Varieties of Dualism, Part Two

"I am a mind"

In this series of essays, I am examining different variants of dualism. I want to offer definitions, theories about origins, ramifications for dualists, and—since I think dualism is a bad thing—ways of addressing them. The book that will include these essays will be a mixture of philosophy, psychology, and self-help; this series is more of a psychological treatment than a philosophical one. I am not making an argument against dualism here.

In this essay I am going to examine mind-body dualism. I distinguish between it and soul-body dualism by pointing out that the former tends to be secular and the latter religious. We will discuss the soul in the next essay.

To reiterate my alternative to dualism, which I call personal holism, I believe that a human being is a unitary being, conscious and bodily, but in no way a consciousness + a body. You can read my foundational essay on personal holism and why I think dualism is false here.

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René Descartes, who was the father of modern mind-body dualism, offered in the Second Meditation a statement about what he believed he was:

Well, then, what am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wants, refuses, and also imagines and senses.

This “thinking thing” is the mind. Note that for Descartes, the mind is always immaterial and is to be contrasted with the material body. This is known as “substance dualism,” because mind and matter are held to be made of two distinct substances. The dualist believes “I am my mind; my body is other.”

René Descartes (1596-1650)

Mind-body dualism is a paradoxical idea. Few members of the educated public that I’ve been able to find hold the precise and explicit Cartesian form of it, although some philosophers and theologians do. From what I can tell looking at entries on Reddit and Quora as well as blogs, most educated people who believe that they are a mind believe that the mind is a function of the brain, although some think it more reducible to brain activity than others. They do not believe in a separate mental substance, as Descartes did. (I will treat explicit brain-body dualism—the idea that the brain is the true self— in a later essay in this series.) However, a more generalized version of a Cartesian thinking, which goes light on the ontological trimmings, can be found in many, perhaps most children, college students, and adults.

It does not bother me that I hold a minority opinion. I regard dualism as akin to the extramission theory of vision, which holds that our eyes emit rays to help us see. Up to 50% of the population believes this notion despite it having been debunked centuries ago. They believe it, no doubt, because it is intuitive. I believe that dualism is intuitive for many or most people, too, but that that intuition can be overcome, just as the geocentric model of the solar system, which is also intuitive, was overcome.

This is an important issue because a belief in dualism, as studies have shown, is unhealthy. If you believe your body is just a vessel for your immaterial true self, you tend not to take care of it. In addition, I would claim there are deleterious psychological consequences to dualism, which I will return to later.

The classic example of a mind-body dualist is the stereotypical college professor who barely pays attention to his feelings, his body, his environment, or other people. As sometime University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins once said, “Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes.” I would suggest that many extreme gamers are probably dualists, too, at least implicitly, but I have no way of doing a survey on the subject. But mind-body dualism extends well beyond these groups.

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So why are people dualists? Child psychologist Paul Bloom in Descartes’ Baby opines that we are born with two separate systems in the brain: a physics system and a social system. These two modules lead us to see bodies and minds as distinct. Bloom is very clear, however, that this does not make dualism true. I don’t know enough about the brain to weigh in on this hypothesis, but I can offer another cluster of hypotheses based on introspection that seem plausible to me.

In The Open-Focus Brain, neurofeedback pioneer Les Fehmi describes different attentional styles. One of them is “narrow-objective,” where you mentally focus on a single item in your cognitive field and hold it at arm’s length. This is the typical problem-solving mode of Western thinkers. In an early paper Fehmi applies his analysis to Descartes:

A famous quotation of Descartes suggests an attentional and content bias of his and our time. He said "I think, therefore I am." Paraphrasing his words and using the language of this paper he might have said "I pay attention to my thoughts, therefore I am." Again paraphrasing, to reflect his position he might also have said, "I am aware that I pay attention with a narrow objective awareness to my various thoughts, therefore I am." In this definition of "self" notice that Descartes did not include reference to the other senses, seeing, hearing, feeling, etc. He only referred to thinking.

As I describe in greater detail in another essay, narrow-objective focus can make you feel as if you are the act of knowing, i.e. a pure mind. According to Fehmi, many Westerners are stuck in this style of attention, which he says is stressful.

Psychologist Jerry L. Jennings followed a similar line of analysis in a paper where he claimed that the reductive focus of Descartes’ method of pursuing truth led him to think he was just a mind. Looking exclusively for “clear and distinct ideas” led him to zero in on a purely intellectual type of thinking. The ontological determination is a mere artefact of the epistemic procedure. If he had paid greater heed to different ways of attending, he would not have come to the same conclusion.

I would add to this my own related hypothesis: we tend to think of ourselves as a disembodied mind because we can freely imagine sights and sounds without bodily involvement. The existence of an “inner eye” and an “inner ear” suggests that there must be an “inner person,” i.e. a mind. I will address this idea at greater length in another essay; suffice it to say for now that it seems logical to think that we evolved to have an onboard “scratch-pad” that piggybacks on sensory experience. This does not seem to me to demonstrate the existence of a consciousness separate from the body.

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An anonymous commenter on Reddit made an interesting, if speculative, point about the origin and consequences of Descartes’ thinking:

Cartesian Dualism seems to create a relationship with the body and the earth that is dissociative and violent towards the natural world. Descartes was ill for much of his life and his theories are likely a result of his need to dissociate from his body to cope. He believed that humans are transcendent of nature and non human animals don’t have the thoughts and emotions that humans do and tried to demonstrate this by publicly torturing a dog and asserting that the dogs cries were not actually the dog suffering. His theories may be a contributor to industrial culture’s violent exploitative relationship with the natural world and one reason for the mass extinction of species. Im not a fan of his theories.

This insight is a good opportunity for me to segue into the ramifications of mind-body dualism for the individual. While the theory is also frequently criticized on ecological and feminist grounds, I will not comment on that here.

As far as the individual dualist is concerned, I believe that dualism is a disaster. To begin with, as the Reddit commenter points out, Cartesian dualism is dissociative. This is so for two reasons: First, Descartes arrived at his theory by doubting everything that can be doubted. Maybe we’re just dreaming or being deceived by a demon or the like. Maybe the world, including the body, isn’t real. When you’re done doubting, all you’re certain of is that you exist as thinking stuff floating in the ether. But that’s what dissociation is: feeling the world isn’t real.

Obviously, not every dualist follows the doubt-all line of argument. Most dualists probably don’t know that much about Descartes. What I think is commonly going on is that in an attempt to escape pain in their lives, they dissociate their “minds” from their bodies and the world and become implicit dualists. Descartes and the Cartesian elements of our culture are waiting for them as much at the end of this process as at the beginning.

The second reason Cartesian thinking is dissociative is that—and here all dualists follow Descartes, even if they don’t know about him—according to dualism, the body is just an appendage, nothing more than a machine we pilot. I’ve read it degradingly referred to as a “meat taxi.” In his defense, Descartes said in the Sixth Meditation that the relationship between mind and body was not like that of a sailor and his ship but that they form a unity in their feelings. However, I don’t think this caveat follows from the rest of his philosophy, and I’m not inclined to excuse him on the basis of this one qualification after pages of ideas to the contrary. For Descartes you are “res cogitans”—a thinking thing. Not identifying with your body is also dissociation.

The next major ramification of mind-body dualism is that it leads its believer to repress and intellectualize the emotions. Emotions and other feelings are felt in the body. If your body isn’t you, your emotions aren’t yours. Notice also that nowhere in Descartes’ list of what a thinking thing does do feelings/emotions appear. Senses, yes, but not affects.

My general hypothesis about dualism is that it usually entails overidentification with a real or imagined aspect of the self as opposed to a proper identification with the whole. According to personal holism, there’s no such thing as a separable “mind,” only conscious persons. “Mind” as a thing is a misconceptualization—a reification of the quality of being conscious. It’s really just a metaphor. So technically, you can’t identify with it. What I believe most mind-body dualists are overidentifying with is their reason, which I would claim is a faculty, not an entity. And since for many people reason is antithetical to the emotions, we can once again get the intellectualization or repression of feelings I spoke of earlier. This is a pattern one can fall into without Descartes’ help, but it is still dualism.

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I have a lot of experience with mind-body dualism in my own life. I had a somewhat isolated childhood. My mother was heavily medicated and distant. I had few friends. I spent a lot of time playing with Lego, reading, and drawing. One of my brothers teased me constantly. He would sing the theme from the TV show “Naked City” when I got out of the bath. I was very ashamed of my body and would not change in and out of a bathing suit in a locker room without my other brother screening me with a towel.

At some point in my teens, I noticed that I was dissociating constantly. It felt like I was looking at the world through a telescope, distant and removed. I called it the Dream State. In addition, it was rare that I would feel emotions vividly and spontaneously. One girl I dated said that it seemed like I calculated everything I did and said before I did and said it. I noticed this, too, and called it Symbol Manipulation. Furthermore, other people didn’t seem quite real to me, just as Descartes worried that other people might be automata since he couldn’t see their immaterial minds.

I didn’t get all this from Descartes, at least not directly. I might have picked up some of it from popular culture. For example, several episodes of Star Trek, a show I watched constantly as a child, are based on dualist premises. But really, I think I mostly developed it on my own in response to my sometimes-traumatic childhood. I probably was trying to shield myself from an alienating life by moving into my own “inner world.”

Human beings are natural philosophers. My primary connection to Cartesian thinking was that my perception seemed indirect, like Descartes’ theory of representationalism, which holds that we do not perceive reality, but images of reality transmitted to the mind by the brain. It was only years later, when I learned about Descartes, that I recognized my implicit philosophy.

Notice that this is a psychological explanation. I believe that false philosophies, to the extent they seem intuitive and plausible, are always grounded in psychology, often in bad experiences that we are reacting to. I don’t take mistaken theories at face value. This is a rather Nietzschean approach to the history of philosophy. It’s a valuable adjunct to philosophical reasoning, which is necessary and which I offer in other essays.

I came to challenge representationalism and the Dream State in college, through two philosophy of mind courses, taught by the wonderful Alan Donagan. In the decades since I developed my theory of personal holism, with help from Ayn Rand and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who got to the general idea first.

I have mostly overcome my own dualism. My therapist helps me with my intellectualization. She makes me use feeling words and describe where in my body I feel an emotion. Reading Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma helped me also.

I’ve dealt with the dissociation mostly on my own using the phenomenon of presence, which is the self-conscious feeling of existing as a physical being in a world of physical entities. I write about presence and exercises I use to attain it in this essay.

Is it fair to say that my problem was dualism, when I didn’t hold the ideas of the philosophy explicitly? I would say that it is, that anyone who lives in his or her head is a dualist implicitly, even if their “official beliefs” run to the contrary. It’s the ideas that we live, that have sunk in, that count. And many people believe in dualism more explicitly than I did. I hope my readers who might be implicit or explicit dualists will recognize their situation and choose to do something about it.

I’d like to help. Scattered through the essays that comprise the book I am writing are suggestions that I think might make a difference: presence, identifying where you feel your feelings, mindfulness moments, sensuality, etc. Some might say increased physical activity would help, but be careful: intense exercise or sports might entail treating your body as a tool, which is a variation on dualism that we will cover later. I would recommend walks in nature, where you reconnect with your body, a companion, and the world by shifting out of narrow-objective focus. And of course, it will help to think through the theory of personal holism, which once accepted can guide you to better lifeways. Mind-body dualism can and should be defeated.