by Seth Stuck

Created on: July 21, 2008

Dualism, similar to the account taken by Descartes, accurately accounts for the existence of the soul. What Descartes refers to as the mind, one can label as the soul, and there is no need to reduce human thought and action to strict materialism. The mind, according to Descartes, was a "thinking thing" (lat. res cogitans) and, consequentially, an immaterial substance. This "thing" is the essence of any one person. It doubts, believes, hopes, and thinks.

The materialist feels that everything that happens in the mind can be explained via chemical and material reactions and so there is no need for a 'mystical' account of the soul. Essentially, the materialist feels that if all of human action/ inaction/ consciousness/ sub-consciousness can be explained through materialism, there is no need for an account of the soul and therefore, the soul appears, in this account, as nothing more than a reservation attempted by the religious.

This distinction between the soul/mind and body/ brain is argued in Descartes' Meditation VI as follows:

A person can have a clear and distinct idea of himself as a thinking, non-extended thing, and a clear and distinct idea of his physical body as an extended and non-thinking thing. Whatever he can conceive clearly and distinctly, God can so create. So, Descartes argues, the mind, a thinking thing, can exist apart from its extended body. And therefore, the mind is a substance distinct from the body, a substance whose essence is thought.

Indeed, Descartes was a religious man and he did make a few far-reaching efforts to account for the soul and existence of God through rationalism, but I don't think that you have to be religious to make a philosophically sound argument for dualism.

In materialism, dreams, mental images, personality, color perception, ideas everything can be broken down into a chemical reaction in the brain. So what is a soul exactly if one's personality can be explained via materialism? We often think of the soul as our personality. When the religious think of the afterlife, it's their personality (in whatever physical/ nonphysical form) they imagine moving on. And so, once materialism shows that a personality, a set of thoughts, a psyche can be explained through brain matter and chemical reactions, there seems to be no room for the soul.

This, in my opinion, reduces human life into advanced worm food. Our cerebral cortex would then be the sole source of human advancement, and once we die, we cease to be aware of our own existence/

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