The mind-body problem is the question of how mental states relate to physical states.
One of the answers to this problem is dualism; though there are many kinds, we will be discussing substance dualism
We see, as we learn more about the human being, that the brain is not solely responsible for thinking. For instance, the links between gut and mental health are remarkable.
Physical states aren’t limited to just the brain.
The M-B problem is both ontological/metaphysical, and causal
Is the debate worth it?
There’s an asymmetry between what we know about our minds and brains. We know a lot about our minds. We have a privileged access to our minds, we can turn inwards, look at ourselves. We can look at cultural effects, the works others create, their production - and that allows you to learn their minds, in turn.
But when you look into the brain, we know comparatively little. It’s only been ~150 years since we started looking at the brain’s basic building blocks. It’s one of the most complex and complicated organs, and we’ve had so little time. That’s why Neuroscience is (relatively) inadvanced.
How then, do we compare the two? Perhaps this will be clearer once neuroscience progresses to a sufficient extent.
Physicalism is a lot more popular than dualism now, especially substance dualism - though this certainly doesn’t mean dualism is dead.
We are natural-born dualists. We think of ourselves as minds possessing a body, not just the body itself. I mean look at Jesus. Bro died, then came back and started running around. His body died - but we don’t see that as necessitating that he in his entirety died.
A first definition -
The universe consists of two kinds of stuff that are irreducibly different: physical stuff, and mental stuff.
Physical stuff is described by physics, tied to space and time, and publicly accessible and objectively reasonable.
Mental stuff has no place in physics, is not tied to space and time (?). Privately accessible and subjectively researchable
Substance dualism is very hardcore. descartes and we are our minds and shit
Property dualism is softer.
John Stuart Mill did it
We have mental and physical properties, (non-reductive physicalism)
There is a spectrum between
Substance dualism ←> eliminativism
property dualism is a bit more to the left of center, NRP is around the center.
esse est percipi
Idealists → only mental states exist
Eliminativists → mental states do not exist
Principle of identity
if x and y have the same features then they are identical
if x and y have different features, they are different.