I think that the qualitative and subjectivist notions of being aware, thinking and feeling are biased by our use of language (as a good Wittgensteinian should think[1]), and that nothing is lost by abandoning these linguistic errors, because nothing was gained by them in the first place.
A historical note or two
I have read repeatedly that the default state of humans is that mind and body, or soul and body, or similar dualities, are real and distinct. Barrett et al. 2021 call this intuitive dualism and go on to contrast it with what they call parallel systems[2]:
… intuitive dualism predicts that not only is it possible for humans to consider minds and bodies to be distinct and capable of independent existence, but that this way of thinking of minds and bodies should be the natural default mode of thought for humans. And unlike the simple parallel systems account, intuitive dualism predicts that dualist afterlife beliefs where the soul (mind) can survive the death of the body should be widespread and habitually activated when thinking about death. [page 3]
In fact, I think the default mode is that bodies have minds/souls/reasoning/experience, and that this is always a unity. I’m not alone in this. It is becoming the consensus view among cognitive scientists and anthropologists.[3] But I’d like to make a few historical points as well. There is a tendency to assume that the modern view on minds (by which I mean since Descartes separated minds and bodies in 1641) is the view that we have always held naturally, and often intellectuals will find evidence of this by interpreting earlier work (such as Augustine’s or Plato’s, or the Vedanta) as being the vindication of a universal intuitive dualism. But this foreshortens both history and philosophy. For example, while the Indus Valley philosophers held that in order to be reincarnated the self must persist over changes in the physical, this is largely down to the lesser reality or unreality of the physical world rather than a mind-body separation (Barua 2017). But more to the point, contemporaneous with or preceding the Vedas was a school of sceptical materialists, the Lokāyata or Cārvāka. Likewise, Plato may be the originator through his theory of forms, his close contemporary Democritus held a materialist view of the world. And even in the Tanakh/Old Testament, we see hints of a monistic view of human life. For example, in Ezekiel 37, the parable of the dry bones, although intended to show that God will restore Judah to life, shows that in order to live there must be a body to add breath[4] to. Likewise in Koheleth (Ecclesiastes) 3, there is no real difference between animals and humans, and their spirit (ruach) dies with them.[5]
There is, to be sure, a somewhat less than monistic tendency among pre-modern cultures with respect to spirits and “spirit”. But the notion of an ontological duality, or even or a mind and body distinction, is almost nonexistent. In large part this is because we are trying hard to impose or project western traditional theological and philosophical categories onto cultures that preceded this. Almost all of the translations and discussions by modern, mostly western, scholars and pundits of religions, rituals, and ancient texts are themselves framed in terms of this Christian dualism and Platonism. In fact, Plato seems to be the ultimate source of western dualism entirely (Sedley 2007, Solmsen 1983). However, I suspect that if not Plato himself, Pythagoreanism (“all is number”) was indirectly influenced by Vedic metempsychotic accounts of subjective self surviving death, before he wrote.[6]
Summary
I’m going to recap the basic arguments I have presented. First of all, I’d like to say that, although others have offered similar arguments, I came to them largely on my own. I do not claim much novelty here, so don’t sue me.
1. I assert, with precisely as much warrant as the dualists have, that the onus is on them to show there is something non-physical about mind and the universe, and that they cannot do this.
2. I deny that we need to posit a property “consciousness”, although we and other organisms are conscious in varying degrees and ways. We should not make the adjectives into nouns unnecessarily.
3. I reject the claim that our starting point must be some ineffable qualia or feelings of what it is like to be what we are. If you cannot state it clearly enough to given solid reasons independent of it being “what we all know”, then there is no explanatory gap.
4. All of what subjectivism asserts can be reduced to location in space and time, and the physical systems we are.
5. Information is not a physical causal property or substance. Conflating the computational representation or model of something with the thing itself is a common fallacy, that of reification. No abstract model of a thing will fully capture all that is true of the thing.
6. We will never be uploaded, therefore.
7. Mind is a physical process, although I am agnostic with respect to dual aspect and functional accounts.
8. We have no unitary ego, although the notion is good enough for government work.
9. We have free will in a social sense, although we are causally restricted to a few states.
10. We lose nothing in ethics and morality by being monists.
11. Emergence is a psychological cognitive property, not a real thing.
12. The world is not aware. Panpsychism is ungrounded.
13. Reductionism is more benign than we traditionally say.
14. We are philosophical zombies. Prove me wrong.
So, when I revise and probably expand this series it will become a book manuscript. With any luck I can find a proper publisher.
References
Barua, Ankur. 2017. “The Reality and the Verifiability of Reincarnation.” Religions 8 (9). https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8090162.
Barrett, H. Clark, Alexander Bolyanatz, Tanya Broesch, Emma Cohen, Peggy Froerer, Martin Kanovsky, Mariah G. Schug, and Stephen Laurence. 2021. “Intuitive Dualism and Afterlife Beliefs: A Cross-Cultural Study.” Cognitive Science 45 (6): e12992. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12992.
Bauks, Michaela. 2016. “‘Soul-Concepts’ in Ancient Near Eastern mythical texts and their implications for the Primeval History.” Vetus Testamentum 66 (2): 181–93.
Bussanich, John. 2005. “The Roots of Platonism and Vedānta: Comments on Thomas McEvilley.” International Journal of Hindu Studies 9, no. 1/3: 1–20.
Conger, George P. 1952. “Did India Influence Early Greek Philosophies?” Philosophy East and West 2, no. 2: 102–28. https://doi.org/10.2307/1397302.
Demertzi, Athena, Charlene Liew, Didier Ledoux, Marie-Aurélie Bruno, Michael Sharpe, Steven Laureys, and Adam Zeman. 2009. “Dualism persists in the science of mind.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1157 (1): 1–9.
Hill, Edmund. 1959. “‘Soul’ in the Bible.” Life of the Spirit (1946-1964) 13 (156): 530–37.
McEvilley, Thomas. 2002. The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. Allworth Press.
Mix, Lucas John. 2018. “The Breath of Life: Nephesh in Hebrew Scriptures.” In Life Concepts from Aristotle to Darwin: On Vegetable Souls, edited by Lucas John Mix, 79–90. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Sanujit. "Cultural links between India & the Greco-Roman world." World History Encyclopedia. Last modified February 12, 2011. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/208/cultural-links-between-india--the-greco-roman-worl/ .
Sedley, David N. 2007. Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity. Sather Classical Lectures. Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press.
Sick, David H. “When Socrates Met the Buddha: Greek and Indian Dialectic in Hellenistic Bactria and India.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 17, no. 3 (2007): 253–78.
Smith, Mark S. 2001. The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2002. The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel. 2nd ed. The Biblical Resource Series. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co.
Solmsen, Friedrich. 1983. “Plato and the concept of the soul (psyche): some historical perspectives.” Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (3): 355–67.
Staples, W. E. 1928. “The ‘soul’ in the Old Testament.” The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 44 (3): 145–76.
[1] Reader, I am not a good Wittgensteinian.
[2] “The parallel systems account implies that people possess distinct ways of thinking about organisms—as agents, and as objects—and that the judgments made in accordance with these different ways of thinking about organisms are made by independent systems. As a result, it allows for the possibility of conceiving of minds and bodies as distinct and capable of independent existence.” [page 2]
On dualism in modern thought, see Demertzi et al.
[3] Bauks 2016.
[4] Ruach in Hebrew, and psuchē in Greek. Both etymologically derive from the notion of breath, but in Hebrew it means something more like the heart of a person, and in Greek the motivating force. See Mix 2018,
[5] For more details see Hill 1959, Staples 1928, and for a general overview of pre-Classical Hebrew religion, see Smith 2001, 2002.
[6] See Sanujit 2011 for evidence of Hellene and Indian interactions before Alexander. I am by far not the first person to have this suspicion, and though many have pointed out that similarities in thought do not imply influence, with which I concur, I remain resolute in my suspicion. See Conger 1952, McEvilley 2002, Bussanich 2005, Sick 2007.
Excellent series, thank you. It helped me to organize and get some perspective on material I've read over the last few years.
This is superb, John. If there's anything I can do to help get this published, let me know!