Abstract

GUIRADO, Matías alejandro. The conceptual plausibility of mind-body dualism: A new defense of the modal argument. discus.filos [online]. 2016, vol.17, n.28, pp.115-134. ISSN 0124-6127.  https://doi.org/10.17151/difil.2016.17.28.7.

The main objection against Cartesian dualism in Philosophy of Mind is that it is incompatible with science. It has been argued, in particular, that the principle of causal closure of the physical world and the theorem of preservation of energy -as well as the concept of dynamic interaction of fundamental physics- overrule the postulation of causal interactions between thinking substances and extended ones. In this paper I argue that this conclusion is at least hasty and that it is not a trivial issue to refute Cartesian dualism by using empirical considerations. My theses are: (i) that the antidualistic criticisms based on scientific premises collapse into a metaphysically implausible reductionism; and (ii) that physical theory does not preclude the existence of a relation of causation or recurrent dynamic interaction as the one required in order to explain the conscious experience by postulating a pertinent link between immaterial minds and nervous systems.

Keywords : Dualism; mind-body problem; causality; physicalism; laws of nature.

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