Everything I read about it says there just has to be an alternate universe where your mind exists, is that the idea? Forgive me I'm an idiot.
Everything I read about it says there just has to be an alternate universe where your mind exists, is that the idea? Forgive me I'm an idiot.
It starts with Descartes locking himself in a room and doubting everything until he comes to a few conclusions, he can imagine himself existing as a mind without a body (like a ghost or something) but not as a body without a mind and that the only thing he could know with any certainty was that he had thoughts - cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am, something's doing the thinking). Descartes figured the mind and minds in general existed in another parallel realm that interacted with the material reality of the world through your pineal gland, the mental realm not really having any "space" but being a realm of thoughts and epiphenomena.
Other mind-body dualists have reserved this other mental/spiritual realm and said there is no interaction but God keeps them in harmony (or that they coincided at some earlier point and are merely playing out exactly the same and just happen to be aligned).
Mind-body dualism is, like, the default belief of the average westerner for many thousands of years so I imagine for a lot of people it was never seriously questioned - even by really deep thinkers or philosophers or people who decide to lock themselves in a room and doubt everything until they are certain about what they can know.
Am I silly for thinking a belief in God and even a spiritual realm doesn't require mind-body dualism? God and the soul could very well be things in the same realm as us, but I don't know how well explored that is in philosophy/theology.
Because I'm just not convinced Descartes made a lot of sense with his assertion that he could imagine himself thinking without also having a body to go along with it. I think Hegel also pointed out that Descartes couldn't ever be a mind without also having access to other thinking beings to confirm his own identity as a thinking being.
The Epicureans had an atomistic / materialist concept of the mind. They even sort of deduced the concept of neurons.
There are definitely Christian materialists and there are definitely Futurama-style religions that believe in a real, physical creator God somewhere present in the world. In terms of strict materialism, we "know" stuff like elementary particles have no internal states because they must be simple according to all of our current understanding of physics and all observations we have made, this rules out any actual interaction from the soul-realm to material (it would have to be one way the other way if mind-body duality is right) and would also rule out any material "soul" (there's nothing to support a material soul, you're body isn't any lighter when you die for example so "souls" must be massless and so on). Maybe it 's all a one-way recording to the spirit-realm, who knows.
Descartes definitely fucked up by leaping from "something is thinking" to "I am thinking" and yes, it was basically assuming there is something called I. The most he could have come up with is that "thinking is occuring." From whence thinking came, we can't really say from a radical doubt perspective.
"you’re body isn’t any lighter when you die for example" Hey son, no one told you you shit the bed when you hit the deck? 💨 💩 :pigpoop:
It doesn't, and also you can have a "soft" or "informational" mind/body dualism, where the soul is really just the patternist conception of the self, but time-independent. The Noosphere and stuff like that come from Catholic Modernists work on this. Teilhard de Chardin is probably the best theorist about that since he's now been mostly reformed by the church and he's not as odd or esoteric as some.
Alternately you can have a dualism where the mind is a way of "down-gearing" the soul, which is this incredibly abstract, near god-like thing, into a point where it can interact with reality at all. This is taken from Jewish Kabbalah where God has to do the same thing a bunch of times just to be able to fit into the concept of, say, time.
The advantage of both models is that they explain things like brain damage influencing personality.