism and no need for mapping.
Metabolism is a self-regulating system. The brain / body / cells, do not explode / fall apart because of feedback regulation. When the brain makes mistakes in perception it adjusts so that the signals match what is coming in. And by experimentation we can predict our own actions. I see an apple because my brain adjusts itself until what is inside and the signals outside are the same. We need this to survive. Whatever we perceive we can manipulate either it or ourselves to improve survival. This is and does not need to be physical it is and can be explained as only mental. Mapping is subject object not mental and physical. The object can be just as mental as the subject. Nothing needs to be physical. It is just mental operating on mental.
This is a Berkelian explanation of reality and is something that is quite defensible. However the video I posted operates on epiphenomenalism, which is the view that most people have concerning the mind-body problem. Concerning substances of reality, I would think most people are property dualists, that: the world is composed of just one kind of
substance—
the physical kind—there exist two distinct kinds of properties:
physical properties and
mental properties. (per wiki)
I seruously doubt epiphenomenalism is particularly popular.
According to epiphenomenalism consciousness is causally inert. That's very counter-common sense. So I don't think any random people in the street would adopt full-blown epiphenomenalism. But even within academic philosophy (at least by some slim margin) majority of philosophers (following philsurveys) are physicalists whereas epiphenomenalism generally falls under dualism as you noted. So it's already a minority position by that fact. Moreover, among non-physicalists, you have to make space for panpsychists, neutral monists, idealists, interactionist dualists and all that - and only then you have some space remaining for epiphenomenalism. So I seriously doubt that it's a very popular land. It may be more popular among some laymen interested in philosophy who are seeking some compromise between dualism and materialism while finding idealism/panpsychism too wacky for their taste. Otherwise, it seems to me a no man's land - that goes neither here nor there. To me it's the worst position in phil. of mind.
But... I don't think you need epiphenomenalism for psychophysical harmony. I didn't watch the video or read the paper. But from some second-third-hand account of it, what I understood is basically all you need is conceptual separability (or perhaps metaphysical possibility of separating) of causal-profiles and qualitative experiences. If it's metaphysically possible at all for there to be action-inversion (no matter if epiphenomenalism is true in the actual world or not) - for example for pain-feels to be hooked to pleasure-actions and such, you can launch a psychophysical harmony argument. So the argument applies even if you are a monist.
I'm, however, skeptical but ultimately agnostic about legitimate separability (and thereby invertibilities) of causal functionalities from phenomenal experiences. But I am willing grant it for the sake of argument.
My general problem, however, with design arguments (yes, all of them - Paley's clock, fine tuning etc.), however, goes much deeper - at metaphilosophical paradigmatic level - at the level of theories of explanations, what deserves explanation, and what kind of explanations count as good.
Overall, I have squeshy relation with "explanations" and "reasons" themselves. Consider a few kinds of explanation:
- Desire-belief explanation in common day-to-day level: example: why was johnson poinsoned by brooke? Because Johnson was mean and brooke hated his guts or something.
- Conceptual analysis kind of explanation: showing logico-mathematical connections. Example explaining why fermat's last theorem is true by showing step by step mathematical connections from some axioms or whatever. In the ideal case the axioms can be self-evident (eg. law of identity) - although my positions on such things are also a bit mixed but that's another story.
- Explanation in terms of some other principles: may be some natural laws, some efficient causal mechanisms and so on.
Among them, I find 2. to be the most satisfying. Because the explanatory demands for 2. kind of cases are often clear, and when answered there are rarely room for further questions. There can be some questions related to platonism/nominalism/conventionalism etc. as to what exactly different frameworks of logic and maths correspond to, but at least, taking a conditional standpoint "given framewok x, under the constraints of x, explain how a leads to b" it seems we can have complete explanations. This explanation can correspond also to matters of physics if we take some physical or metaphysical framework for granted. In a sense then this style of explanation is not completely different from 3.
The problem is that there is no such explanation available in response to design arguments. You can't reduce the apparent design to some self-explaining self-evident axiom or truth. At best (or perhaps, at worst), you can try to motivate principle of sufficient reason of some variant and then say because everything must have a reason, there must be some self-explaining ultimate reason (there are some missing steps here which can be filled by different strategies) -- and kind of indirectly gesture that there should be a conceptual analysis available (taking a Leibniz/Spinozian style rationalist standpoint) -- but fail to provide any such analysis directly (only indirectly suggest there should be based on other reasons - which are typically tenuous - or I find them so). So explanation style (2) is out.
Now both explanation type (1) and (3) (when not simply taking a conditional standpoint) is somewhat unsatisfying - because it ends up in some brute primitives that remains unanalyzed and non-intelligible.
In case of (1), we are tied into the agency-framework. This is fine for normal purposes. But we can keep on asking why. Why does Brooke hates what he hates? How does hating exactly work? (not to mention, I don't really believe in beliefs in the first place -- I know how funny that sounds). The framework takes some primitives related to agency/personalism. While we can justify taking them as primitives for day to day purposes - because often going deeper are not as relevant for day to day social interactions (unless you are looking to manipulate people, optimize relationships and power structures in your favor or something); but that's not an excuse available when asking "big questions" - about the creation of seeming intelligent organization of some core feature of the world or something. I find it very odd to take "agency" as some sort of primitive or privileged kind of explanatory paradigm in that regard.
The case of (3) ultimately is not really much better. Instead of using the language of desires/beliefs or agency and will, you use the language of impersonal principles (laws of nature, mechanisms of efficient causation, some sort of computationalist lingo or whatever) (also my suspicion is that you can rephrase (3) kind of explanations in agential terms without loss in predictability. For example, you can say laws don't really explain anything because they are just abstracted idealizations of behaviors. We have to ask what breaths life into the laws - and then postulate some primitive agents with simple dispositional powers from whose activities regularities and laws arise or something. On the other hand, you can go the other way around and say, talking in terms of agency doesn't really explain anything. Bringing up occult powers says nothing more. Either the agential language ends up taking complex phenomena/relations as brute powers, or it can be broken and explained in terms of simpler impersonal principles and mechanism - which need not be explained further in terms of occult powers that "breath life" into them - not because there aren't any such occult power - but because just saying "yo! there are some magic powers realizing these regularities" doesn't really do further explanatory work that can be practically utilized whereas the formal structures and regularities can be used for prediction and engineering. So part of the difference might be stylistic or more superficial preferences. I don't really care which side you choose here). The problem is that insofar (1) or (3) cannot be reduced to some self-evident primitive (law of identity or something), they end up being brute at some level.
That said, that's ok. Having some brute facts is fine. I don't have in principle issue with theistic explanations having God as a brute fact if it has some desirable explanatory virtue otherwise.
But yeah, we have to now analyze what exact virtues are "brute" explanations offering. In case of "brute" explanations the kind of virtues that I personally prefer are:
- Reduces bruteness (if not eliminate). Explains one or many phenomena/relations by some other phenomena/relations wherein the latter is relatively more intelligible (less is required to understand the latter). The idea of compression as comprehension get close to the spirit of what I am trying to get towards although I may not accept the exact idea in letter fully.
- It provides power. That it provides ways to engineer/design/control things. It provides models of predictions and such.
Standardly, theistic explanations simply do not seem to meet the bar of either (1) or (2) very well in response to design argument. In response to apparent intelligent organization, it posits another brute intelligent organization (intelligent agent) (although there are less-personalistic variants of theism which I am more sympathetic towards). That's just buck-passing instead of bruteness reduction. Even buck-passing is fine it offers some prospect or line of inquiry to explore and reduce bruteness in the long-term. But there isn't any clear way to do that with theism. What theists appeal to in theses cases would be divine simplicity - I think that's completely irrelevant. Divine simplicity is compositional simplicity which I don't care about.
In (1), I am asking for better intelligibility, what I am offered in theism - is the exact opposite - something even less intelligibile (perhaps beyond intelligibility) - some complex functional agent that work in mysterious ways (no matter if it's compositionally simple) that transcends finite mind existing beyond space and time. I mean, fine; as a finite being I don't expect universe to be intelligible completely, but how does that all really work as an "explanation"? Even the theistic-adjacent explanations seems more like buck-passing - "there is psycho-functional harmony - therefore universe is just intrinsically psycho-functionally harmonious" (but that sounds too trivial and empty - so change the language a bit of the second part and call it a day. May be say "because the universe is constrituted of primitive agents with intrinsic normative teleology or something". I'm not saying that's wrong; I think that's likely to be half true at least, but I won't really say that any of these "explains" anything much from where we started from.
All this is where I think naturalistic paradigm shines better because it at least tries to aim towards the two virtues. Whereas more theistic explanations - even if not entirely wrong -- to me, seems often like "not even wrong" i.e provide a sort of pseudo-explanation and pseudo-understanding by exploiting familiarity of agency-framework style explanation and exploiting compositional simplicity by some misplaced value (as if reducing compositional complexity is what is at stake, rather than something deeper - like "compression" of principles).
I'm not completely settled on the "two virtues" of explanation. In principle, I think it could be possible that theistic explanation given certain data can meet them to some respect. For example, I think it could be possible to build some agential framework with primitive agents taking some harmony primitively and build up complexity in some way. This can offer a level of "compression". But that won't be explaining the fundamental psycho-functional harmony to begin with - although the apparent harmony may led to preference of phenomenal-power-based models to account for the appearance (abductively). They can be still considered theistic-adjacent if anything. So it's not like I am completely against these sort of frameworks and models but I am cautious of taking things too far with them - or think that they explain more than they really do. Overall, I still lean towards scientific anti-realism/instrumentalism and would treat all of it as provisional stories rather than approximate truths (regarding which I am agnostic and skeptical - in the pyrrhonic sense of remaining with suspended judgment).
