The Grand Scheme Of Physicalism Vs. Dualism

In essence, Cartesian Dualism attempts to solve the mind-body problem – that is, what is the relationship between the mind and the body? The answer, according to this theory, is that the mind and the body are two distinctly different substances that constitute each person. Here, “mind” can be described as a nonphysical thing that thinks and “body” as a living physical thing that does not think. The mind can also exist independently of the body, and both can causally affect one another.

The defense of dualism stems from two questions. First, is a human being composed of just one ultimate component or two? The second asks if the answer is two, how do these two relate to one another? This idea starts Moreland argument for dualism over physicalism. Physicalism is a worldview that states that

According to Descartes’, “As I think about this more carefully, I see plainly that there are never any sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep.” This is the fundamental principle of the Dreaming Argument. The scenarios in which we experience whilst we are asleep are comparable to the scenarios we experience whilst we are awake. Often, we struggle to tell from our own perspective where our experiences are derived from; it is difficult to differentiate whether our experiences stem from reality or our dreams. The issue with this is that our unconscious

How do we know we are not dreaming some particular experience we are having, or we are not dreaming all our experience of this world? When we dream we imagine things happening often with the same sense of reality as we do when we are awake. In Descartes dream argument, he states there are no reliable signs distinguishing sleeping from waking. In his dream argument, he is not saying we are merely dreaming all of what we experience, nor, is he saying we can distinguish dreaming from being awake. I think his point is we cannot be for sure what we experience as being real in this world is actually real.

The first supporting argument which I will present to support substance dualism is Divisibility. In earlier writings, Descartes divides the objects of our perception into two main classifications: mental substances pertaining to the mind and physical substances pertaining to the body (Alanen, L., 1996). Any substance with mental properties has an absence of physical properties and any substance with physical properties has an absence of mental properties (Rodriguez Pereyra, G., 2008).

A third argument for dualism is paranormal phenomena. Mental powers such as telepathy, precognition, telekinesis, and clairvoyance are all near impossible to explain within the boundaries of the physical brain. These phenomena reflect the nonphysical and supernatural nature

At the start, I will talk about the argument from the religion aspect for dualism. Most major world religions are based on separating the ‘mind’ and ‘body’. The eternal ‘mind’ or soul either ends up in heaven or hell, free from the ‘body’ itself. According to a number of religions, there is some sort of life after you die; a good example of this is angels which some call the ‘mind’ of god exists without any physical presence. This is what we come to know as substance dualism or something that is very relative to a form of substance dualism. As a result, "seeing how uncertain dualism is, in principle, the similar would be a willing to also be uncertain in one 's religious tradition, which a lot of people find challenging to do". [Churchland] Yet, it must

I knew what I saw even though no one else did. Earl Babbie, describes truth as recognizing that what we see is normally all in our minds and subjective realm is the, “Possibly inaccurate perceptions and thoughts we have through the mediums of our minds,”(1986: 37). How can anyone really prove anything they see in their lives or what the might believe in? Babbie goes on to explain, “Our only proof of objectivity is intersubjectivity”(1986: 37). Intersubjectivity was explained in lecture as different subjects with their individual error-prone subjectivities reporting to the same thing. So you can ask someone what he or she thinks about death, and their experience can be completely different from mine and they might laugh at me and not understand how I can be so afraid. But perhaps if my uncle had scared more than one kid at the funeral, that kid would agree with me and the fear that would then make my “vision” real and

A more damaging attack is to question whether property dualism does indeed solve the problem of location associated with substance dualism. Just because mental properties supervene physical properties does not explain where they are, just how they interact with physical properties.

Eben Alexander is a neurosurgeon who believed for many years that when people explained their near death experiences it was just the hard wiring of the brain. Of course ,though, he had refined medical training. It wasn't until Alexander had caught a rare disease which caused him to fall into a coma and had a near death experience himself. Alexander talks about his journey towards the afterlife in his book which leads to many questions to everyone as to whether it really happened or if it was all just a hallucination. The paper talks about how he recounts what happened during his experience

One statement is that mental states can’t be true or false unlike where physical states can. One cannot say that it's false to obtain love or it's true to obtain love. You cannot compare the mental state to a physical state being the mental state is a different state of dimension. Using introspection, one can say that he knows his mind via introspection, but he cannot know his brain via introspection. This means that both mental and physical states are indeed different. This means that you cannot translate neural activity that is firing in your brain, but you can translate thoughts, beliefs, and desires that are in your mind. This difference of the mental state in opposite of the physical state validities the argument that dualist

There are several arguments to argue that the mind and body are not separate substances. And also, this is especially true in the face of its many different views, one of which does not attack substance dualism directly, but does so indirectly by attacking the very idea of dualism itself. The argument begins by looking at the question of how dualism became so popular. It claims that, firstly, it had to do with the fact that the great majority of Western philosophers around the time when the dualism was at its peak were religious, and most of them are specifically of the Christian faith. Thus, one feature of their religious beliefs was to believe in immortality, and in order to settle their belief with their philosophy, they had to support dualism; the reason being that it was very difficult to believe in immorality without believing in dualism.

     For centuries philosophers have debated on monism and dualism, two different philosophical views of the human person. Philosophers have been trying to decipher whether the person is made up of the mind, the body, or both. Monists hold the belief that existence is purely based upon one ultimate “category of being” this means that either the person is made up of only the body or only the mind (Morris p155). Dualists hold the belief that existence is based upon the body as well as the mind and its mental properties (Morris p155).

A couple quotes from people who said they felt nothing; “Overdosed on heroine, EMT’s said my heart stopped. Didn’t see anything, just like sleeping with no dreams.” and “Pure,perfect, uninterrupted sleep,no dreams.”. A quote from someone who felt like they could see what was happening while dead; , “I do remember a little bit of the ambulance ride, but not from my own body. It was seriously the strangest thing I have ever experienced. It could have been a dream, but I saw my own unconscious body completely flatlined in the ambulance. I remember the EMT who was in the ambulance with me (whom I did not see before I passed out)”. And here is a quote from someone who had an interaction; "I was standing somewhere. There was a fog all around me, and I saw my best friend (who at the time I'd been fighting with and he'd stopped talking to me) come out of the mist. He told me that I couldn't go yet, that I have to keep trying, and if I promised not to give up, he'd see me back on Earth. I wordlessly agreed, and I was instantly pushed (into?) my body.".

Another issue Cartesian dualism faces in the mind-body problem. This is how the soul and the body are integrated, and considers how they affect one another. Descartes’ solution is that the body and the mind is separate. Idealists’ solution is that there is only mind, explaining the body as only being an extension of the mind. However as technology has advanced and neuroscience developed, processes such as emotions, memory and perceptions have all been shown to have a neurological basis, refuting the dualism theory of consciousness. PET, MRI, EEG and MEG are all ways of measuring electric and magnetic neural activity, gradually allowing the pathways and areas of the brain to be understood (Taylor 2013.) The mind is no longer such a mystery. A physical reductive approach could be taken to this mind-body problem, where our consciousness is purely generated from matter, and there is no “mind” in the way