It's literally like this:
Materialists/Physicalists: "The thoughts in your head come from your conditions and are ultimately the result of your organs and nervous system. Your consciousness is linked to your brain activity and other parts of your body interacting with the physical real world."
Dualists: "Ok but what if there were an imaginary zombie that has the same organs and molecular structure as a living person but somehow isn't alive on some metaphysical level. If this zombie is conceivable, that means it must be metaphysically true somehow."
Materialists: "That's circular and imaginary, isn't it?"
Other dualists: "Ok but what if I were in a swamp and lightning strikes a tree and magically creates a copy of me but it's not actually me because it doesn't have my soul."
Am I reading this stuff wrong or are these actually the best arguments for mind-body dualism
That's just circular logic though, no?
If it was possible for some thing to behave exactly as you do but without thinking then mind-body dualism would have to be true, because something exists with a human body but no mind. If mind-body dualism is bunk, that thing could not exist, it could not appear to think without thinking.
Mind-body dualism seems like a pretty classic case of motivated reasoning in general, "I want to believe that my mind is not an artifact of my physical body, so I will look for reasons that this might be true".
Yeah it's entirely circular, which is why I don't understand how dualists use it. Their most famous argument is the one about the zombies. It's just "imagine a person without the unexplainable non-physical mind I say they have" and then claiming this is proof a non-physical mind exists, because it's a claim that people with minds and those without minds would be different
It reminds me of Pascal's wager, an argument that is obviously heavily flawed unless you already accept, uncritically, the assertion being argued. That's why I believe motivated reasoning is at work here, these arguments won't convince the critical, but they do allow believers to convince themselves that their otherwise baseless beliefs are actually well reasoned.
This isn't to say I think dualism is wrong, but more to say that it is non-falsifiable and not well supported by existing evidence.
The point why I can understand the want for it is that I have an experience of experiencing/thinking/being/feeling whatever (don't google qualia). This feels separate from the physical world that I do see or feel or hear or imagine. That is all.
However I do think that there is a material reality that is responsible for everything. In that regard I follow
But for his other things, not.