# In Defence of Dualism **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 24, 2019, 12:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962 "2019-04-24T00:18:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962/61 "2019-04-25T17:37:49Z")
> [@begbert2](#): > > Also, regarding your moral issues, if I’m understanding you correctly your entire difficulty with assigning moral value to meat sacks is because you don’t consider meat sacks sentient. But if dualism wasn’t true then the meat sacks necessarily _would_ be sentient, so tell me again why it’s hard to assign moral value to them again? Meat sacks are not necessarily sentient. Sentience does not necessarily exist, and neither do morals. Dualism says they exist in another realm which is affected by actions in the physical realm. Most forms of dualism then say actions in the nonphysical realm also affect the physical realm, mine does not. Before this thread I thought strong physicalism implies consciousness, sentience, and morals to be as illusory as souls - not even an illusion because there is no sentience to be fooled. I still haven’t been convinced otherwise, but I will be looking into a book that purportedly explains consciousness without souls. ~Max ---
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962/62 "2019-04-25T17:38:57Z")
> [@begbert2](#): > > Hello! Good morning! > > There’s something wrong with any cosmological model that is disproven by alcohol. > > Consider: Alcohol, despite its nickname of ‘spirits’, is a fully physical chemical substance. It therefore can only have effects on the physical world. So when a person drinks alcohol the chemical physically makes its way into the bloodstream and physically makes its way to the brain and physically effects the physical brain. All this is a purely physical, chemical, and biological process. And yet it effects the mind. Thinking slows, attention wanders, inhibition lowers. > > In your model there’s no way for a physical chemical to interfere with the spiritual matter that makes up the mechanics of the soul/mind. The closest you could get would be that the soul _pretends_ to be drunk, noticing the chemicals in the physical system and then putting on a slurred and stupid act to maintain the illusion that the alcohol actually does something. Which makes no sense on two different levels: firstly there’s no reason whatsoever for the souls to play this little game, and secondly because we (in the model) _know_ what the soul is thinking, because we _are_ the soul. And I’ve heard no reports that drunk people are faking it. > > So yeah, that’s big problem one with this model that separates the brain and the mind: alcohol, coffee, and myriad other mind-altering drugs would not work under it. And they demonstrably do. In my form of dualism the physical realm is causally self-contained, so none of the above criticism applies. Physical events can affect the spiritual realm but spiritual events cannot affect the physical realm. “We” aren’t our souls, but “we” should act to the benefit of souls, not bodies. ~Max ---
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 5:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962/63 "2019-04-25T17:42:57Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Classic argument from ignorance. > > [Brain surgery can cause personality changes.](https://www.brainsciencefoundation.org/news/coping-personality-behavioral-changes/) Now I have no idea if you consider the mind to be just identity and not tied to personality, but if it is tied to personality then it must diverge after brain surgery. Losing a hand doesn’t change personality (much) but losing a part of the brain does. > Arguing for dualism from a complete lack of evidence - even possible evidence - is the very model of an irrational argument. That, and the argument from morality, remind me a lot of arguments for god - bad arguments. But I suppose if you buy arguments for the soul without evidence you should buy them for a god also. I’m not saying you do, but if you don’t why is the situation different. I apologize, I am not yet ruling out sentience in non-dualist philosophy. I am currently unconvinced is all. This line of inquiry is on pause until I read “Consciousness Explained”, unless someone does my homework for me and explains it here. The library didn’t have the book or know any partner libraries that had it. I’ll be heading over to the local college today or tomorrow to request it, and hopefully I can start reading within the next week or two. ~Max ---
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962/64 "2019-04-25T17:46:37Z")
> [@crowmanyclouds](#): > > I’m still confused on how, exactly, we choose to deal with permanently dead humans has any bearing the the larger question? > > CMC fnord! In a general sense, during moral analysis of actions that affect living humans and corpses, the moral weight assigned to dealing with dead humans can affect the decision. It turns out I answer the hypotheticals the same way as I would without dualism (assuming consciousness and sapience somehow still exist), so in this regard physicalism is simpler and therefore better. ~Max ---
**Author:** ![CurtC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ce73a5/32.png) [@CurtC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CurtC)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962/65 "2019-04-25T17:48:12Z")
> [@Max\_S](#): > > Before this thread I thought strong physicalism implies consciousness, sentience, and morals to be as illusory as souls - not even an illusion because there is no sentience to be fooled. I still haven’t been convinced otherwise, but I will be looking into a book that purportedly explains consciousness without souls. This goes along with what I said earlier, that you seem to be carrying over some of your dualist ideas and having trouble making them work in a physicalist framework, and then deciding that there’s therefore something inherently wrong with physicalism. Here you’re sticking with the idea that consciousness and morality are what souls do, and then reaching the conclusion that a world without souls means that there is no consciousness or morality. When what we’re saying is that the physical processes of the brain _are_ consciousness, and morality is an abstract idea that those conscious physical beings can consider. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962/66 "2019-04-25T17:50:59Z")
> [@begbert2](#): > > Also, and not to hammer on you, but you say: I’m not sure you fully grasp what this means - it means that when I do things, walk around, type this post, that the soul _has nothing whatsoever to do with any of that._ Because my actions in the physical realm are not caused by anything the soul does, in your model. > > This is actually what interested me so much in your specific dualist model - how absurdly unintuitive it is, and how drastically it differs from the ‘standard’ concept of souls. As an example of this ‘standard’ concept, I will cite a TV show that I happened to be rewatching last night, the 2003 show Dead Like Me. In that show you have folks whose nine-to-five is being grim reapers, collecting souls from people after they die. However in one scene one of them gets annoyed and reaches in and rips the soul out of a living person. She proceeds to briefly chew the soul out, holding it by its lapels as she yells at it, before stuffing it back in the body. While its soul is absent the body stands there slack-jawed and immobile, only becoming conscious and aware again once its soul has been returned. > > So yeah, under the standard concept of souls, a soulless person is less a p-zombie and more a zombie zombie. In your model, on the other hand, the body would have become a p-zombie and kept on carrying about its business whether the soul was present or not. It’s really an independent, separate person. A demonstrably conscious and aware sentient person, based on its actions; the soul really contributes nothing to the process. Since doing so, being the body’s puppetmaster, would _ **definitely** _ require the soul to be influencing events in the physical world. Because “acting conscious and self-aware” is something that is occurring in the physical world. > > Seriously, under your model _as you describe it_, my soul could be completely different from me - I’m picturing a somewhat nebbish young girl named Susan who enjoys long walks on the beach and kvetching that she’s stuck with the big hairy dude **begbert2** rather than, say, Brad Pitt. My soul having a completely separate and different mind wouldn’t matter, because the me that I’m aware of is actually a p-zombie, existing in the physical world and interacting with it. The soul is just following me around, barred from interacting with me, or through me. > > Or at least, that’s the picture you imply by saying there are no direct, causal interactions from the spiritual realm onto the physical realm. It’s a fun picture, isn’t it? But I don’t think it’s what you really mean. That is exactly what I mean. Your notes about intuition are quite harmful to my defense, indeed, I agree that the “standard” concept of Dualism with souls causing actions in the physical world is demonstrably false. That is why I chose this particular “non-standard” form of Dualism to defend. I still think my form of dualism is more intuitive and pragmatic than a world without sentience or consciousness. Such a world would have only the illusion or appearance of sentience, consciousness, and morals. You would probably agree, although you and the other posters in this thread are slowly convincing me that physicalism is not the barren philosophy I just described, and that nobody with common sense actually proposes such a philosophy. ~Max ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 5:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962/67 "2019-04-25T17:54:40Z")
> [@Max\_S](#): > > Meat sacks are not necessarily sentient. Sentience does not necessarily exist, and neither do morals. Dualism says they exist in another realm which is affected by actions in the physical realm. Most forms of dualism then say actions in the nonphysical realm also affect the physical realm, mine does not. Before this thread I thought strong physicalism implies consciousness, sentience, and morals to be as illusory as souls - not even an illusion because there is no sentience to be fooled. I still haven’t been convinced otherwise, but I will be looking into a book that purportedly explains consciousness without souls. > > ~Max Sentience observably exists - in my opinion the behavior of humans is literally impossible to explain if that behavior is not backed by mental processes that are both aware of the environment, have internal state (that is to say, thoughts), and are continuously aware that they have thoughts. I do not know how to define sentience other than as this. Now, there are various interesting subdiscussions to be had regarding the location and mechanics of our consciousnesses, but you can start out with firm certainty that human behavior is backed by consciousness, based on observation alone. > [@Max\_S](#): > > In my form of dualism the physical realm is causally self-contained, so none of the above criticism applies. Physical events can affect the spiritual realm but spiritual events cannot affect the physical realm. “We” aren’t our souls, but “we” should act to the benefit of souls, not bodies. > > ~Max Why should we act to benefit souls? The damn things are parasites. They don’t provide us with consciousness - they _can’t_, because we know that whatever consciousness we have drives our physical actions, which souls can’t do because that would be breaching the causal barrier you’ve imposed. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 6:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962/68 "2019-04-25T18:01:40Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > [Brain surgery can cause personality changes.](https://www.brainsciencefoundation.org/news/coping-personality-behavioral-changes/) Now I have no idea if you consider the mind to be just identity and not tied to personality, but if it is tied to personality then it must diverge after brain surgery. Losing a hand doesn’t change personality (much) but losing a part of the brain does. > Arguing for dualism from a complete lack of evidence - even possible evidence - is the very model of an irrational argument. That, and the argument from morality, remind me a lot of arguments for god - bad arguments. But I suppose if you buy arguments for the soul without evidence you should buy them for a god also. I’m not saying you do, but if you don’t why is the situation different. I don’t consider personality to be carried over into the spiritual world, although necessarily the soul will be aware of the personality of it’s body via qualia obtained through sensations of the same. My form of dualism is also consistent with a form of deism, up until a soul or deity wants to induce changes in the physical realm. That would be incompatible. Judging of souls is compatible. ~Max ---
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962/69 "2019-04-25T18:06:38Z")
> [@CurtC](#): > > To wit: The transpoter/duplicator’s problem for dualism is that if a machine creates a second “you,” and that “you” has a soul, then that means that we have a purely physical machine which can create souls. Does this seem like a conflict to you that your dualism has trouble with? After adjusting my philosophy in post #55, there is no conflict. The machine can create souls. I compare this with natural procreation. ~Max ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 6:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962/70 "2019-04-25T18:15:12Z")
> [@Max\_S](#): > > After adjusting my philosophy in post #55, there is no conflict. The machine can create souls. I compare this with natural procreation. > > ~Max Are you proposing that there is a “soul gene”? ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 6:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962/71 "2019-04-25T18:15:20Z")
> [@Max\_S](#): > > I don’t consider personality to be carried over into the spiritual world, although necessarily the soul will be aware of the personality of it’s body via qualia obtained through sensations of the same. > > My form of dualism is also consistent with a form of deism, up until a soul or deity wants to induce changes in the physical realm. That would be incompatible. Judging of souls is compatible. > > ~Max So to recap, the soul really is a completely different person from me with a completely different personality, who I’ll never meet and who parasitically leeches off my senses. The soul is created while I’m born and presumably spends its entire life in an existential hell where it observes my actions and has opinions about what I should do but has no way to communicate with me or otherwise influence the events in the life is has no choice but to experience. And then at some point they are judged for the actions it did not have any control over. Yikes. Sucks to be them - but I still don’t know why I should care about them. I mean sure, I shouldn’t deliberately try to make their eventual judgement harsher, but honestly the only thing I know about what the deist God will be judging by is that he hates accountants, and that doesn’t give me much to go on. And in any case, even if the soul does get judged harshly that’s no skin off _my_ nose - I’ll already be dead. So my incentives to avoid becoming an accountant are low. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962/72 "2019-04-25T18:17:48Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > Sure, without the exceptions, I don’t see property rights ever trumping human rights, myself… > > Depends on the organ. Generally yes, a bit, I imagine. But then so does every other life experience, so it’s not particularly special. > So you admit your reasoning is just ad hoc reactionary response at this point? How the heck is that honest debate? > > If you don’t actually know the Devil’s arguments, don’t be his advocate. > Dennett has quite a bit to say about intuition… > > I wouldn’t care about the former identity of my new kidney if it was properly sourced. It’s an identity change, but not a moral challenge. > > And if I \*willingly \*accept even a \*radical \*identity-altering transplant (say, a partial brain transplant) there’s no moral quandary to me. > > Please explain how they’re extensions, I don’t really see the chain… When receiving a cybernetic implant, the question is “does this implant change who I am? Is that change a moral change?”. My answer for the dualist is the same and I am guessing your answer is the same too. When considering a drug such as Versed, to a dualist’s soul that’s like taking out an organ and putting it back - except the organ is the whole body. Remember that a dualist believes the soul to hold all the moral cards, so with informed consent a beneficial operation with Versed is indeed a beneficial operation. Without dualism, it is my understanding that so long as there is informed consent… actually you said there might be a problem if you try and withdraw consent during the operation. Could you elaborate on that? Maybe drugs are different for your philosophy. ~Max ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962/73 "2019-04-25T18:36:10Z")
Oh, and as an additional note to the “can material brains house consciousness” question, I can say with absolute certianty that 1) I personally have consciousness, and 2) my consciousness can impact my physical actions in the real world. Given the arbitrary rule that the supernatural can’t influence the physical, I know that material brains _ **must** _ be capable of housing consciousness, simply because my consciousness has to be housed somewhere and there’s simply nowhere else it could be. That arbitrary non-interference rule really makes this fun! 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 6:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962/74 "2019-04-25T18:47:03Z")
> [@Max\_S](#): > > I don’t consider personality to be carried over into the spiritual world, although necessarily the soul will be aware of the personality of it’s body via qualia obtained through sensations of the same. > > My form of dualism is also consistent with a form of deism, up until a soul or deity wants to induce changes in the physical realm. That would be incompatible. Judging of souls is compatible. > > ~Max Does a soul have a personality? Does it match the personality of the mind at birth? Can the soul’s personality change - understanding it would not change due to changes in the material body. If so, how? Can the sould actually do anything except watch? If it cannot, how can it be judged? My reference to deism was no about the concepts being connected, but more as another example of belief in something for which there is by definition no evidence and which is unfalsifiable. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 6:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962/75 "2019-04-25T18:54:08Z")
> [@CurtC](#): > > Yes, the physicalist says that there are degrees of self-ness. It goes against the assumptions of our language, and in some ways against some of our intuitions, but those are limitations of our language and intuitions, not of physicalism. Point taken. > [@CurtC](#): > > You have mentioned several aspects that you consider to be problems for physicalism somehow, but so far you haven’t convinced anyone here that anything you’ve mentioned is actually a problem. IMO, you seem to be dragging some of the dualist ideas (a “soul”) into a physicalist world and that is causing you confusion, but you just need to leave the dualist ideas behind completely and then there are no inconsistencies. > > Yet there are inconsistencies with a dualist approach in the very examples you cited. My goal is not to convince anyone else that dualism is or is not better. My goal is to convince myself. Losing the debate is a win so long as we reach a conclusion one way or the other. > [@CurtC](#): > > So you may pretend to accept that something is true because it leads to you to better behavior? I don’t know how that works. > > I want to accept things that are _true_ and then just choose to behave morally without it being propped up on falsehoods. I don’t advocate Dualism itself as true or false. It is inappropriate to declare something absolutely true or false if you do not or cannot be certain. To say you know such a thing would be false knowledge. What I do argue is that Dualism’s spiritual realm is unobservable; unfalsifiable. “We” meat-bags can never know whether souls exist or not. Most people’s response is that therefore, Dualism is useless. I reply to this by arguing morals based on Dualism leads to demonstrably better behavior than the alternatives. Proving or disproving that is the basis of this thread. I was also expecting someone to argue that having no morals at all would be better, that better behavior isn’t necessarily better, but that hasn’t happened. ~Max ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 6:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962/76 "2019-04-25T18:57:14Z")
> [@Max\_S](#): > > I reply to this by arguing morals based on Dualism leads to demonstrably better behavior than the alternatives. Proving or disproving that is the basis of this thread. I can’t even imagine how having ectoplasmic parasites spying on us should improve our morals, or even imply a moral system at all. Care to elucidate? ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962/77 "2019-04-25T18:58:35Z")
> [@Max\_S](#): > > I reply to this by arguing morals based on Dualism leads to demonstrably better behavior than the alternatives. Proving or disproving that is the basis of this thread. But you _haven’t_ argued that morals based on Duelism leads to demonstrably better behaviour-you’ve merely stated it without providing evidence that it is so. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962/78 "2019-04-25T19:14:44Z")
Consider the pea. Originally, it was not a thing. It came from a plant called “pease”, which itself was a singular form, but, since it sounded like a plural, the word “pea” eventually arose as a back-formation to describe a single seed from the pease plant. Similarly, “soul” is a back-formation out of the application complex thought. Its origin lies in the survival instinct present in lifeforms, and is easily observable in a great many animals. It clearly has evolutionary advantage, because beings invested with the desire to survive will tend to prevail over beings that are indifferent to their own survival. What does that mean for morality? Nothing. The “soul” is not a player in morality, other than the fact that it drives our desire to survive. Morality is only about maintaining our relationships with other people and critters in ways that optimize comfort and survival. The “soul’s” depiction of our survival is used by the brain when making moral calculations. Is there more to it than just that? What is my singularity, into which all perception seeems to flow? What is “me”, that is so discreetly and irrevocably isolated from “you” or “her”? Why should it matter, really? It just is, and the survival instinct accounts for it completely. Everything else is fiction (until someone can provide solid evidence to the contrary) and “dualism” is superfluous. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962/79 "2019-04-25T19:20:01Z")
> [@begbert2](#): > > I can’t even imagine how having ectoplasmic parasites spying on us should improve our morals, or even imply a moral system at all. Care to elucidate? Clearly you have not perused the _NOT_s (_New Era Dianetics for Operating Thetans_). According to the doctrine, we are swarming with Body Thetans left over from the massacre of Incident II, and only the practices outlined in the _NOT_s will allow us to clear these ectoplasmic parasites from our bodies. But, a shower might at least make you feel better for a while. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962/80 "2019-04-25T19:24:39Z")
> [@begbert2](#): > > I suppose it bears asking explicitly: > > If I were to say to you, “I prefer not to be tortured, thanks,” would that be my brain saying that, or my soul saying that? If you were to physically say anything, that sense of “you” is the physical brain. But this is merely a reflex. Let me be clear about this, in dualism the soul is sentient, not the body. The brain doesn’t feel pain, it reacts to painful stimuli. Not my brain, not your brain, not an ant brain. Pain is not itself immoral, but sending that pain up to a soul is. Damaging an object is not itself immoral, but damaging an object that another soul has rights over is. ~Max [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defence-of-dualism/832962.md?page=5)