As for Davidson I think AM is rather beautiful and has been hugely influential on me.

Yeah, you’re right – Donaldson isn’t a substance dualist. I was grasping at straws trying to think of serious philosophers who actually still defend dualism. (Can you think of any? I can’t.) [Obviously, I'm not counting theologians. I don't think they should be taken particularly seriously]. Donaldson comes closest to the dualisty concerns wrt freedom. The main point of AM, it seems to me, is to “attempt to hold on to both materialism and free will” (as I said in my post, above).

To be honest though, AM has never made sense to me. I’ve read the “Mental events” paper a couple of times (this was a number of years ago) and could never wrap my mind around it. Frankly, I didn’t think it was coherent. That said, I’m no philosopher and I’m sure you know more about the issues than I do.

It seems obvious to me that Davidson was a property dualist rather than a substance dualist. He is not claiming that there are two sorts of stuff (say, mind and matter). Indeed, he is explicit that there is only one sort of stuff – which is why he called his position anomalous MONISM.

However, Davidson argued, persuasively to my mind, that:

1) Mental events are indeed entirely physical events and are instantiated in the brain.

Hence monism.

2) The descriptions of mental events are incommensurable with descriptions of the biology in which they are instantiated.

Hence anomalous.

The position is subtle, nuanced and extremely useful – it might even be right – I think that people as far apart as Lynne Rudder Baker and Andy Clark buy this position.

However, anyone who buys Dennett’s AM light, ‘intentional systems theory’ is at least as much of a dualist as Davidson as they accept that certain (physical) patterns are only discernible from a particular (mentalist) stance (which is incommensurable with the physical descriptions – that’s what all that talk about Martian mindreaders was trying to obfuscate).

Let me put it another way. Davidson, I think, believes that the two are simply logically incommensurable while Dennett veers wildly between outright elimination, Davidson’s position and logically commensurable but practically incommensurable depending on how real he needs ‘stances’ to be for whatever project he is engaged in!

Humanism is pretty dogmatic and largerly psuedoscientific with respect to the mind and differences between us and other animals. Thats why I’d call myself a post-humanist (you can look at on the ole Wikipedia too).

Yeah, you’re right: your question does still stand. I don’t know what the answer is either – although, a priori, I’d be rather surprised if there were too many. Perhaps Steve has some anecdotal evidence? That said, people often compartmentalize quite successfully so I doubt it’s totally unheard of.

The question of how the “soul” interacts with the body is of course the doozy: it’s a central concern in the philosophy of mind since Descartes. Several strange (and entirely untestable) ideas have been suggested; my personal favorite is Leibniz’s parallelism (http://www.philosophyonline.co.uk/pom/pom_psychophysical_parallelism.htm)

Everybody else…

I’d suggest that some of the commentators (again, not Steve) have been a bit too hung-ho… Yes, I agree the mind is what the brain does (as Pinker put it) and, yes, dualism is crap. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that there are many unsolved problems – and several mysteries (in Chomsky’s usage of that term).

(I keep having to defend philosophy… For the record, I’m NOT one – I do cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. I just think the combination of (a) ignorance of philosophy and (b) contempt of philosophy is not a particularly viable position. You have to have a reasonable degree of familiarity with the serious academic literature – and not just stuff gleaned second hand from popular-writings – to have a serious intellectual position on this stuff.)

Now, if they posited bleed throughs from a parallel universe they might get interesting. But they’d still have to find the receiving and transmitting portion of the brain. OH WAIT! It’s quantum entanglement. Whew, thank goodness for paradigm shifts eh?