In misosopher A. C. Grayling’s book Thinking of Answers: Questions in the Philosophy of Everyday Life, the following is stated:
Why would anyone wish to believe that he or she is a combination of a body and a disembodied mind or soul?
One should never underestimate human ingenuity in search of support for implausible views. The idea that human beings (not, usually, dogs or newts) consist of a body and a mind or soul is older than history, but the reasons for the belief are not empirical. Dualists remain in the majority in today’s world, if only because almost all religions involve belief in an afterlife. There are even a few philosophers who are dualists, protecting the reputation of their profession to provide representatives of every view, mad or sane, invented by mankind.
At this point, perhaps we ought to ask: why would anyone wish to believe that he or she is a mere body animated by bio-chemical reactions? One should never underestimate human ingenuity in search of support for implausible views such as materialism. The idea that human beings consist only of a body has taken shape in a “modern” era wherein “faith” based beliefs, such as materialism, could be expressed in pseudo-scientific language so as to hide a worldview-philosophy behind a façade of empirical truth.
Materialists / atheists, remain in the minority in today’s world, if only because the universe and all it contains, including life, is based on information and the only known source of information is mind (although, we shall see that this is the issue at hand—a denial of mind as being something beyond or, outside of the brain).
Materialists / atheists deny an afterlife because affirming an afterlife would rob them of two of their consoling delusions: the consoling delusion of absolute autonomy and the consoling delusion of lack of ultimate / transcendent accountability.
What could be more mad or sane than the invention that the universe, life and the brain which produces anti-dualistic arguments, just happen to have happened.
The book then goes on to play off of the idea of dualism as consoling delusion, based on wanting to be reunited with dead loved ones, etc.
Our purpose is to get right to the nugget, to the bottom line point, which is posed thusly:
What has rightly been called the “hard problem” of consciousness—how it arises from brain activity—has yet to be solved. But the shortest answer anyone can give to a dualist who hopes this leaves wriggle room for minds or souls is this: hit someone hard enough on the head, and a mental function regularly correlated with the resultantly damaged part of the brain will be lost or compromised. That covariance is enough to render profoundly unpersuasive any of the reasons offered in support of dualism.
Get the point? The point is that there is no, as dualists claim, disembodied mind that interacts with a physical brain. The evidence is that if you damage the brain, nothing further manifests.
Let us apply this logic and take it to its illogical conclusion.
Some claim that there are beings controlling motorized vehicles. They think that these beings actually reside within the vehicles and manipulate them. But the shortest answer anyone can give to a operator of the vehicles dualist is this: remove the wheels of the vehicles and you will note that they come to, and remain, at a complete standstill—so much for the claim that there were operators guiding the vehicles’ movements.
Some claim that people speaking into telephonic devices are having conversations with other people who are not in sight, but are far, far away. But the shortest answer anyone can give to a conversationalist dualist is this: smash that phone and then see if there are disembodies voices proceeding from it.
How about this: some claim that computers function based on ones and zeros. They claim that there is a code behind it all. But the shortest answer anyone can give to a code in the computer dualist is this: smash the computer, the hardware, with a baseball bat. Now, try checking your email. Clearly, since the machine no longer works, there was nothing more to it than hardware—no code, no software at all.
And with this metaphor we come closer to the mind / brain issue.
Here is an elucidation from the essay On God and the creation: how does the immaterial interact with the material?:
…in the movie A Beautiful Mind—which is based on a true story—the protagonist comes to realize that he has been suffering from hallucinations. How does he do this? Well, he figures out that since he has “seen” two people for a very long time but they are not aging; he must be hallucinating.
Thus, his material-brain was malfunctioning and causing him to see people who were not there, who did not exist. Yet, his immaterial-mind was able to function regardless of, in spite of, his damaged material-brain…
if your hardware/computer was destroyed it is still possible to download the software, the code, the memory, the information, and place it into another hardware/computer and thereby allowing the software to, once again, express itself. This is tantamount to the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the physical resurrection…
the hardware is utterly destroyed to the point that the software, the actual program-the code, is irretrievable. What if there is a back up drive? Then the info, the code, is safe and sound and ready to be uploaded into new hardware. Or, what if there is a main database from which the hardware pulled its info? Again, the data is safe and sound. God possesses the external drive, the database and can download the software/data/program/code into new or replenished hardware—the resurrected body.
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