Tertulian
(reputedly said "credo, quia absurdum" - I believe, because its absurd)
Many people, including myself are dualists, because they think it quite obvious that we have minds, thoughts and feelings and, moreover, private access to them. Private access means that I do not need to look into my brain or a brain scanner in order to know that I suffer. But there are those who argue that science is not about highlighting things which are evident.
On the contrary, it sometimes takes things which on first appearances are completely absurd, but after experiments they turn out quite well justified, presumably even true. Science seems to be Tertulianesque in this regard.
The Copernican revolution or Einstein’s claim that time is relative provide good examples of science’s changing things which are absurd into quite reasonable.
We main think materialism absurd, but so was the centrality of the Sun in the Solar system.
Some philosophers even think that dualist psychology shall one day be replaced with neuroscience and treated as folk psychology. We may simply be wrong in saying that we have thoughts and feelings.
I like this argument against dualism. But I do not think a case has been fully made for it. That sometimes science takes us by surprise is a fact, but it does not mean it will in every instance. Claiming so would be equivalent to very radical scepticism, or perhaps complete scepticism. Actually, it would mean that every proposition in which we believe is untrue and only waiting to be replaced by science. The sceptics of old may have deconstructed our whole world but stopped short of denying us our self (or selves). The twentieth century was not so timid, in the form of Freudianism and Analytic Philosophy, but abolishing an even imperfect self paves a road to madness, I think.
And finally, our phenomenology, our introspection provides us with data not theory. Such raw data we may wish to explain as quite a puzzling phenomenon, or cut aside with an Occam’s razor, if only for their notorious non-objectivity, privacy. But what we do not get from such self-examination is theory, which would explain something and compete with other theories, like neuroscience, for the same set of data. Our thoughts and feelings are raw data which may or may not need a theory to explain them. Maybe a little less reliable than we once thought, but data nevertheless.
