Why is being an atheist dualist so difficult?
The problem is as always (from the times of Descartes onwards) how to combine the material and spiritual (moral) aspect in one person. Or simply put, how to connect the body and the soul.
TRADITIONAL DUALIST in my opinion has no problem. God can do anything, so a mere juxtaposition of body and mind comes to him as natural as creating the world, or man for that matter. For a dualist the only thing is to believe in God, but 95% of the human kind do.
MATERIALIST believes only in one substance, so he does not have such problems. Nevertheless, he faces the issue of recognising other humans (and perhaps dogs) as moral agents (as opposed to stones, grasses and cockroaches). But again, the problem does not seem that big. Like God, man can decide anything (but not necessarily do everything). So he may simply decide that other people will be moral beings and protected by our ethical principles, whereas any pest, worms and cockroaches would be eliminated. The basis for our decision will be sympathy (Hume) and similitude. Simply, those being like us will be promoted and those unlike us will be eliminated. I am very subtle today.
TROUBLED DUALIST like me, who does not believe in God, but thinks that the mind cannot be reduced to the physical. He has lots of questions to answer. What is mind for, if neuroscience can (apparently) explain everything? (if not now, then in future). How is the soul connected with the body? If the soul is a special attribute of man, when did it appear on the tree of evolution (and of course I am a Darwinist). Are bats mere machines or spiritual beings? What is it like being a bat? The list of questions may not be so long (see David Armstrong’s book “A Materialist Theory of Mind”), but they all beat me.
Any I have no powerful ally like God to look to, who can do everything for me. And unlike the materialist I cannot make arbitrary decisions (almost play God). I have real questions to answer. I have been looking one way and the other. But so far, I have remained a disfunctional dualist with all my problems. Am I in a minority of one?
Marek
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Dualism has alot more to offer than just religious ramblings about the soul, which is unfortunate since the atheist package often involves a backhand rejection of dualism (spcifically as a rejection of the idea of a "soul" or "afterlife"). Apart form the religious idea of a "soul" there is the mystery of the mind, of what it means to experience, to exist.
ReplyDeleteI am an agnostic on religion, and have used to have my leanings towards materialism in general, but I have been recently thinking that there is more to the "I" than what that position would want me to believe. Simply saying that we can reduce the "I" to the firing of neurons is a little too quick in my opinion. Neuroscience may not explain everything, or at least not what we say it will explain(and even if it did, your dualism would probably put you in the epiphenomenalism camp). I guess this would make me a non-reductionist about the mind, but to be fair, this does not mean that dualism is the inevitable option. Of course this raises as many questions as it solves, but then again, our eixstence in the world is quite mysterious in itself.
And no, you are not alone. David Chalmers, a self-professed atheist (or at least a secular thinker) is quite a big representative of the dualist position.