Dualism vs. Materialism: A Tale of Two (or One?) Substances

They all deny that the mind is the same as the brain. Dualism, the idea of mind and body being separate, is like that old Bollywood love story - sounds good but doesn’t really fit into reality anymore. Descartes' famous conclusion, "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"). This assertion encapsulates his view that the act of thinking itself is undeniable proof of one's existence(kya matlab me exist nhi karti cause mere 2 brain cells don’t think). Dualism remains a significant and controversial theory in the study of consciousness and the mind-body relationship

The current view by psychologists, neuroscientists, and other scientists bolstered by much evidence is that dualism is wrong. The mind is the brain—no two substances, just one. And trust me, that’s a heavy dose of reality, so let’s dive into why it’s worth worrying about. 

So, for instance, you might believe in spiritual beings and supernatural beings with consciousness but no bodies, like gods. If materialism is right, not only don't we have souls but maybe there's no such thing as souls, or to put it differently there's no such thing as mental life separate from the body(meri mental health feels offended). More to the point, maybe you were hoping that when your body dies, when you get very older, or you get hit by a bus, or whatever, you'll live on. You'll go to heaven. You'll go to a spirit world, or get reincarnated, or whatever, and psychologists and neuroscientists that they speak honestly would say, "That's crazy." You, your memories, your will, whatever makes you you is your physical brain and when your brain shuts down, so do you. (ye meri fantasies pe thapad mar rhe hai)

The materialist view likens the mind to a computer, and we treat the brain as the hardware and our mental lives, the ideas, our processes, our heuristics, our algorithms as the software, as the programs that this hardware runs(that explains why my mom says tu macbook ke layak nhi). This way of looking at things, works extremely well when it comes to activities like face recognition, language, motor control, logic and so on, but there still remains what the philosopher David Chalmers has called the hard problem of consciousness. Imagine the joy when for once your mother appreciated you (ft. masi and nani) or the thrill of flaunting your grades to your relatives (while their kid has taken arts) (nothing against arts, just for context). These experiences, the raw feelings of love(experiences of 14 year old kids are neglected as a whole), pride, or even the cliché teenage “Disney” moments, seem almost magical. The “qualia,” or subjective experiences, raise questions about whether they can truly be explained by brain activity alone. 

If it's true, that even these most qualitative experiences are the product of brain activities, I think we should admit that we don't exactly know how this happens. There's a quote by Thomas Huxley: "How is it that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue. That question is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the genie when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.” I think we know that as the product of the brain, but to be honest we don't know how. (mere products thode se replace ho sakte hai, brain ji?)

 The second bit of humility involves the fact that materialism poses a mechanistic conception of mental life, but a lot of us, both as scholars but also as people, are concerned with what you could call humanist values. Values like the notion of moral responsibility: the idea we have of free will, the idea that we're responsible for our actions, the idea that there's such a thing in the world has intrinsic value, the idea that there's such a thing in the world perhaps as spiritual value. For some people it's very hard to reconcile this with the idea that we're merely brains, and there's two ways to react: one can simply reject humanist values, and I know philosophers and psychologists who confidently assert there's no such thing as free will, there's no such thing as morality, there's no such thing as anything higher or spiritual. I know many more people who reject the science, who say that, "Look, if neuroscience is going to tell me that my decisions, my activities are nothing more than neural firings, then to hell with neuroscience."

 My own view is that these two things can be reconciled. I don't think it's easy, but I think that is possible to reconcile a mechanistic conception of human life with humanist values. Our quest to understand consciousness might challenge our beliefs, but it also offers a chance to integrate our scientific understanding with our humanistic ideals.