Was mind-brain dependence supposedly disproving the soul addressed? If so, how?
I'm very glad you asked.
"Dependence" was never proven. All that's known is that the two interact (and this was pretty much always understood anyhow). The so-called "interaction problem" isn't a real (logical) problem either: it doesn't matter whether you understand the exact mechanism if the inverse (reductive physicalism) is logically impossible. It's logically necessary that the mind is distinct from the body for reasons discussed by philosophers from Aristotle up to Searle.
I'll give an example:
the only difference between human and machine intelligence is order of complexity, and the fact that we have the design docs for the latter
This statement expresses the reductive physicalist position in its most consistent form: the mind is generally assumed to be a computer, which is the only way it could really "work" if reductive physicalism were true.
There are a lot of reasons why this is impossible, though; I'll go over three big ones. Aside from the first (the Halting Problem), the following arguments can be found in Edward Feser's* excellent introductory textbook to the Philosophy of Mind:
*
I'm neither a Thomist nor a Roman Catholic and wouldn't recommend most of Ed Feser's stuff outside of this book unless you're interested in understanding contemporary Thomism. He's just very solid on this subject.
Halting problem:
Algorithms can't intuit recursion. You know that old paradox of evaluating the truth or falsehood of the statement "this sentence is a lie"? How it goes back and forth forever ("If it's true, that means it's a lie and therefore false; if it's false, that means it's not a lie and therefore true—ad infinitum")? A computer can't figure that out just by looking at the problem, and it's because they just follow sets of instructions. We dont. You could write a program to recognize one or even a big set of paradoxes, but you can't give it the
faculty that lets it understand when a problem leads to an infinite regress from the outset. Machines can't intuit.
Chinese Room Argument:
You're put in a room with a slot in the door and book on the table. A Mandarin speaking Chinese man hands you something in Chinese through the slot. The book contains written instructions for converting Chinese input into Chinese output: you follow these instructions and hand the Chinese man a response through the slot. To him, it reads like he and you are having a natural conversation in Chinese. Does that mean you or that room have actual knowledge of the meaning of what's being said? Of course not; you're just manipulating symbols. But that's all a computer does, which means that the mind can't be a computer.
Computers have no understanding of semantics, and if you say that humans don't either you're entering into a logical contradiction. You can't make the truth and knowledge claim that truth and knowledge are impossible to attain to. For a quick rundown of the collapse of Western autonomous epistemology (and a proof of God, which the essence-energies distinction completes by explaining how a transcendent Deity can be immanent in the world), see the attached "The Contingency of Knowledge and Revelatory Theism". There's also a lot of back and forth about this stuff on my profile.
Mary's Room Argument:
Imagine a girl named Mary who lives in a black-and-white room and has never seen the color red. You give her every book about red and all the objective facts about it, such as wavelength and emotional associations it's known to have. Later, you take her outside and show here a rose—is she getting any new information? Of course she is, which means there's something called
"qualia": raw subjective experience independent of matter.
