Thoughts about dualism recur for me at right regular intervals (see for instance here), no doubt because we’re all of us quite naturally dualistic in our stance towards reality. It’s not simply a consequence of language that we think that we have rather than that we are bodies. At the same time our collective feeling are echoed by our language. When we’re really sincere, we support something body and soul. My inner intuition isn’t simply that my Mother still exists, but only in my memories—and that in twenty generations (to be massively generous) she will have achieved total nonexistence because no one among the then still living will any longer remember her. No. My intuition is quite otherwise. Is the matter that formed her body at any point in her life still in existence? Certainly. Our physics tells us so. Does she still exist as a person? I’m certain that she does.
Plato’s conceptualization is no doubt the oldest well-known formalization of the dualism we feel. He proposed that eternal Forms exist, of which the soul is one. His formulation, found in Phaedo, rests on the immateriality and therefore indivisibility of the immaterial and the endless divisibility of material. Plato’s formulation served his purpose well; it was to prove the soul’s immortality. It’s very easy to understand that matter is divisible and that a hammer can very easily turn this green cup of mine, not least its pretty crest and its inscription (Harsen’s Island Michigan—irresistible to someone called Arsen) into shards or powder. It is also very easy to intuit one’s own unity. Yes, I’m divided in my mind on many things, but my mind is analogous to my body—even though it is immaterial. I have a mind; but it is I have it, and I can’t imagine that Whatever as divided. It simply is. But Phaedo, of course, is just one book of many hundreds of thousands written on this subject and serves a single argument. It does not exhaust the subject. In effect it may be reducible to just that, dualism: there are two kinds of things—one subject to a certain kind of change and one that is not subject to that kind of change.
The problem in Plato’s formulation is that we have no handy explanation how something immaterial can cause something material to move, to change its position or character. Or vice versa. This problem, the interaction problem, has legs as long as eternal forms. The problem is much worse than saying that a flashlight beam can’t move a mountain. In that particular case, both systems are material, but there is a great distance in powers—the flashlight’s weak little beam and the mountain’s massive inertia. But in truth that weak beam does move the mountain. It causes minute change at the atomic level to a tiny part of the mountain. But we can imagine—vast technocracy that we’ve become—that we could focus gigantic laser guns on that mountain and cause it not only to move a little but literally to vaporize. Thus far, of course, we’ve only done that thing in action movies.
The interaction problem, however, begins to yield ever so gently if we don’t insist on Plato’s conceptualization of the soul as immaterial and, therefore, by definition incapable of exerting any kind of force on anything material. That the soul is different from bodies, and in some genuinely radical way—that I find quite easy to accept. But it must possess some power capable of moving matter, albeit at the extremely small scale.
Let’s transform that mountain into an organism instead of being, as it is, a massive agglomeration of layers of rock. Let it have a nervous system, organs, circulatory mechanisms, muscles, tendons, and, underneath it all, a powerful skeleton as well. Let’s also make it very sensitive to light at night—hating any kind of light whatever, however faint. This monstrous beast will therefore react to our weak little flashlight. How will it do that? Well, its skin will detect the light beam. Nerves will signal this unwelcome event to the mountain’s not very smart but adequate brain. No sooner has the signal reached that presumably massive brain than the mountain will move—will move just enough to one side or the other to escape the irritation of that beam. Being so vast a creature, it might take a while before the movement actually develops, but here it comes! Could the soul, by just a tiny amount of energy proper to its nature, also move a neuron or two in our brain to signal an action that it wants the body to undertake—like my hand right now scratching my ear? It’s possible—not if it is deprived of all power whatsoever by a word like “immaterial,” but Yes if, while radically different from the domain in which it finds itself, it can actually communicate at a low level with neurons too small even for our best microscopes sharply to resolve.
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