What is the difference between dualism and materialism

In dualism, it can even sometimes be hard to distinguish between body and mind. In materialism, it is very straightforward, as everything is physical. This makes it so that everything can be attributed to the brain and neurotransmitters and other chemicals, rather than assigning them to a separate unknown state the mind. In addition, evolution is based on physical processes, and it makes a lot more sense evolutionary for physicality to be the only entity. In addition, if the mind did exist, it would be very connected with the brain and its processes, and the two would be almost indistinguishable without regards.

Although I agree with you that folk psychology certainly has its shortcomings, I think it is important to recognize that many scientific pursuits are influenced by folk psychology. Attempting to understand basic mental processes in simple terms and on our own volition, is certainly a drive to spark scientific investigation. Thus, I find it difficult to imagine our current state of scientific understanding to be possible with the attempts of folk psychology.

I find it interesting that the youtube clip suggests that all life evolved by means of physical processes. Several things come to mind no pun intended when I think about this claims. Thinking can therefore be said to make things happen, "mind moves matter". They believe that thought processes such as the mind cannot be studied scientifically and objectively and should therefore be ignored.

Radical behaviorists believe that the mind does not even exist. The biologists who argue that the mind does not exist because there is no physical structure called the mind also follow this approach.

Biologists argue that the brain will ultimately be found to be the mind. The brain with its structures, cells and neural connections will with scientific research eventually identify the mind. Since both behaviorists and biologists believe that only one type of reality exists, those that we can see, feel and touch; there approach is known as monism.

Monism is the belief that ultimately the mind and the brain are the same thing. The behaviorist and biological approaches believe in materialism monism.

However biologists and behaviorists cannot account for the phenomenon hypnosis. Hilgard and Orne have studied this. They placed participants in a hypnotic trance and through unconscious hypnotic suggestion told the participants they would be touched with a "red hot" piece of metal when they were actually touched with a pencil. The participants in a deep trance had a skin reaction water blisters just as if they had been touched with burning metal. Similar results have been found on patients given hypnosis to control pain.

This contradicts the monism approach, as the body should not react to unconscious suggestions in this way.

This study supports the idea of dualism, the view that the mind and body function separately. Then the above arguments show that any necessary dependence of mind on body does not follow the model that applies in other scientific cases.

This does not show that there may not be other reasons for believing in such dependence, for so many of the concepts in the area are still contested. For example, it might be argued that identity through time requires the kind of spatial existence that only body can give: or that the causal continuity required by a stream of consciousness cannot be a property of mere phenomena. All these might be put forward as ways of filling out those aspects of our understanding of the self that are only obliquely, not transparently, presented in self-awareness.

The dualist must respond to any claim as it arises: the conceivability argument does not pre-empt them. All the arguments so far in this section have been either arguments for property dualism only, or neutral between property and substance dualism.

In this subsection, and in section 4. The ones in this section can be regarded as preliminaries to that in 4. He famously expresses his theory as follows.

Nevertheless, in the Appendix of the same work he expressed dissatisfaction with this account. Somewhat surprisingly, it is not very clear just what his worry was, but it is expressed as follows:. This Berkeleian view is expressed in more modern terms by John Foster. There is a clash of intuitions here between which it is difficult to arbitrate. There is an argument that is meant to favour the need for a subject, as claimed by Berkeley and Foster.

To say that, according to the bundle theory, the identity conditions of individual mental states must be independent of the identity of the person who possesses them, is to say that their identity is independent of the bundle to which they belong. Perhaps the identity of a mental event is bound up with the complex to which it belongs. That this is impossible certainly needs further argument.

Hume seems, however, in the main text to unconsciously make a concession to the opposing view, namely the view that there must be something more than the items in the bundle to make up a mind. He says:. Talk of the mind as a theatre is, of course, normally associated with the Cartesian picture, and the invocation of any necessary medium, arena or even a field hypostasize some kind of entity which binds the different contents together and without which they would not be a single mind.

Modern Humeans — such as Parfit ; or Dainton — replace the theatre with a co-consciousness relation. So the bundle theorist is perhaps not as restricted as Hume thought. The bundle consists of the objects of awareness and the co-consciousness relation or relations that hold between them , and I think that the modern bundle theorist would want to say that it is the nexus of co-consciousness relations that constitutes our sense of the subject and of the act of awareness of the object.

The Humean point then becomes that we mistake the nexus of relations for a kind of entity, in a way similar to that in which, Hume claims,we mistake the regular succession of similar impressions for an entity called an enduring physical object. Whether this really makes sense in the end is another matter. I think that it is dubious whether it can accommodate the subject as agent , but it does mean that simple introspection probably cannot refute a sophisticated bundle theory in the way that Lowe and Foster want.

The rejection of bundle dualism, therefore, requires more than an appeal to our intuitive awareness of ourselves as subjects. We will see in the next section how arguments that defend the simplicity of the self attempt to undercut the bundle theory. There is a long tradition, dating at least from Reid , for arguing that the identity of persons over time is not a matter of convention or degree in the way that the identity of other complex substances is and that this shows that the self is a different kind of entity from any physical body.

Criticism of these arguments and of the intuitions on which they rest, running from Hume to Parfit , have left us with an inconclusive clash of intuitions. The argument under consideration and which, possibly, has its first statement in Madell , does not concern identity through time, but the consequences for identity of certain counterfactuals concerning origin. It can, perhaps, therefore, break the stalemate which faces the debate over diachronic identity. The claim is that the broadly conventionalist ways which are used to deal with problem cases through time for both persons and material objects, and which can also be employed in cases of counterfactuals concerning origin for bodies, cannot be used for similar counterfactuals concerning persons or minds.

Concerning ordinary physical objects, it is easy to imagine counterfactual cases where questions of identity become problematic. Take the example of a particular table. We can scale counterfactual suggestions as follows:. The first suggestion would normally be rejected as clearly false, but there will come a point along the spectrum illustrated by i and iii and towards iii where the question of whether the hypothesised table would be the same as the one that actually exists have no obvious answer.

There will thus be a penumbra of counterfactual cases where the question of whether two things would be the same is not a matter of fact. Let us now apply this thought to conscious subjects. Suppose that a given human individual had had origins different from those which he in fact had such that whether that difference affected who he was was not obvious to intuition. What would count as such a case might be a matter of controversy, but there must be one.

Some philosophers might regard it as obvious that sameness of sperm is essential to the identity of a human body and to personal identity. In that case imagine a counterpart sperm in which some of the molecules in the sperm are different; would that be the same sperm? If one pursues the matter far enough there will be indeterminacy which will infect that of the resulting body. There must therefore be some difference such that neither natural language nor intuition tells us whether the difference alters the identity of the human body; a point, that is, where the question of whether we have the same body is not a matter of fact.

How one is to describe these cases is, in some respects, a matter of controversy. Some philosophers think one can talk of vague identity or partial identity.

Others think that such expressions are nonsensical. There is no space to discuss this issue here. It is enough to assume, however, that questions of how one is allowed to use the concept of identity effect only the care with which one should characterize these cases, not any substantive matter of fact. If there were, then there would have to be a haecceitas or thisness belonging to and individuating each complex physical object, and this I am assuming to be implausible if not unintelligible.

More about the conditions under which haecceitas can make sense will be found below. One might plausibly claim that no similar overlap of constitution can be applied to the counterfactual identity of minds. Why is this so? Can we say, as we would for an object with no consciousness, that the story something the same, something different is the whole story: that overlap of constitution is all there is to it? For the Jones body as such, this approach would do as well as for any other physical object.

The creature who would have existed would have had a kind of overlap of psychic constitution with me. The third answer parallels the response we would give in the case of bodies. But as an account of the subjective situation, it is arguable that this makes no sense. Clearly, the notion of overlap of numerically identical psychic parts cannot be applied in the way that overlap of actual bodily part constitution quite unproblematically can. This might make one try the second answer.

It is difficult to see why it does not. Suppose Jones found out that he had originally been one of twins, in the sense that the zygote from which he developed had divided, but that the other half had died soon afterwards.

He can entertain the thought that if it had been his half that had died, he would never have existed as a conscious being, though someone would whose life, both inner and outer, might have been very similar to his. He might feel rather guiltily grateful that it was the other half that died.

It would be strange to think that Jones is wrong to think that there is a matter of fact about this. If the reasoning above is correct, one is left with only the first option. If so, there has to be an absolute matter of fact from the subjective point of view. But the physical examples we have considered show that when something is essentially complex, this cannot be the case. When there is constitution, degree and overlap of constitution are inevitably possible.

So the mind must be simple, and this is possible only if it is something like a Cartesian substance. His worries concerned the cramping effect that matter would have on the range of objects that intellect could accommodate. Parallel modern concerns centre on the restriction that matter would impose on the range of rational processes that we could exhibit. Some of these concerns are of a technical kind.

But there are other less technical and easier to appreciate issues. I will mention four ways in which physicalist theories of thought seem vulnerable to attack by the dualist.

There has been a rise or revival of a belief in what is now called cognitive phenomenology , that is, the belief that thoughts, of whatever kind — beliefs, desires, and the whole range of propositional attitude state — are conscious in a more than behavioural functional sense.

The issue is whether, under this constraint, one can give an account for meaningful communication and understanding at all. This is clearly expounded in Dennett ; see also the entry on the frame problem. Numbers, it would seem, are abstract objects, yet our intellects operate with them all the time. How does a physical brain interact with an abstract entity? A similar problem could be raised for concepts in general; they are abstract, general entities, not physical particulars, yet they are the meat and drink of thinking.

For a dualist about intellect there does not appear to be the same problem. The immaterial intellect is precisely the sort of thing that can grasp abstract objects, such as numbers and universals — in the Aristotelian context, the immaterial intellect is the home of forms. There is still the issue of how this intellectual capacity of the immaterial mind relates to sensory consciousness.

According to Aristotle, perception is a wholly embodied process, but for modern dualists, sensory consciousness is not material.

In order to unify the perceptual and intellectual functions of the mind, traditional empiricists tended to be imagists, in their theory of thought, in order to assimilate the intellectual to the sensory, but this assimilation is rejected by those who believe in a distinct cognitive phenomenology, as mentioned in a above.

The issue of how these two functions of mind are related in dualism is, it seems to me, insufficiently investigated. Armstrong in his is a striking exception to this, accepting an in re theory of universals. I will not discuss a further, as it is discussed in section 5 of the entry on phenomenal intentionality , An immaterialist response to d can be found in Robinson Both b and c seem to draw out the claim that a material system lacks understanding.

Searle imagines himself in a room with a letter box through which strings of symbols are posted in, and, following a book of rules, he puts out symbols which the rules dictate, given the strings he is receiving. In fact, Searle says, he has been conducting a conversation in Chinese, because the symbols are Chinese script, and the rules those on which a Chinese computer might work, but he has not understood a word.

Therefore neither does a computer understand, so we, understanding creatures, are not computers. A blow was struck against the computational theory of thought when, in , Fodor produced his The Mind Does Not Work That Way , in which he made clear his belief that the kind of computationalism that he had been describing and developing ever since the s only fits sub-personal informational processing, not conscious, problem solving thought.

One physicalist response to these challenges is to say that they apply only to the classical computing model, and are avoided by connectionist theories. Classical computing works on rules of inference like those of standard logic, but connectionism is rather a form of associationism, which is supposedly closer to the way in which the brain works.

See the entry on Connectionism. But Gary Marcus — see Other Internet Resources and others have pointed out the ways in which these impressive machines are quite different from human thought. We can learn things with very few trials because we latch on to abstract relationships, whereas the machine requires many — perhaps thousands or millions — of examples to try to catch extensionally what we get by the abstract or intensional relation. The dualist might sum up the situation on thought in the following way.

The case against physicalist theories of sensation is that it is unbelievable that what it feels like to be struck hard on the nose is itself either just a case of being disposed or caused to engage in certain behaviours, or that what it feels like is not fundamental to the way you do react. Similarly, the dualist about thought will say, when you are, for example, engaged in a philosophical discussion, and you make a response to your interlocutor, it is obvious that you are intending to respond to what you thought he or she meant and are concentrating on what what you intend to say means.

It seems as bizarre to say that this is a bye-product of processes to which meaning is irrelevant, as it is to claim the same about sensory consciousness. You are, in other words, as fundamentally a semantically driven engine, as you are a sensorily consciously driven one.

Perhaps, in the case of a sophisticated conversation, the fundamentality of meaning, and of conscious reflection, as a driver is even more obvious than in the case of sensation. A dualist could, it seems, argue that Plato was right in claiming that intellect necessarily has an affinity with the realm of abstract entities, and Aristotle was right to think that no material or mechanical system could capture the flexibility built into genuine understanding.

We have already discussed the problem of interaction. In this section we shall consider two other facets of dualism that worry critics. First, there is what one might term the queerness of the mental if conceived of as non-physical.

Second there is the difficulty of giving an account of the unity of the mind. We shall consider this latter as it faces both the bundle theorist and the substance dualist. Mental states are characterised by two main properties, subjectivity, otherwise known as privileged access, and intentionality. Physical objects and their properties are sometimes observable and sometimes not, but any physical object is equally accessible, in principle, to anyone.

From the right location, we could all see the tree in the quad, and, though none of us can observe an electron directly, everyone is equally capable of detecting it in the same ways using instruments. But the possessor of mental states has a privileged access to them that no-one else can share. This suggests to some philosophers that minds are not ordinary occupants of physical space.

Physical objects are spatio-temporal, and bear spatio-temporal and causal relations to each other. Mental states seem to have causal powers, but they also possess the mysterious property of intentionality — being about other things — including things like Zeus and the square root of minus one, which do not exist.

The nature of the mental is both queer and elusive. Ghosts are mysterious and unintelligible: machines are composed of identifiable parts and work on intelligible principles.

But this contrast holds only if we stick to a Newtonian and common-sense view of the material. Think instead of energy and force-fields in a space-time that possesses none of the properties that our senses seem to reveal: on this conception, we seem to be able to attribute to matter nothing beyond an abstruse mathematical structure. Whilst the material world, because of its mathematicalisation, forms a tighter abstract system than mind, the sensible properties that figure as the objects of mental states constitute the only intelligible content for any concrete picture of the world that we can devise.

Perhaps the world within the experiencing mind is, once one considers it properly, no more — or even less — queer than the world outside it. Whether one believes that the mind is a substance or just a bundle of properties, the same challenge arises, which is to explain the nature of the unity of the immaterial mind.

For the Cartesian, that means explaining how he understands the notion of immaterial substance. For the Humean, the issue is to explain the nature of the relationship between the different elements in the bundle that binds them into one thing. Neither tradition has been notably successful in this latter task: indeed, Hume, in the appendix to the Treatise , declared himself wholly mystified by the problem, rejecting his own initial solution though quite why is not clear from the text.

If the mind is only a bundle of properties, without a mental substance to unite them, then an account is needed of what constitutes its unity. The only route appears to be to postulate a primitive relation of co-consciousness in which the various elements stand to each other. There are two strategies which can be used to attack the bundle theory. One is to claim that our intuitions favour belief in a subject and that the arguments presented in favour of the bundle alternative are unsuccessful, so the intuition stands.

The other is to try to refute the theory itself. Foster , —9 takes the former path. This is not effective against someone who thinks that metaphysical economy gives a prima facie priority to bundle theories, on account of their avoiding mysterious substances.

The core objection to bundle theories see, for example, Armstrong , 21—3 is that, because it takes individual mental contents as its elements, such contents should be able to exist alone, as could the individual bricks from a house. Hume accepted this consequence, but most philosophers regard it as absurd. There could not be a mind that consisted of a lone pain or red after-image, especially not of one that had detached itself from the mind to which it had previously belonged.

Therefore it makes more sense to think of mental contents as modes of a subject. Bundle theorists tend to take phenomenal contents as the primary elements in their bundle.

Seeing the problem in this way has obvious Humean roots. This atomistic conception of the problem becomes less natural if one tries to accommodate other kinds of mental activity and contents. How are acts of conceptualising, attending to or willing with respect to, such perceptual contents to be conceived? These kinds of mental acts seem to be less naturally treated as atomic elements in a bundle, bound by a passive unity of apperception.

William James , vol. James attributes to these Thoughts acts of judging, attending, willing etc, and this may seem incoherent in the absence of a genuine subject. But there is also a tendency to treat many if not all aspects of agency as mere awareness of bodily actions or tendencies, which moves one back towards a more normal Humean position. But see Sprigge , 84—97, for an excellent, sympathetic discussion. The problem is to explain what kind of a thing an immaterial substance is, such that its presence explains the unity of the mind.

The answers given can be divided into three kinds. There are two problems with this approach. Second, and connectedly, it is not clear in what sense such stuff is immaterial, except in the sense that it cannot be integrated into the normal scientific account of the physical world.

Why is it not just an aberrant kind of physical stuff? Account a allowed the immaterial substance to have a nature over and above the kinds of state we would regard as mental. The consciousness account does not. The most obvious objection to this theory is that it does not allow the subject to exist when unconscious. This forces one to take one of four possible theories.

He has half escaped because he does not attribute non-mental properties to the self, but he is still captured by trying to explain what it is made of.

The reason is that, even when we have acknowledged that basic subjects are wholly non-physical, we still tend to approach the issue of their essential natures in the shadow of the physical paradigm. One can interpret Berkeley as implying that there is more to the self than introspection can capture, or we can interpret him as saying that notions, though presenting stranger entities than ideas, capture them just as totally.

If we are not to trust our senses because they can be fooled, why should we trust our reason? In dreams, just as one sees things that are not real, one acts and thinks in ways that seem absurd upon waking as well.

Also, everyone has had the experience of making a mistake in reasoning that seems absolutely plausible at the time but is later shown to be false. Materialism, too, is suspect. Hobbes, however, along with most materialists, take it as a truth as absolutely as the dualists take theirs. Materialism is too quick to deny something it cannot prove or disprove.

The criticisms of both dualism and materialism are too strong to take either one as truth. Instead, a better philosophy would combine the methods of both dualism and materialism but leave out their shortsightedness. It would use its own method of doubt, but instead of denying the validity of anything not absolutely known, it would assign a degree of trust to it depending on how likely it is true. This is the true scientific approach, basing theories on reason and then verifying them by empirical research to a high degree of probability, never putting absolute faith in any fact or idea.

For example, dualism throws out all ideas based on observation, because the senses could possibly be deceiving the observer. Materialism ignores that possibility and draws conclusions based on those observations. In the more scientific method, the senses are highly trusted if the observer is awake and not under the influence of anything likely to impair his judgement, and the observations are repeated by others under similar circumstances. Thus, though no blind faith is put into the senses, a high enough degree of probability has been established to use the evidence they present to draw conclusions.

Take evolutionary argument for materialism. Materialism of course accepts evolution and says that since we began as purely physical matter and became as we are now through physical processes, we are wholly physical now.

A truly scientific approach, however, would say that evolution, which is most likely how the human species originated, does not deal with development of the mind or soul, and should not be extended to it until some direct or indirect evidence of it appears.