Mind-body dualism

How mind and body are distinct but intertwined. 

See www.newDualism.org for reviews and articles about all kinds of theories.

Preliminary articles concerning mind-body dualism:

Discrete Degrees Within and Between Nature and Mind
Examining the role of dispositions  (potentials and propensities) in both physics and psychology reveals that they are commonly derivative dispositions, so called because they derive from other dispositions. Furthermore, when they act, they produce further propensities. Together, therefore, they appear to form discrete degrees within a structure of multiple generative levels. It is then constructively hypothesized that minds and physical nature are themselves discrete degrees within some more universal structure. This gives rise to an effective dualism of mind and nature, but one according to which they are still constantly related by causal connections. I suggest a few of the unified principles of operation of this more complicated but universal structure.

Ten Principles

A new account of the role of mind in nature is based on several principles taken to be universal, some of which exist already in today’s science.

Dualism in Descartes and Swedenborg

Swedenborg used Descartes as a symbol of his desired resolution of the mind-body problem in favour of ‘spiritual influx’, but we see that Descartes’ position was substantially different in a number of ways. We consider a number of modern objections and puzzles about dualism, and how Descartes and Swedenborg each might respond.

Dualism: a Causal Correspondence Theory

A suggestion is made how the mind and brain might fit together intimately while still maintaining distinct identities. The connection is based on the correspondence of similar functions in both the mind and the quantum-mechanical brain.

Are Quantum Physics and Spirituality related?

It is particularly valuable to discuss questions concerning quantum physics and spirituality together, in order to see the connection between them. There is an urgent reason for discussing this link, because there are people who want to identify these things, giving a monism rather than (at least) a dualism. There is a widespread feeling that somehow that they are connected, but some ‘new age’ people want to say that quantum physics tells us about spirituality. We have read in Swedenborg that any such connection could  not be quite so simple, so we need to understand in more detail what is going on.


Full details at www.beginningtheisticscience.com/ 

Do religion and theism make factual claims?

Literal and metaphorical images and myths are often contrasted with each other, and we are sometimes asked to choose between them. Are the stories of the bible (with their miracles) to be taken literally, or metaphorically? Which? Tell me!  Julian Baggini recently asks these questions in the Guardian Newspaper, in his column entitled The articles of 21st-century faith. He says

Atheist critics of religion are often dismissed for dealing only with the simple, highly literal forms of belief, while ignoring more nuanced, intellectual understandings of religion. The form of this argument varies, but in general terms it rests on a rejection of the idea that religion requires belief in anthropomorphic supernatural beings. As Theo Hobson put it in an exchange with me a few years back, "a huge proportion of believers inhabit this grey area between 'literal' and 'metaphorical' belief – in a sense all believers do.

He wants to know whether religious people choose between a metaphorical interpretation of religion, the first bullet of which is:

M1. To be religious is primarily to assent to a set of values, and/or practise a way of life, and/or belong to a community that shares these values and/or practices. Any creeds or factual assertions associated with these things, especially ones that make claims about the nature and origin of the natural universe, are at most secondary and often irrelevant. 

Alternatively, the choice is to take stories and miracles literally, which is to take the opposing positions:

L1. Religious creeds or factual assertions are neither secondary nor irrelevant to religion.
L2. Religious belief requires the belief that supernatural events have occurred here on Earth.
L3. Religions can make claims about the physical nature, origin or structure of the natural universe. That which science can study and explain empirically should not be left to science, and if a religion makes a claim that is incompatible with our best science, the scientific claim need not prevail.
L4. Human intellect and imagination are insufficient to explain the existence of religious texts.

Baggini thinks that such people would like to take these 'opposing positions', but are reluctant to admit this in public, because this exposes them to being contradicted by science. So they retreat to the metaphorical views M1-M4, which are almost devoid of content.  Baggini's immediate aim is to determine whether the fashionable atheists of today are correct in attributing positions L1-L4 to the religious believers, and hence whether they are targeting actual beliefs when they attack these from the scientific materialist & atheist point of view.

In theistic science, by contrast, our position is clear. We clearly affirm all the positions L1, L2, L4, and the first sentence of L3. And we do not retreat from them in the face of science. Instead we take science as the systematic application of reason and evidence in examining the nature of things. We therefore use science to examine things of religion, of spirituality, of mind, and even of God insofar has the Divine has effects in the world. That is our challenge in theistic science.

There are some provisos, however:

1. We do not insist that "if a religion makes a claim that is incompatible with our best science, the scientific claim need not prevail", because religions are also subject to investigation by theistic science, and, after sufficient investigations, not all parts of all religions will necessarily be found based on fact.
2. We do not insist that all stories in religious scriptures are necessarily literally true. That is because some stories may be included because they are parables rather than history. Or they may be selected pieces of history put together to illustrate a spiritual truth as if history were the parable. We are not going to get into discussion about whether the stories are 'real but not true'.  Only to say that the true reference of the characters and events in the stories may be at one of the discrete levels that exist in the interior parts of our minds.

There is much to discover and to learn.