Mind, God and immortality

On my Polish blog I wrote about the difference between the old philosophising about the soul and modern mind/body problem. The concept of the soul appears in inquiries about human immortality, while the concept of more or less non-material mind is to explain an equally puzzling miracle of private access to our minds, introspection, etc. Our minds need not be immortal, while the concept of soul more often than not implies immortality. While we have direct access to our minds, Cicero thinks that we do not have direct access to our souls. We can learn about them indirectly, the same as we learn about God.

That our inquiries about the human mind bear few consequences for the issue of our immortality is shown by the following quotation from Hume. Hume starts with the panpsychism of the stoics (which nowadays seems to be restored by David Chalmers, who thinks that consciousness is more dispersed in the world than usually expected).

“…admitting a spiritual substance to be dispersed throughout the universe, like ethereal fire or the Stoics and to be the only inherent subject of the thought, we have reason to conclude from analogy that nature uses it after the manner she does the other substance, matter. She employs it as a kind or paste or clay; modifies it into a variety of forms and existences; dissolves after a time each modification and from its substance erects a new form. As the same material substance may successively compose the bodies of all animals, the same spiritual substance may compose their minds. Their consciousness or the system of thought, which they form during life, may be continually dissolved by death. And nothing interests them in the new modification. The most positive asserters of mortality of the soul never denied the immortality of its substance. And that an immaterial substance, as well as material may lose its memory or consciousness appears, in part, from experience, if the soul be immaterial”.

David Hume Of the Immortality of the Soul (page one or two)


Let me put very simply: you do not need to believe in God or immortality to be a dualist.