Mind, Body and the Evidence for Survival

Overview

Recall questions on substance dualism and Ryle's objection, property dualism and monism, Plato and Aristotle on the soul, the moral argument for a world to come, near-death experiences, and the problems of evidence and language for survival.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What is substance dualism?

   Model answer

   The view that a person is made of two different kinds of thing: a physical body, extended in space and publicly observable, and a mind or soul which thinks, is not extended, and is known directly only by the person whose it is. Descartes argued that he could doubt whether he had a body but could not doubt that he was thinking, and concluded that mind and body are distinct substances capable of existing apart. The view makes survival of death straightforward in principle.

2. 2

   What are the standard objections to substance dualism?

   Model answer

   The interaction problem: if the mind is not physical it is hard to see how it moves an arm, or how a drug alters a mood, since any point of contact would have to be physical on one side and not on the other. Ryle argued that dualism rests on a category mistake, like a visitor shown the colleges, the library and the offices who then asks to be shown the university, and he mocked the picture as a ghost in a machine. There is also the sheer weight of evidence tying mental function to brain states.

3. 3

   What are the alternatives to substance dualism?

   Model answer

   Property dualism keeps one kind of stuff but holds that conscious properties are not reducible to physical ones, so experience is something over and above brain activity without being a separate substance. Materialist monism holds that the mind simply is the brain and its activity, in one of several versions - mental states identical with neural states, or understood as functional roles that could in principle be realised in another medium. Idealist monism runs the other way and treats matter as dependent on mind. Only some of these leave any room for survival, which is why the question is not merely technical.

4. 4

   What did Plato hold about the soul?

   Model answer

   That the soul is immortal and belongs with the unchanging Forms, while the body belongs to the shifting world of appearances; the body is a hindrance, and philosophy is a preparation for leaving it. He argued that learning is really the recollection of what the soul knew before birth, which implies it existed beforehand; that a simple thing without parts cannot be broken up; and that what is essentially alive cannot admit its own opposite. He also divided the soul into reason, spirit and appetite, with reason properly in charge.

5. 5

   How does Aristotle differ from Plato on the soul?

   Model answer

   Sharply. For Aristotle the soul is not a thing inside the body but the form of a living body - what makes this matter a functioning organism, as the shape of a statue is not a further ingredient alongside the bronze. He compares it to sight: if an eye were a whole animal, sight would be its soul, and there is no sight once the eye is destroyed. On that account the soul cannot outlast the body's dissolution, because it is not the sort of item that could exist on its own. He does raise a puzzle about intellect which later interpreters made much of, but he offers nothing resembling personal immortality.

6. 6

   How does moral argument bear on belief in a world to come?

   Model answer

   Through the argument that morality makes demands this life never honours. Kant held that the moral law requires us to aim at a perfect union of virtue and happiness which nobody achieves in a lifetime, so reason must postulate a continued existence in which the pursuit can go on, and a God able to match happiness to desert. More widely, many people find it intolerable that the torturer and the tortured should meet the same end, and judgement after death answers that. Critics reply that wanting the universe to be fair is not evidence that it is, and that acting well for the sake of a reward is not acting well at all.

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