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In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either that mind phenomena are non-physical,Hart, W. D. 1996. "Dualism." pp. 265–267 in A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, edited by S. Guttenplan. Oxford: Blackwell. or that the mind and Human body are distinct and separable. Thus, it encompasses a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, as well as between subject and object, and is contrasted with other positions, such as physicalism and enactivism, in the mind–body problem.
Aristotle shared Plato's view of multiple souls and further elaborated a hierarchical arrangement, corresponding to the distinctive functions of plants, animals, and humans: a nutritive soul of growth and metabolism that all three share; a perceptive soul of pain, pleasure, and desire that only humans and other animals share; and the faculty of reason that is unique to humans only. In this view, a soul is the hylomorphism of a viable organism, wherein each level of the hierarchy formally supervenience upon the substance theory of the preceding level. For Aristotle, the first two souls, based on the body, perish when the living organism dies,Aristotle. c. 1924. Metaphysics (Metaphysica), edited by W. D. Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2 vols. whereas there remains an immortal and perpetual intellective part of mind.Aristotle, De Anima III: For Plato, however, the soul was not dependent on the physical body; he believed in metempsychosis, the migration of the soul to a new physical body.Duke, E. A., W. F. Hicken, W. S. M. Nicoll, et al., eds. 1995. Platonis Opera, Vol. 1: Tetralogiae I-II, Oxford Classical Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press. . (includes Euthyphro, Apologia Socratis, Crito, Phaedo, Cratylus, Theaetetus, Sophistes, and Politicus.) It has been considered a form of reductionism by some philosophers, since it enables the tendency to ignore very big groups of variables by its assumed association with the mind or the body, and not for its real value when it comes to explaining or predicting a studied phenomenon.
Dualism is closely associated with the thought of René Descartes (1641), who holds that the mind is a nonphysical—and therefore, non-spatial—substance. Descartes clearly identified the mind with consciousness and self-awareness and distinguished this from the physical brain as the seat of intelligence.Howard Robinson. 2003 2016. " Dualism" (rev.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Hence, he was the first documented Western philosopher to formulate the mind–body problem in the form in which it exists today.Descartes, René. 1641 1984. "Meditations on First Philosophy." pp. 1–62 in The Philosophical Writings of René Descartes 2, translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. However, the theory of substance dualism has many advocates in contemporary philosophy such as Richard Swinburne, William Hasker, J. P. Moreland, E. J. Low, Charles Taliaferro, Seyyed Jaaber Mousavirad, and John Foster.
Dualism is contrasted with various kinds of monism. Substance dualism is contrasted with all forms of materialism, but property dualism may be considered a form of non-reductive physicalism.
Cartesian dualism, most famously defended by René Descartes, argues that there are two kinds of substances: mental and physical. Descartes states that the mental can exist outside of the body, and the body cannot think. Substance dualism is important historically for having given rise to much thought regarding the famous mind–body problem. It is compatible with theologies which claim that immortal souls occupy an independent realm of existence distinct from that of the physical world. Cartesians tend to equate the soul to the mind.
The Heliocentrism and the scientific discoveries of the 17th century reinforced the belief that the scientific method was the unique way of knowledge. Bodies were seen as biological organisms to be studied in their constituent parts (materialism) by means of anatomy, physiology, biochemistry and physics (reductionism). Mind–body dualism remained the biomedical paradigm and model for the following three centuries.
Hasker has argued that emergent dualism is consistent with neuroscientific discoveries showing the dependence of mind on brain. He likens the individual mind to a magnetic field in its qualitative difference from the physical properties that generate it and also in its ability to act on the brain that generates it. Consciousness is said to arise when the brain reaches a certain threshold level of organizational complexity and when properly organized gives rise to the soul.
Thomism substance dualism has been defended by J. P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae. Thomistic substance dualism distinguishes itself from Cartesian substance dualism by denying that the body and soul are different substances. Instead, a person is composed of only one substance, the soul, while the body is considered an ensouled physical structure. J. P. Moreland has commented:
Eleonore Stump has suggested that Thomas Aquinas's views on matter and the soul are difficult to define in contemporary discussion but he would fit the criteria as a non-Cartesian substance dualist.
Other terms for Thomistic dualism include hylomorphic dualism or Thomistic hylomorphism which are contrasted with substance dualism. Hylomorphism is distinct from substance dualism as it holds the view that the immaterial (form) and material (matter) are not distinct substances and only share an efficient causality.
Thomistic scholars such as Paul Chutikorn and Edward Feser have written that Aquinas was not a substance dualist. Edward Feser who has defended hylomorphic dualism has suggested that it has advantages over substance dualism such as offering a possible solution to the interaction problem. Paul Chutikorn has commented that "adopting Aquinas' view of substance will provide a solution to the problem by avoiding altogether the position that man is made up of dual substances. Rather, Aquinas shows us that we can acknowledge a duality within substance itself, while maintaining its inherent substantial unity".
Aristotelian hylomorphic dualism also has many similarities with Thomistic dualism. Michael Egnor is a notable advocate of Aristotelian dualism.
Non-reductive physicalism is a form of property dualism in which it is asserted that all mental states are causally reducible to physical states. One argument for this has been made in the form of anomalous monism expressed by Donald Davidson, where it is argued that mental events are identical to physical events, however, strict law-governed causal relationships cannot describe relations of mental events. Another argument for this has been expressed by John Searle, who is the advocate of a distinctive form of physicalism he calls biological naturalism. His view is that although mental states are ontologically irreducible to physical states, they are Causality. He has acknowledged that "to many people" his views and those of property dualists look a lot alike, but he thinks the comparison is misleading.
Predicate dualism is most easily defined as the negation of predicate monism. Predicate monism can be characterized as the view subscribed to by eliminative materialists, who maintain that such intentional predicates as believe, desire, think, feel, etc., will eventually be eliminated from both the language of science and from ordinary language because the entities to which they refer do not exist. Predicate dualists believe that so-called "folk psychology," with all of its propositional attitude ascriptions, is an ineliminable part of the enterprise of describing, explaining, and understanding human mental states and behavior.
For example, Davidson subscribes to anomalous monism, according to which there can be no strict psychophysical laws which connect mental and physical events under their descriptions as mental and physical events. However, all mental events also have physical descriptions. It is in terms of the latter that such events can be connected in law-like relations with other physical events. Mental predicates are irreducibly different in character (rational, holistic, and necessary) from physical predicates (contingent, atomic, and causal).
The idea that even if the animal were conscious nothing would be added to the production of behavior, even in animals of the human type, was first voiced by La Mettrie (1745), and then by Cabanis (1802), and was further explicated by Hodgson (1870) and Huxley (1874).Gallagher, S. 2006. "Where's the action? Epiphenomenalism and the problem of free will". pp. 109–124 in Does Consciousness Cause Behavior?, edited by S. Pockett, W. Banks, and S. Gallagher. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jackson gave a subjective argument for epiphenomenalism, but later rejected it and embraced physicalism.
In the dialogue Phaedo, Plato formulated his famous Theory of forms as distinct and immaterial substances of which the objects and other phenomena that we perceive in the world are nothing more than mere shadows.
In the Phaedo, Plato makes it clear that the Forms are the universalia ante res, i.e. they are ideal universals, by which we are able to understand the world. In his allegory of the cave, Plato likens the achievement of philosophical understanding to emerging into the sunlight from a dark cave, where only vague shadows of what lies beyond that prison are cast dimly upon the wall. Plato's forms are non-physical and non-mental. They exist nowhere in time or space, but neither do they exist in the mind, nor in the pleroma of matter; rather, matter is said to "participate" in form (μεθεξις, methexis). It remained unclear however, even to Aristotle, exactly what Plato intended by that.
Aristotle argued at length against many aspects of Plato's forms, creating his own doctrine of hylomorphism wherein form and matter coexist. Ultimately however, Aristotle's aim was to perfect a theory of forms, rather than to reject it. Although Aristotle strongly rejected the independent existence Plato attributed to forms, his metaphysics do agree with Plato's a priori considerations quite often. For example, Aristotle argues that changeless, eternal substantial form is necessarily immaterial. Because matter provides a stable substratum for a change in form, matter always has the potential to change. Thus, if given an eternity in which to do so, it will, necessarily, exercise that potential.
Part of Aristotle's psychology, the study of the soul, is his account of the ability of humans to reason and the ability of animals to perceive. In both cases, perfect copies of forms are acquired, either by direct impression of environmental forms, in the case of perception, or else by virtue of contemplation, understanding and recollection. He believed the mind can literally assume any form being contemplated or experienced, and it was unique in its ability to become a blank slate, having no essential form. As thoughts of earth are not heavy, any more than thoughts of fire are causally efficient, they provide an immaterial complement for the formless mind.Aristotle. c. 1907. On the Soul (De anima), edited by R. D. Hicks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1968. Books II-III, translated by D.W. Hamlyn, Clarendon Aristotle Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
In the scholastic tradition of Saint Thomas Aquinas, a number of whose doctrines have been incorporated into Roman Catholic dogma, the soul is the substantial form of a human being. Aquinas held the Quaestiones disputate de anima, or 'Disputed questions on the soul', at the Roman studium provinciale of the Dominican Order at Santa Sabina, the forerunner of the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum during the academic year 1265–1266.Torrell, op. cit., 162 By 1268 Aquinas had written at least the first book of the Sententia Libri De anima, Aquinas' commentary on Aristotle's De anima, the translation of which from the Greek was completed by Aquinas' Dominican associate at Viterbo, William of Moerbeke in 1267.Torrell, 161 ff. Like Aristotle, Aquinas held that the human being was a unified composite substance of two substantial principles: form and matter. The soul is the substantial form and so the first actuality of a material organic body with the potentiality for life.Aristotle, de Anima II. 1–2.
While Aquinas defended the unity of human nature as a composite substance constituted by these two inextricable principles of form and matter, he also argued for the incorruptibility of the intellectual soul, in contrast to the corruptibility of the vegetative and sensitive animation of plants and animals. His argument for the subsistence and incorruptibility of the intellectual soul takes its point of departure from the metaphysical principle that operation follows upon being ( agiture sequitur esse), i.e., the activity of a thing reveals the mode of being and existence it depends upon. Since the intellectual soul exercises its own per se intellectual operations without employing material faculties, i.e. intellectual operations are immaterial, the intellect itself and the intellectual soul, must likewise be immaterial and so incorruptible. Even though the intellectual soul of man is able to subsist upon the death of the human being, Aquinas does not hold that the human person is able to remain integrated at death. The separated intellectual soul is neither a man nor a human person. The intellectual soul by itself is not a human person (i.e., an individual supposit of a rational nature).Summa theologiae, I. 29.1; 75.4ad2; Disputed Questions on the Soul I. Hence, Aquinas held that "soul of St. Peter pray for us" would be more appropriate than "St. Peter pray for us", because all things connected with his person, including memories, ended with his corporeal life.Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica. trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2d, rev. ed., 22 vols., London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne; reprinted in 5 vols., Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981.
The Catholic doctrine of the resurrection of the body does not subscribe that, sees body and soul as forming a whole and states that at the second coming, the souls of the departed will be reunited with their bodies as a whole person (substance) and witness to the apocalypse. The thorough consistency between dogma and contemporary science was maintained here in part from a serious attendance to the principle that there can be only one truth. Consistency with science, logic, philosophy, and faith remained a high priority for centuries, and a university doctorate in theology generally included the entire science curriculum as a prerequisite. This doctrine is not universally accepted by Christians today. Many believe that one's immortal soul goes directly to Heaven upon death of the body.Spong, John Selby. 1994. Resurrection: Myth or Reality. New York: HarperCollins Publishing. .
The central claim of what is often called Cartesian dualism, in honor of Descartes, is that the immaterial mind and the material body, while being ontologically distinct substances, causally interact. This is an idea that continues to feature prominently in many non-European philosophies. Mental events cause physical events, and vice versa. But this leads to a substantial problem for Cartesian dualism: How can an immaterial mind cause anything in a material body, and vice versa? This has often been called the "problem of interactionism."
Descartes himself struggled to come up with a feasible answer to this problem. In his letter to Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess Palatine, he suggested that spirits interacted with the body through the pineal gland, a small gland in the centre of the brain, between the two hemispheres. The term Cartesian dualism is also often associated with this more specific notion of causal interaction through the pineal gland. However, this explanation was not satisfactory: how can an immaterial mind interact with the physical pineal gland? Because Descartes' was such a difficult theory to defend, some of his disciples, such as Arnold Geulincx and Nicolas Malebranche, proposed a different explanation: That all mind–body interactions required the direct intervention of God. According to these philosophers, the appropriate states of mind and body were only the occasions for such intervention, not real causes. These occasionalism maintained the strong thesis that all causation was directly dependent on God, instead of holding that all causation was natural except for that between mind and body.Tad Schmaltz. 2002 2017. " Nicolas Malebranche." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by E. N. Zalta.
A similar defense comes from Australian philosopher Frank Jackson (born 1943) who revived the theory of epiphenomenalism which argues that mental states do not play a role in physical states. Jackson argues that there are two kinds of dualism:
He claims that functions of the mind/soul are internal, very private experiences that are not accessible to observation by others, and therefore not accessible by science (at least not yet). We can know everything, for example, about a bat's facility for echolocation, but we will never know how the bat experiences that phenomenon.
In 2018, The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism was published that contains arguments for and against Cartesian dualism, emergent dualism, Thomistic dualism, emergent individualism and nonreductive physicalism. Contributors include Charles Taliaferro, Edward Feser, William Hasker, J. P. Moreland, Richard Swinburne, Lynne Rudder Baker, John W. Cooper and Timothy O'Connor.
Mental events have a certain subjective quality to them, whereas physical ones seem not to. So, for example, one may ask what a burned finger feels like, or what the blueness of the sky looks like, or what nice music sounds like.Thomas Nagel. 1986. The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press. Philosophers of mind call the subjective aspects of mental events qualia. There is something that it's like to feel pain, to see a familiar shade of blue, and so on. There are qualia involved in these mental events. And the claim is that qualia cannot be reduced to anything physical.
Thomas Nagel first characterized the problem of qualia for physicalistic monism in his article, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?". Nagel argued that even if we knew everything there was to know from a third-person, scientific perspective about a bat's sonar system, we still wouldn't know what it is like to be a bat. However, others argue that qualia are consequent of the same neurological processes that engender the bat's mind, and will be fully understood as the science develops.
Frank Jackson formulated his well-known knowledge argument based upon similar considerations. In this thought experiment, known as Mary's room, he asks us to consider a neuroscientist, Mary, who was born, and has lived all of her life, in a black and white room with a black and white television and computer monitor where she collects all the scientific data she possibly can on the nature of colours. Jackson asserts that as soon as Mary leaves the room, she will come to have new knowledge which she did not possess before: the knowledge of the experience of colours (i.e., what they are like). Although Mary knows everything there is to know about colours from an objective, third-person perspective, she has never known, according to Jackson, what it was like to see red, orange, or green. If Mary really learns something new, it must be knowledge of something non-physical, since she already knew everything about the physical aspects of colour.Jackson, Frank. 1977. Perception: A Representative Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
However, Jackson later rejected his argument and embraced physicalism. He notes that Mary obtains knowledge not of color, but of a new intramental state, seeing color. Also, he notes that Mary might say "wow," and as a mental state affecting the physical, this clashed with his former view of epiphenomenalism. David Lewis' response to this argument, now known as the ability argument, is that what Mary really came to know was simply the ability to recognize and identify color sensations to which she had previously not been exposed.Lewis, David. 1988 1999. "What Experience Teaches." pp. 262–290 in Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daniel Dennett and others also provide arguments against this notion.
Chalmers' argument is that it seems plausible that such a being could exist because all that is needed is that all and only the things that the physical sciences describe and observe about a human being must be true of the zombie. None of the concepts involved in these sciences make reference to consciousness or other mental phenomena, and any physical entity can be described scientifically via physics whether it is conscious or not. The mere logical possibility of a p-zombie demonstrates that consciousness is a natural phenomenon beyond the current unsatisfactory explanations. Chalmers states that one probably could not build a living p-zombie because living things seem to require a level of consciousness. However (unconscious?) robots built to simulate humans may become the first real p-zombies. Hence Chalmers half-joking calls for the need to build a "consciousness meter" to ascertain if any given entity, human or robot, is conscious or not.
Others such as Dennett have argued that the notion of a philosophical zombie is an incoherent, or unlikely, concept. In particular, nothing proves that an entity (e.g., a computer or robot) which would perfectly mimic human beings, and especially perfectly mimic expressions of feelings (like joy, fear, anger, ...), would not indeed experience them, thus having similar states of consciousness to what a real human would have. It is argued that under physicalism, one must either believe that anyone including oneself might be a zombie, or that no one can be a zombie—following from the assertion that one's own conviction about being (or not being) a zombie is a product of the physical world and is therefore no different from anyone else's.
Avshalom Elitzur has described himself as a "reluctant dualist". One argument Elitzur makes in favor of dualism is an argument from bafflement. According to Elitzur, a conscious being can conceive of a P-zombie version of his/herself. However, a P-zombie cannot conceive of a version of itself that lacks corresponding qualia.
Physics is the general analysis of nature, conducted to understand how the universe behaves. On the other hand, the study of meteorology weather patterns or human behavior is only of interest to humans themselves. The point is that having a perspective on the world is a psychological state. Therefore, the special sciences presuppose the existence of minds which can have these states. If one is to avoid ontological dualism, then the mind that has a perspective must be part of the physical reality to which it applies its perspective. If this is the case, then to perceive the physical world as psychological, the mind must have a perspective on the physical. This, in turn, presupposes the existence of mind.
However, cognitive science and psychology do not require the mind to be irreducible, and operate on the assumption that it has physical basis. In fact, it is common in science to presuppose a complex system; while fields such as chemistry, biology, or geology could be verbosely expressed in terms of quantum field theory, it is convenient to use levels of abstraction like molecules, cells, or the mantle. It is often difficult to decompose these levels without heavy analysis and computation. Sober has also advanced philosophical arguments against the notion of irreducibility.
Somewhere along the way from the printer's being made up exactly of the parts and materials which actually constitute it to the printer's being made up of some different matter at, say, 20%, the question of whether this printer is the same printer becomes a matter of arbitrary convention.
Imagine the case of a person, Frederick, who has a counterpart born from the same egg and a slightly genetically modified sperm. Imagine a series of counterfactual cases corresponding to the examples applied to the printer. Somewhere along the way, one is no longer sure about the identity of Frederick. In this latter case, it has been claimed, overlap of constitution cannot be applied to the identity of mind. As Madell puts it:
If the counterpart of Frederick, Frederickus, is 70% constituted of the same physical substance as Frederick, does this mean that it is also 70% mentally identical with Frederick? Does it make sense to say that something is mentally 70% Frederick?Shoemaker, S., and Richard Swinburne. 1984. Personal Identity. Oxford: Blackwell. A possible solution to this dilemma is that of open individualism.
Richard Swinburne, in his book The Existence of God, put forward an argument for mind-body dualism based upon personal identity. He states that the brain is composed of two hemispheres and a cord linking the two and that, as modern science has shown, either of these can be removed without the person losing any memories or mental capacities.
He then cites a thought-experiment for the reader, asking what would happen if each of the two hemispheres of one person were placed inside two different people. Either, Swinburne claims, one of the two is me or neither is—and there is no way of telling which, as each will have similar memories and mental capacities to the other. In fact, Swinburne claims, even if one's mental capacities and memories are far more similar to the original person than the others' are, they still may not be him.
From here, he deduces that even if we know what has happened to every single atom inside a person's brain, we still do not know what has happened to 'them' as an identity. From here it follows that a part of our mind, or our soul, is immaterial, and, as a consequence, that mind-body dualism is true.Swinburne, Richard. 1979. The Existence of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Christian List argues that Benj Hellie's vertiginous question, i.e. why people exist as themselves and not as someone else, and the existence of first-personal facts, are a refutation of physicalist philosophies of consciousness. List argues that first personal facts cannot supervene on third personal facts. However, List also argues that this also refutes standard versions of mind-body dualism that have purely third-personal metaphysics.
The argument postulates that if, as naturalism entails, all of our thoughts are the effect of a physical cause, then we have no reason for assuming that they are also the consequent of a reasonable ground. However, knowledge is apprehended by reasoning from ground to consequent. Therefore, if naturalism were true, there would be no way of knowing it (or anything else), except by a fluke.
Through this logic, the statement "I have reason to believe naturalism is valid" is inconsistent in the same manner as "I never tell the truth." That is, to conclude its truth would eliminate the grounds from which to reach it. To summarize the argument in the book, Lewis quotes J. B. S. Haldane, who appeals to a similar line of reasoning:
In his essay "Is Theology Poetry?", Lewis himself summarises the argument in a similar fashion when he writes:
But Lewis later agreed with Elizabeth Anscombe's response to his Miracles argument. She showed that an argument could be valid and ground-consequent even if its propositions were generated via physical cause and effect by non-rational factors. The Socratic Digest, No. 4 (1948) Similar to Anscombe, Richard Carrier and John Beversluis have written extensive objections to the argument from reason on the untenability of its first postulate.
The indivisibility argument for dualism was phrased by Descartes as follows:Calef, Scott. n.d. " Dualism and Mind § The Argument From Indivisibility." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
There is a great difference between a mind and a body, because the body, by its very nature, is something divisible, whereas the mind is plainly indivisible...insofar as I am only a thing that thinks, I cannot distinguish any parts in me.... Although the whole mind seems to be united to the whole body, nevertheless, were a foot or an arm or any other bodily part amputated, I know that nothing would be taken away from the mind...The argument relies upon Leibniz' principle of the identity of indiscernibles, which states that two things are the same if and only if they share all their properties. A counterargument is the idea that matter is not infinitely divisible, and thus that the mind could be identified with material things that cannot be divided, or potentially Leibnizian monads.Edward Feser. 27 February 2017. " Descartes' "indivisibility" argument." .
First, it is not clear where the interaction would take place. For example, burning one's finger causes pain. Apparently there is some chain of events, leading from the burning of skin, to the stimulation of nerve endings, to something happening in the peripheral nerves of one's body that lead to one's brain, to something happening in a particular part of one's brain, and finally resulting in the sensation of pain. But pain is not supposed to be spatially locatable. It might be responded that the pain "takes place in the brain." But evidently, the pain is in the finger. This may not be a devastating criticism.
However, there is a second problem about the interaction. Namely, the question of how the interaction takes place, where in dualism "the mind" is assumed to be non-physical and by definition outside of the realm of science. The mechanism which explains the connection between the mental and the physical would therefore be a philosophical proposition as compared to a scientific theory. For example, compare such a mechanism to a physical mechanism that is well understood. Take a very simple causal relation, such as when a cue ball strikes an eight ball and causes it to go into the pocket. What happens in this case is that the cue ball has a certain amount of momentum as its mass moves across the pool table with a certain velocity, and then that momentum is transferred to the eight ball, which then heads toward the pocket. Compare this to the situation in the brain, where one wants to say that a decision causes some neurons to fire and thus causes a body to move across the room. The intention to "cross the room now" is a mental event and, as such, it does not have physical properties such as force. If it has no force, then it would seem that it could not possibly cause any neuron to fire. However, with Dualism, an explanation is required of how something without any physical properties has physical effects.
The explanation provided by Arnold Geulincx and Nicolas Malebranche is that of occasionalism, where all mind–body interactions require the direct intervention of God.
At the time C. S. Lewis wrote Miracles, quantum mechanics (and physical indeterminism) was only in the initial stages of acceptance, but still Lewis stated the logical possibility that, if the physical world was proved to be indeterministic, this would provide an entry (interaction) point into the traditionally viewed closed system, where a scientifically described physically probable/improbable event could be philosophically described as an action of a non-physical entity on physical reality. He states, however, that none of the arguments in his book will rely on this. Although some interpretations of quantum mechanics consider wave function collapse to be indeterminate, in others this event is defined as deterministic.
By assuming a deterministic physical universe, the objection can be formulated more precisely. When a person decides to walk across a room, it is generally understood that the decision to do so, a mental event, immediately causes a group of neurons in that person's brain to fire, a physical event, which ultimately results in his walking across the room. The problem is that if there is something totally non-physical causing a bunch of neurons to fire, then there is no physical event which causes the firing. This means that some physical energy is required to be generated against the physical laws of the deterministic universe—this is by definition a miracle and there can be no scientific explanation of (repeatable experiment performed regarding) where the physical energy for the firing came from.Baker, Gordon and Morris, Katherine J. (1996) Descartes' Dualism, London: Routledge. Such interactions would violate the fundamental physical law. In particular, if some external source of energy is responsible for the interactions, then this would violate the law of the conservation of energy.William Lycan. 1996. "Philosophy of Mind." In The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, edited by N. Bunnin and E. P. Tsui-James. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Dualistic interactionism has therefore been criticized for violating a general heuristic principle of science: the causal closure of the physical world.
Another reply is akin to parallelism—Mills holds that behavioral events are causally overdetermined, and can be explained by either physical or mental causes alone. An overdetermined event is fully accounted for by multiple causes at once. However, J. J. C. Smart and Paul Churchland have pointed out that if physical phenomena fully determine behavioral events, then by Occam's razor an unphysical mind is unnecessary.
Howard Robinson suggests that the interaction may involve dark energy, dark matter or some other currently unknown scientific process.
Another reply is that the interaction taking place in the human body may not be described by "billiard ball" classical mechanics. If a nondeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct then microscopic events are indeterminism, where the degree of determinism increases with the scale of the system. Philosophers Karl Popper and John Eccles and physicist Henry Stapp have theorized that such indeterminacy may apply at the macroscopic scale.Karl Popper, and John C. Eccles. 1977. The Self and Its Brain. Berlin: Springer. However, Max Tegmark has argued that classical and quantum calculations show that quantum decoherence effects do not play a role in brain activity.
Yet another reply to the interaction problem is to note that it doesn't seem that there is an interaction problem for all forms of substance dualism. For instance, Thomism dualism doesn't obviously face any issue with regards to interaction, for in this view the soul and the body are related as form and matter.
Phineas Gage, who suffered destruction of one or both frontal lobes by a projectile iron rod, is often cited as an example illustrating that the brain causes mind. Gage certainly exhibited some mental changes after his accident, suggesting a correlation between brain states and mental states. It has been noted, however, that Gage's most serious mental changes were only temporary,(September 2008). "Phineas Gage – Unravelling the myth". The Psychologist. 21 (9): 828–31. and that he made a reasonable social and mental recovery. The changes in question have almost always been distorted and exaggerated by scientific and popular literature, often relying on hearsay.Macmillan, Malcolm B. (2014). "Phineas Gage". Encyclopedia of the Neurological Sciences. Academic Press. p. 383.Kotowicz, Z. (2007). "The strange case of Phineas Gage". History of the Human Sciences. 20 (1): 115–31.Grafman, J. (2002). "The Structured Event Complex and the Human Prefrontal Cortex". In Stuss, D. T.; Knight, R. T. (eds.). Principles of Frontal Lobe Function. pp. 292–310. Similar examples abound; neuroscientist David Eagleman describes the case of another individual who exhibited escalating pedophile tendencies at two different times, and in each case was found to have tumors growing in a particular part of his brain.Choi, Charles. 21 October 2002. " Brain tumour causes uncontrollable paedophilia." New Scientist. .Nigel Warburton, and David Edmonds, hosts. 22 May 2011. " David Eagleman on Morality and the Brain." Philosophy Bites (podcast).
Case studies aside, modern experiments have demonstrated that the relation between brain and mind is much more than simple correlation. By damaging, or manipulating, specific areas of the brain repeatedly under controlled conditions (e.g. in monkeys) and reliably obtaining the same results in measures of mental state and abilities, neuroscientists have shown that the relation between damage to the brain and mental deterioration is likely causal. This conclusion is further supported by data from the effects of neuro-active chemicals (e.g., those affecting neurotransmitters) on mental functions, but also from research on neurostimulation (direct electrical stimulation of the brain, including transcranial magnetic stimulation). Alterations of sociomoral judgement and glucose use in the frontomedial cortex induced by electrical stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) in Parkinsonian patients (2004):
Writing in the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas writes that "the body is necessary for the action of the intellect, not as origin of action." Thus, if the body is dysfunctional, the intellect will not actualize as it intends to. Article 2, Reply to Objection 3. According to the philosopher Stephen Evans:
This argument was criticized by Peter Glassen in a debate with J. J. C. Smart in the pages of Philosophy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Glassen argued that, because it is not a physical entity, Occam's razor cannot consistently be appealed to by a physicalist or materialist as a justification of mental states or events, such as the belief that dualism is false. The idea is that Occam's razor may not be as "unrestricted" as it is normally described (applying to all qualitative postulates, even abstract ones) but instead concrete (only applies to physical objects). If one applies Occam's Razor unrestrictedly, then it recommends monism until pluralism either receives more support or is disproved. If one applies Occam's Razor only concretely, then it may not be used on abstract concepts (this route, however, has serious consequences for selecting between hypotheses about the abstract). Plato Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Simplicity. Excerpt: "Perhaps scientists apply an unrestricted version of Occam's Razor to that portion of reality in which they are interested, namely the concrete, causal, spatiotemporal world. Or perhaps scientists apply a 'concretized' version of Occam's Razor unrestrictedly. Which is the case? The answer determines which general philosophical principle we end up with: ought we to avoid the multiplication of objects of whatever kind, or merely the multiplication of concrete objects? The distinction here is crucial for a number of central philosophical debates. Unrestricted Occam's Razor favors monism over dualism, and nominalism over platonism. By contrast, 'concretized' Occam's Razor has no bearing on these debates, since the extra entities in each case are not concrete".
This argument has also been criticized by Seyyed Jaaber Mousavirad, who argues that the principle of simplicity could only be applied when there is no need for an additional entity. Despite arguments indicating the need for the soul, the principle of simplicity does not apply. Therefore, if there were no argument establishing the existence of the soul, one could deny its existence based on the principle of simplicity. However, various arguments have been put forth to establish its existence. These arguments demonstrate that while neuroscience can explain the mysteries of the material brain, certain significant issues, such as personal identity and free will, remain beyond the scope of neuroscience. The crux of the matter lies in the essential limitations of neuroscience and the potency of substance dualism in explaining these phenomena.
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