The Plausibility of Substance Dualism as an Approach to the Mind-Body Problem: A Philosophical and Theological Inquiry

The Plausibility of Substance Dualism as an Approach to the Mind-Body Problem:
A Philosophical and Theological Inquiry

Richard J. Bernier

A Thesis

in The Department

of Theological Studies

Presented in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts at

Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, Canada

November 2003

CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY School of Graduate Studies

This is to certify that the thesis prepared By: Richard J. Bernier

Entitled: The Plausibility of Substance Dualism as an Approach to the

Mind-Body Problem

and submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts (Theological Studies)

complies with the regulations of the University and meets the accepted standards with respect to originality and quality.

ABSTRACT

The Plausibility of Substance Dualism as an Approach to the Mind-Body Problem

Richard J. Bernier

This thesis presents an argument that would posit a substantial non-physical principle of cognition and consciousness, i.e. a mind or soul, ontologically distinct from the physical brain and its properties. The case consists of, first, a series of arguments that seek to establish the rational foundation for this Cartesian or substance dualism and, second, an attempt to reply to some of the major objections to it. The second component includes a survey of physicalism, the chief alternative to dualism as a solution to the classic mind-body problem. The theological significance of the debate, and particularly of the status one accords to dualism in the debate, is the concern of the final chapter. The latter concludes that the implications of accepting or rejecting substance dualism are far-reaching for theological and ethical affirmations about human immortality and the worth of human beings. Some areas needing further discussion and inquiry, such as the possible relevance of Chalcedonian Christology and the need for further reflection on the precise mechanism of brain-mind interaction, are highlighted in the course of the presentation of the issue.

111

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This thesis is dedicated, with affection and respect, to the students of the Newman Centre of McGill University.

I wish to thank all those whose encouragement and insight have contributed to the completion of this project. In particular I am grateful to the following individuals who have read or discussed the substance of this thesis and whose thoughts and comments have been especially valuable: Ms Nicole Beaudry, Mr M. Robert Bichage, Mr Thomas Bouchard, Mr Brian Butcher, Ms Bethany Cere, Mr Eric Durocher, Ms Emilie Lemay, and Fr Cyril MacNeil. Along with these my deepest gratitude goes to many other dear friends, whom I will not name for fear of omission. Special thanks to Dr Daniel Cere for continual support and encouragement in this as in so many other things, and to Rev Dr Telesphore Gagnon PSS, whose love of philosophy and skill in communicating it were my first introduction to many aspects of the mind-body problem and to many other philosophical questions. I also wish to thank my supervisor, Dr Paul Allen, for his careful and helpful critiques, as well as Dr Christine Jamieson and the other members of the department of Theological Studies at Concordia University.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter I: A case for substance dualism 14

Chapter II: Physicalist approaches to the mind-body problem 43

Chapter III: Some objections to substance dualism 70

Chapter IV: Some theological implications of mind-body substance dualism 93

Conclusion 117

Works Cited 121

INTRODUCTION

In this thesis I shall be attempting to state a plausible case for mind-body substance dualism, from the point of view of a philosophical theology.

A survey of opinions expressed in English on mind-body dualism reveals that many theologians and philosophers consider it to be an unreasonable position. The present study seeks to inquire whether it is as indefensible as many claim it to be.

In this Introduction, I shall specify what I mean by the expression substance dualism in this connection and clarify a few preliminary points. In Chapter I, I shall attempt to outline a case to be made in favour of a dualist solution of the mind-body problem by presenting eight arguments that can be marshalled in support of it. (I shall use the expressions 'mind-brain dualism' and 'mind-body dualism' interchangeably throughout). In Chapter II, I shall present four of the most important expressions of the physicalist view of the mind-body relation, the principal (some would argue the only) alternative to dualism, which holds that mind and brain alike are essentially physical realities. Chapter II will address some forms of physicalism qualified as 'nonreductive', i.e. some that claim to avoid 'reducing' the mind to being identical with the brain. Chapter III will attempt to reply to the eight major specific objections that can be made to mind-body dualism. Chapter IV is devoted to drawing out theological and religious implications of mind-body dualism, with particular reference to the problems of personal immortality, free will, providence, and ethical problems related to the fundamental nature of human beings.

a) What is meant by the term 'substance dualism'?

Substance dualism as an approach to the mind-body problem holds that mind and brain (or mind and body, or soul and body), are two distinct realities, respectively nonphysical and physical. Both are essential components of human existence as we know it, but they are distinct, and each one can exist at least in theory without the other.

The expression 'dualism' has a range of meanings in popular and scholarly usage, many of them not pertinent to the present discussion. Dualism in the sense intended here does not imply any conflict or disharmony between the posited principles; on the contrary, it assumes significant co-operation and interaction. Postulating interaction does not render the dualism for which I am arguing hopelessly idiosyncratic; it is the assumption or conclusion of most authors who are sympathetic to dualism. For this reason, Eccles and Popper describe their dualism as 'dualist interactionism'¹. On the other hand, this thesis will not engage Manichean dualism, as though it were my intention to argue for deprecation of the body, or to dismiss the brain or physical existence as, at best, dispensable or burdensome. Similarly, I disavow any implication in the term 'dualism' that the posited duality of mind and body is tantamount (as Leibniz proposed) to two monadic substances existing in some "pre-established harmony" but without real interdependence or interaction. Dualism is often described as a belief in "the ghost in the machine"², a description that owes its rhetorical force to precisely such a suggestion that

¹ Cf John ECCLES and Karl POPPER, The Self and its Brain, (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1977), passim.

² This expression is usually traced to Gilbert Ryle in his The Concept of Mind, where the author writes: "I shall often speak of [Cartesian dualism], with deliberate abusiveness, as 'the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine'." (The Concept of Mind, (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1949), pp. 15-16). In this connection John Beloff s spirited rejoinder is most apropos: "[...] one would have to be either a natural simpleton, or

body and mind co-operate only accidentally while retaining each one its full autonomy from the other. Needless to say, the alleged positing of a "ghost" in the first place appears so plainly irrational that it too discredits dualism so described. Whether the notion of ghosts is in fact itself quite so irrational is precisely the question in dispute. To posit dualism in either of these senses would imply that human existence as we know it could conceivably be predicated of the putative monadic mind or 'thinking substance' even in the absence of the body, and thus that human cognition as we know it owes nothing to the body. This is not what I intend to suggest, as will become clear.

The position being defended in this thesis corresponds with what is sometimes referred to as 'Cartesian dualism'. However, I am not necessarily arguing as a Cartesian of the Strict Observance³; the details of the position I am defending are different from those of Descartes. As John Smythies points out in his preface to The Case for Dualism,

Not all dualists, of course, [...] would make the distinction between mind and body in the same way as Descartes did, but all would agree that mind, however we may choose to define it, cannot be analysed in purely physical terms or somehow reduced to the behaviour of purely physical objects⁴.

else have been hopelessly besotted with verbal sophistries, to see nothing mysterious whatever in the mind-body relationship. [...] Those who take seriously the existence of Mind are often taunted with being worried by a 'ghost in the machine'; I suggest it is high time we refused to let our critical faculties be paralysed any longer by this pert gibe." (John BELOFF, The Existence of Mind, (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1962), pp. 12-13).

³ This felicitous expression is Etienne Gilson's, found for instance in his Modern Philosophy: Descartes to Kant.

⁴ John SMYTHIES, "Preface", The Case for Dualism, edited by J Smythies and J Beloff, (Charlottesville VA: University Press of Virginia, 1989), p. vi.

Moreover, it is inaccurate to describe dualism as a position originating with or peculiar to Descartes. Zeno Vendler, alluding to Ryle's description of Cartesian dualism as the "official doctrine"⁵, remarks:

[...] the "official doctrine" is nothing but the commonsense view, and is Cartesian only inasmuch as it has found its clearest philosophical expression in Descartes' works.⁶

St Thomas Aquinas is only one important example of a much earlier dualist (according to the definition of the term employed here) in an emphatically non-Cartesian philosophical tradition. St Thomas describes the 'intellectual soul' (that is, the mind, the soul, of a human being, as opposed to the strictly 'vegetative' and 'animal' souls of living but nonthinking being) in these terms:

Intellectus autem habet operationem in qua non communicat sibi corpus, ut ostensum est, ex quo patet quod est operans per seipsum. Ergo est substantia subsistens in suo esse.⁷

In another place, St Thomas affirms the substantial character of the soul just as clearly:

Natura ergo mentis humanae non solum est incorporea, sed etiam est substantia scilicet aliquid subsistens [...] Relinquitur igitur animam humanam, quae dicitur intellectus vel mens, esse aliquid incorporeum et subsistens.⁸

⁵ Cf. Gilbert RYLE, The Concept of Mind, p. 11.

⁶ Zeno VENDLER, Res Cogitans, (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), p. 144.

⁷ St Thomas AQUINAS, Compendium Theologiae, lib. 1, cap. 84.

⁸ St Thomas AQUINAS, Summa Theologiae, la, q. 75, art. 2.

When I propose ex hypothesi that mind-body dualism accurately describes the nature of things, I mean that human existence is most aptly explained as consisting of two distinct and interacting principles, physical and non-physical. These principles can be called 'substances' inasmuch they are posited as capable of independent existence even if they never in feet exist isolated from one another. Where 'substance' is used in these pages, it is used in this latter sense, as employed, for instance, by Richard Swinburne⁹. W D Hart's definition of 'substance' in connection with dualism is similar:

Mind-body dualism is the thesis that there are at least two basic or fundamental sorts of things: one including you and other minds, selves, or persons, and the other including bodies of you and other people [...] Things that are basic or fundamental are sometimes called substances [...] The central idea is that a basic thing exists independently, that is, that it is not dependent for its existence on the existence of anything else¹⁰.

Finally, Jaegwon Kim describes dualism in these terms:

Cartesian substance dualism pictures the world as consisting of two independent domains, the mental and the material, each with its own distinctive defining properties (consciousness and spatial extendedness, respectively). There are causal interactions across the domains, but entities in each domain, being "substances", are ontologically independent of those of the other, and it is metaphysically possible for one domain to exist in the total absence of the other¹¹.

⁹ Cf. Richard SWINBURNE, "Body and Soul", in The Mind-Body Problem, edited by Richard Warner and Tadeusz Szubka (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 311, where he says "I understand by a substance a thing, a component of the world which interacts causally with other components of the world and which has a history through time".

¹⁰ W D HART, The Engines of the Soul, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 1.

¹¹ Jaegwon KIM, Mind in a Physical World, (Cambridge MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press, 1998), p. 15.

These will do as adequate definitions of the dualism being investigated in the following pages.

b) Why 'defend'dualism?

My case for positing dualism will be that it provides the most plausible account of the data of human existence. That is, in order reasonably to account for the phenomena associated with human consciousness, we must posit both a physical and a non-physical principle of mind, and therefore both a physical and a non-physical principle of human nature. (By describing a principle as non-physical, I mean among other things that it is not governed by the laws of physics and chemistry, is not spatially extended, and cannot meaningfully be described in terms of molecules or atoms. This negative definition will be supplemented as we go on by the positive attributes that will be seen to characterise non-physical beings: consciousness, intellect and will, for example).

One aspect of dualism that will not be discussed here is the question of whether the hypothetical substantial immaterial soul is a properly human characteristic not shared by any other species. St Thomas, for instance, states clearly his position that this is the case;¹² Descartes notoriously held that animals do not have the attribute of consciousness; Richard Swinburne is clearly inclined to the opposite view,¹³ while John Foster is ambivalent but cautiously suggests the possibility of the opposite view.¹⁴ If it is in fact the

¹² Cf. St Thomas AQUINAS, Summa Theologiae, la, q. 75, art. 3: "Ex quo relinquitur quod cum animae brutorum animaliumper se non operentur, non sint subsistentes [...]".

¹³ Richard SWINBURNE, The Evolution of Soul, revised edition, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 199.

¹⁴ John FOSTER, The Immaterial Self, (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 236-237.

case, it does not seem unreasonable to ask, Why should the human species be marked by this odd and unprecedented aberration, alone (as far as we can see) in all the cosmos? However, we have no idea what animal consciousness is like and should hesitate to guess what it 'must' be like. In no sense am I attempting to prove that dualism is or is not true of animal existence; our strictly 'exterior' experience of animal awareness prevents us from generalising what it is or must be like, and seems to force us into a cautious agnosticism on the question, at least for the purpose of this discussion.

c) Another sort of dualism

The expression 'dualism' is also used in the phrase 'property dualism'; a subtle and sophisticated position concerning the mind-body relationship that is defined by those who hold it in sharp contradistinction from substance dualism. According to David Chalmers, property dualism maintains that

[...] conscious experience involves properties of an individual that are not entailed by the physical properties of that individual, although they may depend lawfully on those properties. Consciousness is & feature of the world over and above the physical features of the world. This is not to say it is a separate "substance"; the issue of what it would take to constitute a dualism of substances seems quite unclear to me. All we know is that there are properties of individuals in this world - the phenomenal properties - that are ontologically independent of physical properties¹⁵.

We shall examine property dualism more thoroughly in Chapter II. For the moment, let me simply distinguish between it and substance dualism (the position

¹⁵ David CHALMERS, The Conscious Mind, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 125.

endorsed in these pages). Substance dualism, it would seem, can accept all of the affirmations made in the above definition of property dualism except for its explicit denial of the existence of a 'thinking substance'.

When we come to the eight arguments that support the dualist hypothesis, it will be seen that some of them do not obviously establish substance dualism as opposed to some broader dualism of principles, such as the property dualism just mentioned. I shall acknowledge this feet in those instances where it obtains. Despite this occasional equivocality, the arguments to be presented in Chapter I together do constitute a case for the plausibility specifically of substance dualism.

This raises the problem of what to call this putative non-physical principle of consciousness and cognition. With respect to the physical principle, there is no question about the legitimacy of employing the specific term 'brain' or the broader but equally acceptable 'body'; for the non-physical principle, common English usage suggests such diverse names as 'soul', 'spirit', 'psyche', or even 'mind'. 'Soul' is a familiar enough term and bears often enough the connotation of non-physicality that it can be used without incoherence to name the putative non-physical principle of cognition, and indeed of personality. Of course it is clear that not all those who speak of 'soul' intend by it a non-physical entity at all. Where it appears in these pages without further qualification, soul denotes the (putative) non-physical principle of cognition and personality. Moreover, this discussion is intended as an essay in philosophical theology, and will not avoid the religious and theological implications of positing a substantial soul distinct from the body. On the contrary, I shall venture to discuss these issues directly in Chapter IV.

d) Is dualism ultimately a religious affirmation?

While there will be a discussion of theological issues in Chapter IV, the first chapter does not concern properly theological notions of soul at all. In theory, an orthodox Christian, for instance, could hold the physicalist position that all cognitive functions are reducible to, supervene on or correspond dependently with the operations or properties of the brain and still affirm by virtue of his or her religious faith that there is a non-physical component of the personality that survives bodily death and awaits the Resurrection anticipated by Christian eschatology. By contrast, Chapter Fs discussion postulates something quite distinct; that cognitive functions can only be explained if one posits a substantial soul, not necessarily a soul that can survive bodily death. (Swinburne calls this position 'soft dualism'¹⁶). In short, there will be no attempt here to show that immortality is a necessary feature of the soul. On the other hand, it is clear that, while postulating a soul does not necessarily commit one to affirming immortality, nonetheless evidence, - if such exists, - for personal survival after bodily death would be strong evidence for an immaterial soul and thus for dualism. The reason for this is clear: if a person can be said to survive bodily death and to retain in a meaningful way some degree of his or her identity and even some degree of his or her faculties, it seems it would be because there is a substantial non-physical principle of his or her nature. As C D Broad affirmed in his classic study of mind, "if there be reason to believe that a human mind can ever exist and function apart from a human body, it will be almost impossible to accept the

¹⁶ Cf. Richard SWINBURNE, The Evolution of Soul, revised edition, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 10.

epiphenomenalist theory of the mind and its relations to the body."¹⁷ This observation will be important in a later chapter, but in the first chapter I shall not be discussing the problem of immortality. One of the surprising discoveries of this investigation has been the theological significance of the issue for writers on quite different sides of the debate.

In summary, the first chapter will investigate the plausibility of mind-body dualism on the basis of the most manifest phenomena of consciousness and cognition so as to establish whether it is meaningful and reasonable to posit a substantial immaterial soul. Whether other qualities, such as immortality or individual creation by God, may be attributed to this soul, is a separate discussion.

e) The problem of artificial intelligence

I shall not be addressing, except peripherally, the issue of artificial intelligence (AI). If the position that I am arguing here is true, then genuine 'strong' AI is impossible, since while human industry can manufacture ever more sophisticated physical artefacts, manufacturing an immaterial soul as I have defined it seems beyond human capabilities. However, if genuine AI is in fact shown to be impossible on other grounds, whether in principle or merely in terms of practical feasibility, it does not necessarily follow that the dualist position is true. For example, Sir Roger Penrose and John Searle both appear to doubt that genuine AI will ever be possible; they maintain that human cognition cannot be duplicated, but their models of the mind-body relationship remain within the pale of

¹⁷ Charlie Dunbar BROAD, The Mind and its Place in Nature, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1925), p. 481, emphasis in original.

physicalism¹⁸. If soul exists, then strong AI cannot exist; but if strong AI cannot exist, it does not follow that soul exists, since the 'unduplicatible' principle of cognition could hypothetically be (ultimately) physical in nature. The latter is close to the affirmation made by some non-reductive physicalists, a position that will be examined more closely in Chapter II.

J) The gratuity of mind-brain dualism?

As we shall see, critics of mind-brain dualism insist how difficult it is for scientific minds to deal seriously with the suggestion that there is an immaterial entity, not subject to immediate empirical verification, operative at the very centre of human cognition. The impressive consensus with which substance dualism is disdained by most scholars interested in neuroscience raises the question of why it should be investigated seriously, still less be granted any kind of provisional possession of the field pending such an investigation. Is the onus probandi not squarely on the shoulders of those who posit such a nebulous, even spooky, substance? If dualism were proposed as a scientific hypothesis to account for manifestly neuromechanical activities that remain as yet unexplained, then dualism would indeed appear to be a gratuitous and unscientific hypothesis, and its explanatory and predictive value for neuroscience could well be insignificant. This may be granted; we see that objections to dualism's 'unscientific' character, far from being fatal to the dualist position, in fact clarify the fact that dualism is not a scientific hypothesis (not

¹⁸ Cf Sir Roger PENROSE, Shadows of the Mind, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 393ff. and passim. Cf John SEARLE, "Minds, brains and programs", in The Mind's I, edited by Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter, (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 353ff.

even, like Descartes' infamous pineal gland, a particularly poor one) but a philosophical position. (The reality that to different domains of phenomena different modes of inquiry are suitable is too axiomatic to require demonstration. An ethicist, a legal scholar, an archaeologist, a historian, a religious scholar and a clinician would all have very different approaches and preoccupations in their professional attitude to, let us say, the same preserved body dredged up from some Irish peat bog, for instance). If one grants that dualism is a hypothesis not in neuroscience but in philosophical and theological inquiry -germane, indeed, to neuroscience, and profoundly interested in and respectful of its findings and speculations - then dualism is worthy of investigation. It is not necessarily even an implicit criticism of the methodological naturalism of the natural sciences. In the words of Charles Hartshorne, "I recognise that the material mode of description is that part of the complete mode which is capable of scientific precision, and that, accordingly, 'methodological materialism,' or the restriction of attention to this mode, is a natural bias among scientists"¹⁹. We shall examine some of the positive rational support for substance dualism as we advance through the arguments. Suffice it to note here that as a philosophical position, dualism has none of the presumptuous strangeness it would have if it were proposed as a hypothesis in neuroscience. As John Beloff says,

The thesis of this [work], if it can be stated in two words, is that Mind exists, or, to be more explicit, that minds, mental entities and mental phenomena exist as ultimate constituents of the world in which we live. There was a time when such a proposition would have been regarded as a truism, scarcely worth a paragraph, certainly not worth a

¹⁹ Charles HARTSHORNE, The Logic of Perfection, (Lasalle, IL: Open Court Publishing Co., 1962), p.

217.

book, but today it can be defended only by those who are not afraid to be considered outmoded in their thinking²⁰.

Sir Karl Popper makes perhaps too strong a claim when he affirms that "all thinkers of whom we know enough to say anything definite on their position, up to and including Descartes, were dualist interactionists."²¹ Presumably, for instance, the Epicureans would be an exception to this claim²². Certainly, nonetheless, a significant array of philosophers (and even modern neuroscientists, notably Sir Charles Sherrington²³, Wilder Penfield²⁴ and Sir John Eccles) were dualists. Thus, the position merits at least some attention, if only for the sake of historical curiosity.

²⁰ John BELOFF, op. cit., p. 11.

²¹ Karl POPPER, The Self and its Brain, (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1977), p. 152.

²² Cf Frederick COPLESTON, A History of Philosophy, vol. I: Greece and Rome, (Westminster, MD: Newman Bookshop, 1946), p.401ff.

²³ Consider, for instance: "The physico-chemical [...] produced a unified machine from what without it would be merely a collocation of commensal organs. The psychical creates from psychical data a percipient, thinking and endeavouring mental individual. Though our exposition kept these two systems and their integrations apart, they are largely complemental and life brings them co-operatively together at innumerable points. Not that the physical is ever anything but physical, or the psychical anything but psychical." (C S SHERRINGTON, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (new edition), (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1947), from the "Foreword to 1947 Edition").

²⁴ Cf. Wilder PENFIELD, The Mystery of Mind, (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 4 and p. 80.

CHAPTER I; A Case for Substance Dualism

The basis for this chapter is a phenomenological investigation of human consciousness. By 'phenomenological' I mean simply that this inquiry will strive to pay heed to the phenomena of cognition, to the appearances of consciousness; to the way cognition discloses itself to the interested beholder. In keeping with phenomenological realism, I am proceeding as though with the assumption that

[t]he mind is essentially intentional. There is no "problem of knowledge" or "problem of the external world," there is no problem about how we get to "extramental" reality, because the mind should never be separated from reality from the beginning. Mind and being are moments to each other; they are not pieces that can be segmented out of the whole to which they belong²⁵.

Though this is a controversial assumption to make, one must consider that if the assumption is not made, - if one speculates that our minds may not be able to know the world, - then this inquiry and every other inquiry is simply pointless until the more fundamental epistemological question is resolved.

Some arguments for mind-brain dualism

The principal arguments for dualism appear to be of eight kinds. Six are positive arguments from (respectively) understanding, self-reflectivity, continuity of consciousness, irreducibility of consciousness, logical necessity, said free mil. The

²⁵ Robert SOKOLOWSKI, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 25.

seventh and eighth kinds of argument are not positive arguments for dualism but negative arguments that the alternative, physicalism, is implausible. There are three additional lines of argument that I shall not consider in this chapter; first, fromparapsychological phenomena²⁶, since the alleged phenomena in question are highly controversial; the second, from arguments for idealism²⁷, for though idealism affirms with dualism the non-physicality of mind, it goes far beyond dualism in affirming the non-physicality of everything else as well, at least so far as our ability to know it is concerned; and the third, Sir John Eccles' claim that dualism is contrary to biological evolution and the known laws of physics²⁸, because examining dualism in this perspective would deviate from the strictly philosophical approach I am attempting to employ.

1) An argument from understanding: "The intentionality of consciousness"

The expression 'intentionality of consciousness' is a familiar one in the lexicon of phenomenology and philosophy of mind. 'Intentionality of consciousness', or 'intentionality' tout court, refers to the fact that mental events are always about something; consciousness is always consciousness of something; awareness always has an

²⁶ Cf. John BELOFF, The Existence of Mind, (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1962). Also his The Relentless Question, (Jefferson NC: McFarland & Co., 1990). Cf. also Bruce GREYSON and Charles FLYNN, The Near Death Experience: Problems, prospects, perspectives, (Springfield IL: Charles C Thomas Publishers, 1984). Also Stephen E. BRAUDE, The Limits of Influence, (Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1997). For a sceptical appraisal of alleged parapsychological phenomena, cf. Antony FLEW, "Parapsychology: Science or Pseudoscience?" in Paul Kurtz (ed.), A Skeptic's Handbook of Parapsychology, (Buffalo NY: Prometheus, 1985).

²⁷ Cf. John FOSTER, "The succinct case for idealism", in Objections to Physicalism, edited by Howard Robinson, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 293-313. Cf. also his The Case for Idealism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).

²⁸ Cf. Sir John ECCLES, The Human Psyche, (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 19-20.

object. Not only is consciousness difficult to imagine without reference to a content of some kind, but it is meaningless without such a reference. Human cognition is essentially and intrinsically thematic, intentional, inseparable from 'aboutness'. It is the very identity of the mind to be aware of an object, whether that object is presented through the five senses, through imagination or reminiscence, through intuitive understanding, insight or a process of reasoning. This reality has important consequences, among them the conclusion that there is no 'external' world that the mind must labour mightily to attain; there is simply the world, of which the intentional subject is one part. Even before the intentionality of consciousness is reflective and self-aware, it is operative. A three-year-old child, though she never questions the general reliability of her perceptions (nor, therefore, affirms it, for that matter), lives an intentional existence of ceaseless attentiveness to the world and indeed has already begun formulating discursively the problems and dilemmas this attentiveness harvests²⁹.

Roland Puccetti offers a description of intentionality that usefully relates it to its phenomenological roots:

Intentionality I take to be Brentano's thesis that mental acts always have directedness upon objects, whereas the correct description of a physical entity never points beyond itself to anything else.³⁰

²⁹ Of course states of sleep and other forms of unconsciousness appear to be exceptions to this observation. Eccles suggests (in The Self and its Brain, Springer-Verlag 1977, p. 371ff.) that dreaming or oblivion are what result when the mind goes looking for data (so to speak) and finds that there is no signal coming in from outside.

³⁰ Roland PUCCETTI, "The heart of the mind: intentionality vs. intelligence", in The Case for Dualism, edited by John Smythies and John Beloff, (Charlottesville VA: University Press of Virginia, 1989), p. 255.

Now, intentionality grasps the world under its several aspects (colour, shape, quantity, etc. in the case of sensory perceptions, imaginations and imaginative reminiscences) but above all under its aspect of intelligibility. Intelligibility is the handle by which, above all, the mind holds onto the world to which its attention is directed. I look to the left; my senses are flooded with light and colours, with a clear object close by and a more dimly perceived jumble of objects forming a back- and foreground. My mind does not simply passively receive these stimuli, but spontaneously and at first unreflectively 'reaches into' this object and its surroundings to perceive its intelligible content: It is a lamp. I know other things about the meaning of this object: It is turned on. It is usefUl for reading. Previous experiences give me common labels for the object ('lamp', 'une lampe') as well as a vast array of meanings-about-the-lamp: It has been in the family for years. It uses a fluorescent bulb, which remains cool, unlike an incandescent bulb. It is powered, through hundreds of kilometres of copper wire, by magnetised turbines spun around by the dammed waters of one of the rivers of northern Quebec, and so forth. Now, all of these 'intentions' of my mind going out to meet the lamp are quite beyond the bald sensory experience of light and colour (or of cold metal if I touched it). My mind grasps the lamp as intelligible. Intelligibility, the presence of meaning, is what my mind seeks and finds, often without my deliberately directing it, often without clear self-reflective awareness of what I am doing³¹.

The scholastic tradition in epistemology describes this process of 'distilling' non-physical meaning from the objects (even physical) it which it inheres as 'abstrahere', 'abstraction', a word whose implicit concrete imagery is aptly expressed by the image of distillation - cf. Jacques MARITAIN, Introduction to Philosophy, (Westminster MD: Christian Classics, 1991), p. 113.

Understanding is not such that we either enjoy it or lack it altogether. To be human and to be aware is to encounter only what is in some manner understood. Thus, it may be said that understanding is an unsought condition; we inexorably inhabit a world of intelligibles. But understanding as an engagement is an exertion; it is the resolve to inhabit an ever more intelligible, or an ever less mysterious world³².

One may be able to imagine or conceive what sensory perception could "look like" at the neural or cellular level; there is no absurdity in positing light-sensitive rods and colour-sensitive cones, pressure-sensitive nerve endings in fingertips, stimulated by contact with the lamp and transmitting electrical impulses through the nerves to one's brain. Yet, what nerve ending does 'lampness' stimulate? What kind of cell is sensitive not to light or touch but to meaning? What neural chemicals constituted understanding when Faraday understood why electricity behaves the way it does? What do one's brain cells look like when they detect logical necessity (as in "colour requires spatial extension"), or moral excellence ("the fire-fighters ran up the stairs of the burning building to save those trapped inside"), or aesthetic splendour (Brandenburg Concerto no. 6, to most hearers) or a notion of quantity (Archimedes' intuitive approximation of the value of ti)? Such questions seem ludicrous. However, meaning is at the centre of human cognitive existence, defining the human mind which essentially intends-the-intelligible. Intelligibility is irreducible; it cannot consist ultimately (the way stimulation of the visual cortex can realistically be said to consist ultimately) of a certain array of molecules, atoms and electrons. Therefore the mind must consist (among other constituents) of a non-physical principle of understanding, which I call soul. (For the purposes of this discussion,

³² Michael OAKESHOTT, On Human Conduct, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 1.

I am considering what may be called the moral sense as a form of understanding; this has the advantage of being compatible with most ethical models, whether they derive their force from pragmatic, deontological, religious and/or other considerations, thus prescinding from the problem of the ground of moral reasoning). As Puccetti remarks,

[...] letters on paper or raised Braille bumps have no meaning in and of themselves; their propositional content, if any arises in the mind of a beholder already possessing a relevant semantic scheme. For that matter, the same dissociation must hold for patterns of neural activity in the human brain. Suppose you come into the room and say to me, "It's raining." On current knowledge of brain function, it is not until nerve impulses triggered by your acoustic speech signals reach Wernicke's area in my left cerebral hemisphere that a mental act of understanding takes place. I understand you to be giving me a weather report. But it is surely not the case that a correct description of neuronal activity going on at the cortical juncture of parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes in my left hemisphere is itself about the state of the weather outside.³³

The irreducible character of understanding as a major operation of human cognition can be seen in several ways. Insight, for instance, when a person arrives at an important, perhaps epochal understanding in a sudden instant of clarity, is an example of the irreducibility of understanding to a mechanistic operation. Even if it were granted that computation is a 'mechanistic' process of reasoning, crucial insights are strikingly non-computational in character. Consider a few watershed discoveries by figures in the history of ideas, such as Archimedes' method for approximating n, Darwin's grasp of the

³³ Roland PUCCETTI, "The heart of the mind: intentionality vs. intelligence", in The Case for Dualism, edited by John Smythies and John Beloff, (Charlottesville VA: University Press of Virginia, 1989), pp. 260-261.

immense explanatory power of natural selection, Husserl's return to things themselves, Buber's I-Thou and I-It dichotomy, Marx's insight into the crucial role of labour and economic forces in the shaping of history; these are not conclusions coming at the end of series of algorithms, but bursts of insight that grasp in a moment some intrinsic truth about the nature of things. John Morgan reports that, by his own account, Sir Roger Penrose's "best work arose not from any deductive, logical process but from sudden intuitions and insights into an indescribably beautiful Platonic realm"³⁴. From these heuristic insights patient algorithmic reasoning can and usually does follow, but the foundational insights cannot be seen as simply the logical, predictable conclusion of prior lines of reasoning. They are insights dense with truth, supposing keen and alert understanding that can perceive meaning:

[.. .]insight comes suddenly and unexpectedly [...] it is reached, in the last analysis, not by learning rules, not by following precepts, not by studying any methodology. Discovery is a new beginning. It is the origin of new rules that supplement or even supplant the old. Genius is creative. It is genius precisely because it disregards established routines, because it originates the novelties that will be the routines of the future. Were there rules for discovery, then discoveries would be mere conclusions. Were there precepts for genius, then men of genius would be hacks³⁵

Another apparently irreducible manifestation of understanding is the phenomenon of humour and laughter. Even more clearly than is the case with sadness (which has more obviously emotional and physiological causes), laughter involves not only a sweeping

³⁴ John MORGAN, The Undiscovered Mind, (New York: Touchstone, 1999), p. 240.

³⁵ Bernard LONERGAN, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), p. 29.

grasp of meaning (as when the significance of a punch line hits us) but the capacity to perceive incongruity or absurdity. Not all absurdity or incongruity is humorous; 2 + 2 = 5 is absurd but if it is funny, it is so only in a very mild way. On the other hand, the humour of many forms of satire that identify and emphasise human foibles seem able even to cross otherwise impermeable cultural barriers; e.g., the broad appeal of Cervantes' Don Quixote.

Howard Robinson addresses an important physicalist account of intentionality in the following way:

In general Churchland creates the impression that so long as the mode of representation employed is non-verbal, the traditional problems of intentionality and physicalism do not arise. But this cannot be the heart of the matter, for 'aboutness' is the problem and that is a property of anything that can be called a 'representation', whether or not it is linguistic. The magic notion which is supposed to bridge the gap between the mental and the physical is information. Information is held to be naturally present in the physical world, passim, and to possess intentionality because it is about something. [...] The obvious problem with any attempt to treat information physicalistically is that a signal is only information to someone, rather in the way that the marks that constitute the writing in a book would have no sense and convey nothing in themselves, if there were no readers.³⁶

2) An argument from self-reflective consciousness or subjectivity

This line of argument is closely related to but distinct from the first. In the last argument, I emphasised the fact that consciousness is always intentional, is always 'consciousness-of something, and that the aspect of consciousness we call mind is

³⁶ Howard ROBINSON, "Introduction", in Objections to Physicalism, edited by Howard Robinson, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 16.

conscious-of-meaning. In this argument the point is that mind is also conscious-of-itself-of itself as mind. It is self-reflective or subjective. Not only is the human mind conscious of meaning, not only does it know meaning, but also human consciousness knows that it knows. It is a self-reflective consciousness; it is a subject that is conscious of being a subject. It is both language and metalanguage (and indeed, meta-metalanguage, as the progression of this self-awareness is unbounded); it is a set capable of calling into question and examining its own coherence within a larger set, and so on ad infinitum.³⁷ It seems to be this capacity for self-criticism that allows us to distinguish confidently between dreaming and waking. When I am dreaming, I have no control over the questions I ask in the dream, and if the sentence "I am awake" occurs to me, it does not occur to me to subject the sentence to verification. When, however, I am awake, I can instantly ask myself if I am awake, how I know I am awake; and the feet that I can deliberately subject my consciousness to critique persuades me that I am in feet in possession of my senses. Now, this capacity for self-transcendence is a remarkable thing and bespeaks a principle of consciousness capable of standing outside the conscious individual (as it were) and evaluating itself. This principle cannot meaningfully be reduced to a physical entity. Self-transcendence seems simply meaningless when predicated of a physical entity, wherefore one must posit a non-physical principle of consciousness. It would not be enough to propose that an entity with the capacity for self-transcendence might arise or emerge from

³⁷ These references to metalanguage and set allude, of course, to the work of Kripke and Godel respectively. Godel's incompleteness theorem has a striking application to the problem of consciousness, as Roger Penrose discusses at length (cf PENROSE, Shadows of the Mind).

a wholly physical entity, since this fails to explain how the crucial capacity could in fact arise from a matrix which cannot meaningfully possess that capacity.

3) An argument from the continuity of consciousness

This argument points out that the human mind is conscious of being a single entity across significant stretches of time and across the multiplicity of events that define neuromechanical activity. To this we may add the fact that not all cerebral events, though one maybe conscious of them, are directly present to one's consciousness, but these are clearly distinct from the multitude of conscious events occurring throughout our waking hours.

This can be illustrated in the following way. At any moment of one's waking life, one can advert to the massive range and number of events of which one is conscious, dimly or clearly; this becomes clearest when one considers a situation especially rich in stimuli (for instance, bicycling down a busy road to an anxiety-fraught meeting while carrying on a conversation with a friend). However, even in an excessively tranquil situation (e.g., lying down in an empty, darkened, soundproof room) one is simultaneously conscious of a range of things. Now, at any waking moment, one can advert to a number things that are occurring in oneself, regulated by one's brain and nervous system, of which one is normally unconscious; breathing, pulse, digestion, involuntary nervous events (such as the classic knee-jerk reaction, or the distinctly unpleasant burning sensation when the ulnar nerve is bumped) and so forth. Then, one can advert to a range of stimuli of which one is continually but dimly aware: familiar sounds in the distance, light flooding one's

eyes from familiar objects in the room, vague recollections of a nature engagement that will affect one's schedule. Finally, one can advert to the things that are quite explicitly occupying one's thoughts and senses: sudden, unfamiliar noises, objects found in unaccustomed places, a piece of music one is concentrating on learning, the faces in a crowd when one is energetically scanning for a friend, and so on. Now, these stimuli and preoccupations can occur simultaneously; whatever their precise nature, during our waking hours we are simultaneously conscious to varying degrees of several things, while a host of other things are going on inconspicuously in our brains³⁸. However, across the range of discrete conscious (and unconscious but still neural) events, we retain a vivid awareness of being a single percipient, a single consciousness, a single subject. Part of the stress of over-stimulation is precisely that one is only a single mind, and a single mind "can only take so much". Though distinct and unrelated events are occurring in one's consciousness through the senses, the imagination, the emotions and the intellect, one does not have as many consciousnesses as one has discrete stimuli, nor even as many consciousnesses as one has distinct faculties. In other words, human cognition displays the phenomenon of radical unity, of radical singularity, despite the diversity and indeed dissipation of its several functions. The problem of reconciling this unity of consciousness with the multiplicity of the neural functions that are held to subtend it is often called 'the binding problem' in the philosophy of mind³⁹. The human mind, therefore, must involve a

³⁸ The fact that consciousness is inconceivable without a shifting set of perceptions that "animate" it that inspired Hume to equate mind with those perceptions while denying that there is any substantial entity to ground them. This is the critical difference between Cartesian and Humean dualism; cf. John FOSTER, The Immaterial Self: A defence of the Cartesian dualist conception of mind, (London: Routledge, 1991).

³⁹ Cf John HORGAN, The Undiscovered Mind: How the human brain defies replication, medication and explanation, (New York: Touchstone Books, 1999), p. 236.

principle that is a ground of unity and organisation, standing sufficiently apart from the observable functions of the mind to advert to them as distinct events but also underlying their unity so as to remain aware that these distinct events involve the same single subject. This principle, therefore, must transcend the several discrete functions that are the observable manifestation of mind. It must transcend them, moreover, not only across simultaneous diversity but across stretches of time: the same mind that experiences simultaneous discrete events as a single whole also experiences the passage of time as a progression affecting a single subject. It is a most common experience to be conscious of what is occurring right now to oneself, and at the same time to be able to evoke, to recall events from an hour ago - from yesterday - from last year - from twenty years ago - from distant infancy. All of these are recalled as experiences that occurred in the life of the selfsame single subject. Thus human cognition involves a principle of unity and continuity that coexists with, but that must transcend, the physical reality of subjective experience.

What is the locus of this unity and continuity of consciousness? What is the seat of this single 'ego"? The sense of being a single being unified across a little bit of space and a lot of time requires a 'ground' of consciousness that is not wholly physical, not wholly subject to the body's changefulness and multiplicity.

Geoffrey Madell argues a very similar case based on what he calls "personal identity". He too argues that the unicity of experiences in and across time cannot satisfactorily be explained in physicalist terms:

In order to claim any [simultaneous] group of experiences as mine, I must first establish that they satisfy the suggested criteria [of being related to the single same body]. But I can

only do this if I first identify the experiences in question, and just doing this is to identify them as mine. Nor can it be supposed that this difficulty is confined to the case of simultaneous experiences. The same absurdity confronts us if it is claimed that what unites a set of experiences over time is their being all related to the same body. This must be so, since on the criterion of bodily continuity the fact that I have the clearest possible memory of a past experience as an experience of mine and that no one else has such a memory or ever will still leaves us with the question, did that experience happen to me?⁴⁰

Madell concludes that the nature of personal identity is such as to support a dualism, if only of properties, but that this particular argument shows that property dualism cannot avoid becoming substance dualism:

These considerations show conclusively that the conception of personal identity, which I have argued for, is totally incompatible with physicalism. What we must now look at is the double aspect view of the mind-body relationship [or what will be referred to in these pages as property dualism]. [...] It has never been clear to me what is to prevent the double aspect position from collapsing into Cartesian dualism, and I think a consideration of the way the issue of personal identity impinges on it shows that it does in fact so collapse.⁴¹

Madell explains that one can attribute "the property of subjectivity" to both the "mental and physical aspects", or "restrict" it "to the mental". The second certainly appears to be the case, virtually by definition. "But," if this is the case,

this leads immediately to Cartesian dualism, rather than a double aspect position. For we have in effect committed ourselves to saying that only the mental side is really me, and that in so far as a body is mine it is so only because it is related to that which has subjectivity

⁴⁰ Geoffrey MADELL, "Personal identity and the mind-body problem", in The Case for Dualism, edited by John Beloff and John Smythies, (Charlottesville VA: University Press of Virginia, 1989), p. 26.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 39.

in its own right: my mind, or self. Moreover, if only the mental side has the property of subjectivity, only the mental side has what must go with this, an identity through time which is strict and unanalysable. This commits us even more clearly to dualism.⁴²

This is so, in Madell's view, because of what he calls "McTaggart's basic insight, that no objective description can entail or imply a first-person ascription"⁴³.

Madell seems to be saying that the identification (even under putative "double aspects") of mental with physical violates the completely different approach of "objective descriptions" and "first-person ascriptions". For instance, no account of any set of facts can ever convey the state of (say) "being aware of the immensity of the sky"; nor can the content of a first-person experience ever convey the facts about the physical state of the observer. Physicalism attributes to the physical world a burden it is incapable of supporting and a "methodology" totally foreign to what is esteemed as scientific objectivity: the burden of feeling "what it is like to be" a human being⁴⁴. No objective description can capture or convey these qualia to an observer.

4) An argument from the irreducibility of consciousness

At the heart of John Foster's work The Immaterial Self, in which the author defends "the Cartesian dualist conception of the mind", is an intricate discussion of many

⁴²Ibid, pp. 39-40.

⁴³ Ibid., p. 36.

⁴⁴ With apologies to Thomas Nagel for paraphrasing the title of his memorable article, on behalf of a position with which he cannot be supposed to sympathise. (Cf Thomas NAGEL, "What is it like to be a bat?", in Douglas HOFSTADTER et al. (eds.), The Mind's /, (New York: Basic Books, 2000).).

issues arising from the dualist thesis. Concluding at one point, for instance, that "I shall assume that the corporealist position has been reflated and that the dualist claim is correct,"⁴⁵ Foster devotes the other sections of his book to such topics as clarifying whether the Cartesian model of dualism is more reasonable than Hume's, addressing the alleged lack of positive attributes in the self as postulated by Cartesian dualism, and discussing many details of the various models of the brain-mind relationship. For our present purposes, the most important question is, On what basis does Foster consider that the "corporealist" claim has been reflated and the dualist claim established?

His central argument seems to be that while a mental event (such as pain) may be correlated with observable physiological events (such as the firing of C-fibres in the brain), mental events as such are not reducible to anything else. (In Foster's terminology, they are "fundamental" realities). For all the physical correlates, pain itself (or any other qualia or consciousness-event, taken as the state of experiencing or being-in-pain) is just pain and cannot be decomposed into anything more fundamental. "Thus it just seems obvious that someone's being in pain, or someone's having a visual experience, involves something genuinely additional to all the non-mental factors to which the theorist might seek to reduce it."⁴⁶

There is no absurdity in decomposing any physical reality into some array of more fundamental entities; indeed, a complete knowledge of the properties of more fundamental entities (such as atoms and molecules) would allow us confidently to predict properties of

⁴⁵ John FOSTER, The Immaterial Self, p. 212.

⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 150.

those same entities when they co-exist in a certain disposition (such as water when molecules of H₂O co-exist at a certain temperature). This is not the case, however, with consciousness:

The upshot of this is that the forms of constitution postulated by the mental reductionist are simply not comprehensible: given their sui generis character, we have no way of understanding how mental facts could be non-mentalistically constituted.⁴⁷

Foster further clarifies the nature of the incomprehensibility of physicalist claims:

It is not that the constitutional claims are semantically defective or involve some implicit contradiction. It is just that we can never achieve a perspective in which we can grasp how such constitutional relationships are possible - a perspective in which we can understand how such facts as Smith's being in pain and Mary's believing that dodos are extinct could be derived from facts of a non-mental kind.⁴⁸

The human mind, in this account of things, is thus what Foster terms a basic mental subject:

An entity qualifies as a mental subject if and only if it is something which has mental states or engages in mental activities [...] It qualifies as a basic (mental) subject if and only if it is represented as a mental subject in the conceptually fundamental account (i.e. in terms not amenable to further conceptual analysis) of the metaphysically fundamental reality (i.e. the reality of metaphysically basic facts).⁴⁹

⁴⁷ Ibid., p. 156.

⁴⁸/to/.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 203.

An objection to which this perspective appears to be susceptible is that, while it is all very well to describe pain and other mental states as non-physical, they are states which can sometimes be predicated truly of manifestly corporeal beings (namely, human persons).

Thus suppose Jones [...] is in pain. Our natural inclination is to accept the following three propositions. First, the pain belongs to a basic subject; in other words, whatever the possibilities for conceptual and metaphysical reduction, there being something which is in pain is an irreducible feature of the situation and requires recognition in the philosophically fundamental account. Second, the basic subject who suffers the pain is Jones himself [...] Third, as a human individual, Jones has a corporeal nature: he is not a purely spiritual entity, like an angel or a disembodied soul [.. .]⁵⁰

This appears to present a problem. Since Jones, the basic subject who is in pain, is manifestly a corporeal being, how can the dualist claim, that all basic subjects are wholly non-physical, be sustained? "[.. .H]ow is it possible for something both to be a physical object and to have, in a way which is not amenable to conceptual or metaphysical reduction, additional intrinsic attributes which are extraneous to its physical character [?]"⁵¹

But this is only a problem for the property dualist (whom we shall examine in greater detail later) who describes mental properties as "intrinsic attributes" of physical entities, attributes "extraneous to its physical character". The substance dualist by definition claims that the person is a "basic mental subject" (thus accounting for consciousness that cannot be reduced to non-mental terms) but does not extend the scope

⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 207.

⁵¹/to/., p. 208.

of this to include the person's corporeity. The latter is a genuine aspect of the person's existence, but is not described in terms that attempt to make corporeity bear the weight of being a basic mental subject in Foster's sense.

5) Arguments from logical necessity

An example of this kind of argument figures prominently in David Chalmers' The Conscious Mind. (Chalmers does not accept substance dualism but he does describe his position as property dualism, in contrast to an eliminative or reductive materialism that interprets consciousness as a physical property of physical entities). Chalmers writes:

1) In our world, there are conscious experiences.

2) There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not hold.

3) Therefore, facts about consciousness are further facts about our world, over and above the material facts.

4) So materialism is false.

Chalmers goes on to explain:

If a physically identical zombie world is logically possible, it follows that the presence of consciousness is an extra fact about our world, not guaranteed by the physical facts alone. The character of our world is not exhausted by the character supplied by the physical facts; there is an extra character due to the presence of consciousness [...]

We can use Kripke's image here. When God created the world, after ensuring that the physical facts held, he had more work to do. He had to ensure that the facts about consciousness held. The possibility of zombie worlds or inverted worlds showed that he had a choice. The world might have lacked experience, or it might have contained different experiences, even if all the physical facts had been the same. To ensure that the facts about consciousness are as they

are, further features had to be included in the world [...] This failure of materialism leads to a kind of dualism: there are both physical and non-physical features of the world⁵².

This argument is essentially Descartes' own argument, taken up in more recent times by W D Hart, that since we can imagine disembodied minds, the existence of minds is not necessarily dependent on bodies⁵³. Chalmers insists that this does not prove substance dualism but only property dualism. This objection will be addressed in Chapter II.

A very similar argument is Richard Swinburne's principal argument for substance dualism in his Gifford Lectures, The Evolution of Soul. Swinburne's argument is in two stages. First, he wishes to show that "knowledge of what happens to bodies or their parts will not show you for certain what happens to persons".⁵⁴ Then, he undertakes to show that "the most natural way of making sense of this fact is talking of persons as consisting of two parts, body and soul"⁵⁵.

Swinburne argues the first point in several ways. He argues, for instance, that transplanting each half of a given brain into a separate individual's head would produce two instantiations (in terms of memories and so forth) of what was previously a single person. Now, they cannot both be the same person at the same time, so we must assume that one or neither of them is in fact the original person; whence he concludes "however

⁵² David CHALMERS, op. cit., pp. 123-124, emphases in original, except "even if...the same", where emphasis is mine.

⁵³ Cf WDHART, op. cit.

⁵⁴ Richard SWINBURNE, The Evolution of Soul, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 9.

⁵⁵ Ibid., p. 147.

much we knew in such a situation about what happens to the parts of a person's body, we would not know for certain what happens to the person."⁵⁶ He proposes other thought-experiments to drive this point home: A man threatened with the double transplant of his brain into two separate persons would have no basis on which to choose a happy destiny for one and a miserable one for the other.⁵⁷ The possibility of living and functioning consciously as a disembodied being is not incoherent or logically impossible - for instance, "serious religious affirmations" of immortality, though possibly false, are not unintelligible.⁵⁸ The non-necessity of my consisting of this particular array of matter "shows that none of the matter of which my body is presently made is essential to my being the person that I am."⁵⁹

The second part of Swinburne's argument involves what he calls the "quasi-Aristotelian assumption: that a substance S₂ at t₂ is the same substance as an earlier substance Si at t\ only if 5₂is made of some of the same stuff as S\ (or stuff obtained therefrom by gradual replacement)."⁶⁰ This assumption, in other words, simply sets the criteria by which continuity can be established, in what seem to be uncontroversial terms: There can only be continuity in a meaningful sense if material from one thing persists in

⁵⁶ Ibid., pp. 148-149. This argument seems limited by the possibility that a brain transplant may not in fact be possible, or if possible would not involve a transmission of memories. In such a case, I would suggest, the evidence for some principle of personal identity other than the brain/body is strengthened rather than otherwise.

⁵⁷ Ibid., p. 149. ^5SCf.ibid., p. 152-153.

⁵⁹ Ibid., p. 153.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 154.

another. With this assumption and his earlier distinction between bodies and persons in hand, Swinburne concludes:

Given the quasi-Aristotelian assumption, and given, that for any present person who is currently conscious, there is no logical impossibility, whatever else may be true now of that person, that the person continue to exist without his body, it follows that that person must now actually have a part other than a bodily part which can continue, and which we may call his soul - and so that his possession of it is entailed by his being a conscious being. For there is not even a logical possibility that if I now consist of nothing but matter and the matter is destroyed, that I should nevertheless continue to exist. From the mere logical possibility of my continued existence there follows the actual fact that there is now more to me than my body; and that more is the essential part of myself.⁶¹

6) An argument from free will

This argument is based on a very controversial premise - that human agents are, at least some of the time, genuinely free and not determined. With John Beloff, I do not embark upon this argument without hesitation:

The free-will controversy is notoriously one of the most treacherous quicksands in all philosophy and I would have been much happier if I could have steered clear of it altogether. Where so many great philosophies have faltered I certainly have no ready answer and still less can I prove to the reader that free will is a reality. But the controversy is so central for the whole philosophy of mind that there is no escaping from it.⁶²

⁶¹ Ibid., p. 154.

⁶² John BELOFF, The Existence of Mind, (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1962), p. 141.

Like Beloff, too, "I am not so much concerned to solve this age-old puzzle as to show that the libertarian solution is a tenable one and to examine its implications for the mind-body problem."⁶³

The impression that human agents are able freely to choose in many circumstances between several options, even if it is illusory, is one that afflicts every conscious human being. On physicalist terms, it is perfectly understandable why this massive and vivid impression should be deemed illusory, since how can an organ purely physical in nature, and thus reducible to atoms and molecules, transcend the determinacy of its constituents and so flagrantly defy the ironclad determinacy of nature to choose 'freely'? On the other hand, if we bracket the physicalist explanatory model, why should such an illusion be so ubiquitous and absolute? How could the human species evolve such a completely invalid and false naive conviction? The situation is really without parallel. I feel hungry; well, there is such a thing as food⁶⁴. I feel tired; well, there is such a thing as rest. I feel sickness or pain; well, there are steps I can take to remove myself from harm's way or to retire and recuperate. I feel utterly free to (say) pick up this 'phone to my left or not, to lean back in this chair or not, to leap up from this keyboard and go fly a kite, and so on -ah, this is an illusion. I am not free at all. What I end up doing will be what I am inexorably bound to do by the ineluctable progress of chemical and physical processes in my brain. Why should I entertain this absolutely vivid illusion, along with every other man and woman? It is more reasonable to conclude that the impression and appearance of

Ibid.

⁶⁴ I am conscious as I write this last sentence of the influence of C S Lewis; if memory serves, this very statement "I feel hungry..." etc. can be found verbatim somewhere in his writings.

significant freedom ('freedom' and not 'indeterminacy' is the right word here, since the point is that I seem to have the power freely to determine a whole range of events) is a valid and accurate impression. There is, moreover, a far more pressing need for this conclusion than simply the unreasonableness of positing a universal illusion. If every event in my life is determined physically, then the operation of what feels like my reason is not an exception. If what feels like my reason is determined, then it cannot be trusted to distinguish between true and false, between logical and illogical, for it does not have the freedom to be thematic, to be governed by detected truth or falsehood; it is purely an illusion of free inquiry and deliberation attached to what is really the inexorable movement of my neural machinery. But then, if this is the case, my grounds for having concluded the existence of neural machinery in the first place are undermined - in which case I have no grounds for believing any more in determinacy (or anything else, for that matter, including this very line of reasoning). This, then, is our dilemma: either to posit physicalism and consequently chalk not only 'freedom' but 'reason' up to illusory epiphenomenal by-product; or else to accept the validity of reason and of the impression of freedom, and consequently posit a non-physical principle of cognition (which we call soul) to ground this transcendence. If we choose the first option, the discussion has not only to end, but really should not even have begun. Physicalism as an intellectual position is ultimately self-refuting⁶⁵. As Popper observes,

According to determinism, any theory such as say determinism is held because of a certain physical structure of the holder - perhaps of his brain. Accordingly, we are deceiving

⁶⁵ The first and most elegant presentation I ever encountered of this reductio ad absurdum was in C S Lewis, Miracles (London: Macmillan, I960),passim.

ourselves and are physically so determined as to deceive ourselves whenever we believe that there are such things as arguments or reasons which make us accept determinism.⁶⁶

The dilemma is similar to that which arises from the commonplace observation that we do not perceive things but rather the effects of things on our nerve endings. Taken to its logical extreme, this implicit denial of the objectivity of sense-perception also undermines the only reason we have for believing that such is the nature of sense-perception in the first place - namely, our (sensory) observation of perception in ourselves and others.

7) An argument against the physicalist alternative

We shall examine the varieties of physicalism in Chapter II; the fundamental affirmation that all physicalist positions share and that constitutes their principal objection to dualism is the premise that 'the physical domain is causally closed'. Physicalists do not necessarily deny outright (some do) that non-physical entities exist or that the very expression 'non-physical entity' can be construed as meaningful; but all physicalists by definition maintain that no non-physical entity, if such exists, can exert a causal influence on the world of our experience. In other words, the world is physical, explainable in physical terms, and if any entities exist that are not physical, they are not involved with this world in any significant sense.

The reasons for this basic position are numerous; the most important are, first, Occam's razor, and second, the sheer success of the physicalist worldview. Occam's

⁶⁶ Sir Karl POPPER, Objective Knowledge: An evolutionary approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972),

razor exhorts us to avoid postulating any more causes than are necessary to account for the phenomena at hand; to many thoughtful students of the mind-body problem, postulating a non-physical principle of cognition not accessible to empirical inquiry is gratuitous in the extreme. It is all the more unimpressive in the light of the astounding successes of the physicalist worldview in offering a coherent and rational explanation of phenomena in all other domains, and even in the realm of the human person in all respects other than human consciousness and cognition.

Some physicalist authors concede that, strictly speaking, no disproof of dualism on empirical grounds is possible, if only because no universal negation can be proved on empirical grounds, only logical grounds. They suggest that no such disproof is necessary, as the case for physicalism can be framed much more plausibly. The seventh kind of argument for dualism consists in a variation on this type of argumentation, except that it is offered from the opposing viewpoint.

From this perspective, I point out that, strictly speaking, no empirical proof of physicalism is possible - and this, for the same reason that physicalists themselves concede, namely that no empirical disproof of dualism is conceivable. Why is this so? It is so because by definition physicalism is not an empirical claim but a metaphysical one about the nature of things; and it is a metaphysical claim that consists at least implicitly in the denial that non-physical entities exist or, if they do, that they are causally relevant in the world. In other words, precisely because physicalism consists in a negation of any relevant reality outside that which is empirically accessible, it can be reduced to the

pp. 223-224.

affirmation that "the metaphysical claims made by dualism are false" - a universal negation, and not on logical grounds.

Stated more positively, this seventh argument for dualism could be presented as follows: The world can to a great extent be successfully explained in physicalist terms. There are, however, important phenomena (such as those listed in this chapter) that make much more sense if we postulate non-physical substances. This can be done without jeopardising the many ways in which physicalism provides a sensible and successful framework for interpreting the cosmos. Therefore dualism saves the appearances of all phenomena and concedes as far as possible the (prodigious) usefulness of the scientific method. However, as soon as the latter is no longer quite adequate to account for the phenomena, dualism does not elevate the scientific method into an imperative so inviolable that we must falsify the data of consciousness to accommodate its claims. On this account, physicalism is an arbitrary metaphysical claim - a denial - while dualism is the model of explanation that requires the fewest sweeping generalisations. Dualism can ask with interest (with what is usually called 'an open mind') whether there is evidence for survival of bodily death; physicalism must apparently rule the question out of court before the inquiry even begins.

8) Another argument against the physicalist alternative

This argument, briefly, is a riposte to the common objection that dualism cannot account for the interaction it posits between two quite different substances. It consists in the observation that physicalism cannot account for the "downward" causation of the

mental, whereas this causation is what dualism would expect. Like free will, the alleged downward causation of the mental is a controversial premise, but it is (like free will) buttressed by everything we are able to know about the phenomenon from within (from the first-person perspective).

For instance, it is a common experience to know that one has, say, a stressful meeting scheduled, and to forget it under the pressure or consolation of some other preoccupation. The knowledge of the meeting remains present though not present to consciousness; yet once it is restored to being present to consciousness by reminiscence, it can (and usually does) have a mild to significant effect on our brains and bodies: the newly-remembered meeting causes physical symptoms of stress and anxiety. Another example might be the physical exhilaration caused by a moment of insight or understanding, sometimes at a fairly abstract level. (I recall experiencing such exhilaration when I grasped the rationale behind the standard formula in calculus for approximating the area under a curve). Another example would be the very physical symptoms of fear one can suddenly experience when a realisation of peril dawns upon one - say, if a pharmacist realises that he or she has given an elderly patient the wrong medicine.

Dualist interactionism would expect such a reciprocal relationship between brain and mind since it perceives each one as a substance capable of acting and being acted upon: Brain injury can make focused concentration difficult, and mental events like remembering or realising can cause vigorous emotional and physical reactions. In contrast, physicalism, which conceives (in the form of physicalism that most strongly concedes the reality of the mental realm) of mental events as properties of physical

realities, cannot explain how a property can causally affect that on which it depends. It is always possible to claim (as property dualism does) that mental properties are a new kind of property that does not follow the same laws as physical properties; but in this case the physicalist position is compromised (as discussed above) by the idiosyncratically unique character of consciousness in the physical world. If it possible to describe mental events as properties of the physical world while they display none of the qualities one associates with any other part of the physical world, the identification of those properties as properties of the physical world is not an empirical observation but the logical expression of an a priori materialist premise.

To put this point another way: Property dualism acknowledges the unique character of the human mind, and is willing to describe mental qualities as a kind of property quite different from any properties observed anywhere in the physical world. However, in order to remain within a naturalistic framework, property dualism classifies these mental properties as properties of the physical world. Note the reasoning at work in this classification: Mental properties are classed a priori as properties of the physical world because failing to do so would undermine the all-important methodological materialism (in Hartshorne's phrase) of the natural sciences. They are not classified as properties of the physical world because they have been observed empirically to be so. In fact, such a classification requires one to categorise mental and physical properties together even though they do not manifest any common features to justify such a classification. Thus property dualism does not present any argument to warrant the

classification of mental properties as properties of the physical world; it assumes the classification for a clear and specific a priori reason.

Conclusion

In summary, in this chapter I have defined a plausible dualism as the hypothesis that human nature and consciousness - notably cognition - can only be adequately and reasonably accounted for if we posit a non-physical principle called 'soul' that interacts with the physical principle of human cognition, called 'brain' or 'body'. In particular I have focused on five features of cognition that appear to require the dualist hypothesis.

I shall now address the case for physicalist models of the brain-mind relationship and engage physicalists' principal objections to dualism, particularly those that have emerged from positions broadly identified as property dualism.

CHAPTER II; Physicalist Approaches to the Mind-Body Problem

In this chapter I shall present four important versions ofphysicalist alternatives to dualism.

The chief authors sympathetic to physicalism who will be presented here are Daniel Dennett, Jaegwon Kim, John Searle and David Chalmers. (A number of others will be seen when we come to examine physicalist objections in Chapter III).

a) Daniel Dennett and the crux of the issue

Daniel Dennett's important work on consciousness, Consciousness Explained, sets out clearly and cogently the author's objections to dualism, which he considers to be "deservedly in disrepute today"⁶⁷. His principal objection is one he situates in the broader perspective of ongoing debates about the mind-body problem:

The standard objection to dualism was all too familiar to Descartes himself in the seventeenth century, and it is fair to say that neither he nor any subsequent dualist has ever overcome it convincingly. If mind and body are distinct things or substances, they nevertheless must interact [...] Hence the view is often called Cartesian interactionism or interactionist dualism. [.. .T]he directives from mind to brain [...] ex hypothesi, are not physical; they are not light waves or sound waves or cosmic rays or streams of subatomic particles. No physical energy or mass is associated with them. How, then, do they get to make a difference to what happens in the brain cells they must affect, if the mind is to have any influence over the body? A fundamental principle of physics is that any change in the trajectory of any physical entity is an acceleration requiring the expenditure of energy, and where is this energy to come from? It is this principle of the conservation of energy that accounts for the physical impossibility of "perpetual motion machines", and the same

⁶⁷ Daniel DENNETT, Consciousness Explained, (Toronto: Little, Brown & Co., 1991), p. 33.

principle is apparently violated by dualism. This confrontation between quite standard physics and dualism has been endlessly discussed since Descartes's own day, and is widely regarded as the inescapable and fatal flaw of dualism⁶⁸.

Here Dennett is affirming vigorously the challenge to dualism of accounting for the interaction between physical brain or body and the putative non-physical soul or mind, and also of accounting for the apparent violation of the law of conservation of energy. Dennett goes on candidly to acknowledge the deeply held convictions that make dualism so odious to him:

[The] fundamentally antiscientific stance of dualism [he is referring to the empirical inaccessibility that dualism seems to predicate of the mind] is, to my mind, its most disqualifying feature, and is the reason why in this book I adopt the apparently dogmatic rule that dualism is to be avoided at all costs. It is not that I think I can give a knockdown proof that dualism, in all its forms, is false or incoherent, but that, given the way dualism wallows in mystery, accepting dualism is giving up⁶⁹.

It appears that Dennett's careful and heartfelt presentation of the problem clarifies a very significant factor in the mind-body debate: it is not so much that physicalists have disprov