Without substance dualism, it is idiotic to distinguish between things like psychological and physical abuse, sexual feelings and actions, mental and physical health, emotional life and bodily vitality, and so on. If the basic, philosophically obvious distinction between self-awareness, perception, and thought on one hand and physical limbs and organs on the other hand is truly too difficult for non-rationalists to grasp, then perhaps the difference between things like psychological and physical abuse will be sufficient to break the fog of stupidity within their minds. What person would reveal such great stupidity so as to truly equate these things?
The fact that people talk of their mental experiences and "their" bodies (that is, the bodies their conscious selves experience), which spans both mental and physical health, shows that they are on at least some level unable to sincerely conflate their thoughts and stream of perception with the bodies they perceive their minds to reside in. Moreover, who has ever claimed that mental health is physical health--not in the sense that altering aspects of the body's nervous system can alter mental states, but in the sense that there is no difference at all between the two? A consistent, thoughtful reductionist would eventually do so, but there is no such thing as a deeply thoughtful reductionist because reason would never bring them to reductionism of any kind.
What of sexuality? Almost every adult is likely to understand or at least be capable of understanding that the ability of the body to become sexually aroused does not necessitate that the mind is eager, willing, or ready to engage in a sexual act. Again, what fool has ever said that there is no difference between the mental and physical components of sexuality? In fact, if a person denied this objective difference, they have knowingly or unknowingly denied the only basis for rape being what it is: a nonconsensual sexual act in which one person forces another person with an unwilling mind into a physical behavior they are partaking in while desiring not to.
All of this is already enough to demonstrate to anyone willing to forgo assumptions and biases that the mind is not the same as the body despite the intimate relationship between them. The example of psychological and physical abuse differing would also prove the distinction between mind and body on its own, and thus everyone who rightly differentiates between the former two while conflating the latter two has done so out of irrationality and inconsistency. However, there are consequences to denying substance dualism. A person who does so has rejected the basis for correctly distinguishing between all mental events like mental illness and sexual arousal of the mind and physical events like bodily illness and arousal of the genitals.
The bias against substance dualism will likely persist even if everyone thought of or was told of these examples, though. Some people pretend like substance dualism entails "magic" of some kind and will decry it on these fallacious grounds. The utterly vague and often undefined nature of whatever they mean by magic aside, this is just another asinine misrepresentation accepted by fools. First of all, it is not as if an afterlife or out of body experience, if this is what they mean, is logically impossible even if there is no way for someone not experiencing them to know if they are genuine parts of reality. Second, the mind and body, regardless of which precedes the other, are neither conceptually nor metaphysically identical. Just as the tongue is not the experience of taste and a radio is not music, the body is not the mind that animates it. This fact is right before everyone and the truth is that anyone can realize this with or without help.
No comments:
Post a Comment