A rational, non-religious case for Dualism

Reading | Metaphysics

Jamey Hecht, PhD, PsyD, LMFT | 2025-12-19

Dual-aspect monism claims that mind and brain are two equivalent aspects of one underlying tertium quid, or “third thing”—but in practice, it often seems that dual-aspect monists consider the brain to be what’s really real, while the reality of the mind consists in its status as an aspect of the brain. After all, sufficient damage to the brain extinguishes embodied consciousness, and dual-aspect monism precludes the notion of any consciousness that could possibly exist without embodiment. It is philosophically quite appealing to put mind and brain on an equal footing, where they can (somehow) interact and influence each other. But if only one is dependent on the other for its existence, then they are by no means equal in their realness—which philosophers call their ontological status (from Plato’s Greek term ontos, “being”).

John Searle was already a prominent academic philosopher when his 1992 book The Rediscovery of Mind disavowed materialism as well as its disreputable twin, dualism. He did this largely by denying what others had assumed: “that in some important sense ‘physical’ implies ‘nonmental’ and ‘mental’ implies ‘nonphysical’” (p. 26). Descartes had started all the trouble, and the way out was to dispense with his mutually exclusive categories of the physical and the mental: “I believe that if you take those categories seriously— the categories of mental and physical, mind and body—as a consistent dualist, you will eventually be forced to materialism” (p. 26). Searle does not seem to have spelled out just how this eventual forcing was to occur, since he regarded dualism as a discredited relic, beneath the dignity of serious consideration.

Materialism, by contrast, was the worthy opponent at which Searle directed his fire: The Rediscovery of Mind was a mighty critique of computational functionalism. That’s the notion that the brain is to the mind as a computer is to its software; the mind is (“nothing but”) what the brain does. Computational functionalism was and is the heart of the discipline called cognitive science, whose philosophical side is perhaps most prominently represented by Paul and Patricia Churchland, and by the late Daniel Dennett. If the brain is a computer running a program called the mind, Searle showed, then there must be a User in there somewhere, for whom the software bears a meaning. But (for Searle) there can’t be such a User, since the program itself is what is supposed to conjure the User into being—without whose mental gaze the symbols of the program are a mere syntax of meaningless elements.

A software program (like its constituent algorithms) is a syntactical arrangement of symbols that can receive an input, modify that input as it moves along the arrangement, and eventually produce a novel output as a result. But the physical computer system that executes the program does not “understand” what it is doing, any more than the optic nerve “knows” it is building an image for the occipital cortex to “see.” Searle argued that “semantics is not intrinsic to syntax,” and, in turn, “syntax is not intrinsic to physics” (Searle 1992, p. 210). Though physical systems have inherent structures that are observer-independent, it is we who arrange elements within physical systems into what we construe as syntax, and we who imbue that syntax with its symbolic significance. Hardware and software alike require a conscious observer to confer meaning. When an argument begs the question by presupposing the presence of that observer, rather than accounting for it, the observer is somewhat derisively called a homunculus—an imaginary miniature User, running up and down the neurons of the brain or the transistors of a laptop, perceiving and interpreting its every operation.

This was indeed a strong blow to the computational theory of the mind, and that was (or should have been) a big deal to the thinking public at large, because of the crucial role played by that theory in the larger edifice of materialism. While Searle had his detractors, The Rediscovery of Mind was championed in the New York Review of Books by Thomas Nagel, who called it “trenchant, aggressive, and beautifully clear.” But Nagel had more praise for Searle’s takedown of the computationalists than for his positive assertions of an alternative understanding of consciousness. These amount to little more than an almost glib reliance on “emergence” in Chapter Five (“Reductionism and the Irreducibility of Consciousness”), with the claim that consciousness is a physical property of brains (albeit a currently mysterious one). As Searle writes in his opening chapter,

Consciousness is a higher-level or emergent property of the brain in the utterly harmless sense of “higher-level” or “emergent” in which solidity is a higher-level emergent property of H2O molecules when they are in a lattice structure (ice), and liquidity is similarly a higher-level emergent property of H2O molecules when they are, roughly speaking, rolling around on each other (water). Consciousness is a mental, and therefore physical, property of the brain in the sense in which liquidity is a property of systems of molecules ([my emphasis] p. 14).

Nagel quotes this passage from Searle in his review, responding to it with a gracious acknowledgment that Searle already knows emergence is inadequate to the job at hand. Thus Nagel:

Suppose we grant that states of consciousness are properties of the brain caused by, but not reducible to, its neural activity. This means that your brain, for instance, has a point of view of which all your current experiences are aspects. But what is the justification for calling these irreducibly subjective features of the brain physical? What would it even mean to call them physical? Certainly they are “higher-order” in the sense that they can be ascribed only to the system as a whole and not to its microscopic parts; they are also “emergent” in the sense of being explained only by the causal interactions of those parts. But however great the variety of physical phenomena may be, ontological objectivity is one of their central defining conditions; and as we have seen Searle insists that consciousness is ontologically subjective… To propose that consciousness is an intrinsic subjective property of the brain caused by its neural activity is the first step on a different path—the right one, in my opinion. But there are large problems ahead, and they are not just empirical but philosophical.

The three statements I’ve highlighted in bold type are all iterations of the same central claim. But the first is put in a provisional way (“Suppose we grant”); the second is stated as if it were an obvious truism (“Certainly…”); and the third is framed as a major “first step” forward from the impasse of the mind-body problem in which we have been stuck “since the Seventeenth Century.” This begs the question of dualism’s possible contribution to a better theory, which is an acceptable move because dualism has already been ruled out as a matter of course: “But nowadays,” Searle wrote, “as far as I can tell, no one believes in the existence of immortal spiritual substances except on religious grounds. To my knowledge, there are no purely philosophical or scientific motivations for accepting the existence of immortal mental substances” (p. 29).

Published by Searle in 1992, the first of these sentences wishes-away the work of figures like, say, David Lund, Professor of Philosophy at Minnesota’s Bimidji University, whose early book Death and Consciousness: The Case for Life After Death had appeared in 1985. Lund seems uninterested in religion and argues for the survival hypothesis (that human beings somehow survive bodily death) without reference to theism. In this he is—and already was in 1992—far from alone. It is true that such secular dualists, numerous though they are, remain greatly outnumbered by religious authors whose confidence in the soul is part of a broadly theistic outlook. Searle discounts religious dualists because they are religious; he discounts secular dualists by declaring that they do not exist. There are indeed “purely philosophical or scientific motivations for accepting the existence of immortal mental substances,” namely the drive to include in one’s world picture all the contents of experience that it can possibly accommodate. That was the explicit motive of William James and his colleagues in the Society for Psychical Research a century ago, and it has motivated similarly fascinated researchers all along. It is not only that the alternatives to dualism remain nearly helpless to solve the hard problem of consciousness. They also must ignore outright the vast fields of anomalous evidence for which dualism can readily account (even if accounting falls well short of explaining), where materialism cannot even begin to do so.

Later on, Searle briefly returns to this issue:

The thesis of this chapter so far has been that once you see that atomic and evolutionary theories are central to the contemporary scientific world view, then consciousness falls into place naturally as an evolved phenotypical trait of certain types of organisms with highly developed nervous systems. I am not in this chapter concerned to defend this world view. Indeed, many thinkers whose opinions I respect, most notably Wittgenstein, regard it as in varying degrees repulsive, degrading, and disgusting. It seems to them to allow no place or at most a subsidiary place for religion, art, mysticism, and ‘spiritual’ values generally. But, like it or not, it is the world view we have (pp. 90-91).

“Atomic and evolutionary theories” are among the most sublime achievements of our species, but to know them at all well is to concede that their considerable profundity is limited to certain finite zones of explanatory power and practical application, beyond which they quickly shade off into overwhelming mystery. As is often observed (but as Searle would seem to have forgotten), the deepest minds active in the discovery and development of these theoretical disciplines are precisely those who are most impressed with their limitations amid the unfathomable vastness of the realities they contemplate. “Atomic theory,” in particular, is the domain of quantum electrodynamics (Q.E.D.), a metaphysical jungle of ambiguities and contradictions so exquisitely counterintuitive that its own intellectual pioneer famously declared, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics” (Feynman, 1965, p. 129). As for “evolutionary theory,” one is free to dismiss on principle the theistic conclusions of intelligent design (and they are conclusions, not premises), but that gesture by itself will not generate solutions for the unresolved dilemmas that continue to vex the neo-Darwinian account of life’s origin and phylogenetic development. Searle continues:

Given what we know about the details of the world—about such things as the position of elements in the periodic table, the number of chromosomes in the cells of different species, and the nature of the chemical bond—this world view is not an option. It is not simply up for grabs along with a lot of competing world views.

This presumes that any alternative to naturalism must refute or ignore all that has been achieved within the naturalistic framework. Creationists tend to make just that presumption, but it is surprising to find John Searle appearing to presume it, too. Given the brilliance of The Rediscovery of the Mind, I am astonished that his awareness of the radical incompleteness of “our” physics and biology did not prevent him from writing these passages. Not only are the tenacious mysteries of those disciplines bracketed out as if negligible or somehow irrelevant; he also assumes, and asserts without a whisper of argument, that an ordinary working awareness of the basics of 20^th Century physics, chemistry, and biology somehow rules out theism, the human survival of bodily death, and dualism:

Our problem is not that somehow we have failed to come up with a convincing proof of the existence of God or that the hypothesis of an afterlife remains in serious doubt, it is rather that in our deepest reflections we cannot take such opinions seriously. When we encounter people who claim to believe such things, we may envy them the comfort and security they claim to derive from these beliefs, but at bottom we remain convinced that either they have not heard the news or they are in the grip of faith. We remain convinced that somehow they must separate their minds into separate compartments to believe such things [my emphasis].

I suggest that the “separate compartments” approximate the two hemispheres of the brain, and that a person who writes this sort of stuff has not fully availed himself of the compartment on the right. He seems genuinely naive about it, in a way that, say, Wittgenstein was not. I remain convinced that either he has not heard the news (namely, that naturalism is not so much erroneous, as radically incomplete) or he is in the grip of faith (namely, that naturalism is complete, or only trivially incomplete). When I speak of the incompleteness of naturalism, I don’t mean merely that the theories comprising it are currently unfinished but destined (let us hope) to be extended by future generations into a grand consilient synthesis; I mean that even this eventual Theory of Everything will, if it remains a theory of nature alone, remain oblivious to the meaning of it all.

Of course, human knowledge—spiritual or otherwise—must remain incomplete indeed, just as Socrates understood Apollo to be saying (i.e., that merely human knowledge amounts to nothing, compared with Divine knowledge). That kind of incompleteness seems to me ineluctable and necessary. But the kind of epistemological impoverishment which naturalism requires can be overcome by the influx of the right hemisphere’s world of experience, as this is integrated with the familiar, rational mindset of daily business and its explicit lore. Iain McGilchrist’s two-volume, 1500-page tome The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (Perspectiva Press, 2019) is perhaps the greatest exemplar of this sort of completeness, well aware of its own limitations, and wisely open to what lies beyond.

Toward the end of his review of Searle’s Rediscovery of the Mind, Thomas Nagel asks pointedly,

…[w]hat is the metaphysical content of Searle’s claim that mental properties are physical, and his emphatic rejection of property dualism? He says, after all, that the ontological distinction between subjective and objective marks ‘different categories of empirical reality.’ To say further that we are ‘left with a universe that contains an irreducibly subjective physical component as a component of physical reality’ merely couches an essentially dualistic claim in language that expresses a strong aversion to dualism  [my emphasis].

Reading that sentence, penned by Nagel in 1993, is a piquantly ironic experience for readers of the superb book he published twenty years later, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Why? Because Mind and Cosmos repeatedly couches an essentially theistic claim in language that expresses a strong aversion to theism, as here:

I confess to an ungrounded assumption of my own, in not finding it possible to regard the design alternative as a real option. I lack the sensus divinitatis that enables—indeed compels—so many people to see in the world the expression of divine purpose as naturally as they see in a smiling face the expression of human feeling. So my speculations about an alternative to physics as a theory of everything do not invoke a transcendent being but tend toward complications to the immanent character of the natural order (p. 12).

Remarkably, Nagel adds a footnote that echoes the very phrase from his Searle review of two decades before: “I am not just unreceptive, but strongly averse to the idea” [my emphasis]. Much of the value of Nagel’s work, with its striking intellectual independence, lies in his unusual combination of atheism, metaphysical open-mindedness, and skepticism about the naturalist consensus. He is nobody’s foot-soldier; far from it. So I do not mean to hint that he is some sort of unwitting proto-theist, or to presume to understand him better than he knows himself. All I want to point out about his work is its compatibility with the theism he prefers to reject, and its great usefulness for digging oneself out of the intellectual prison-house of “the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature.”

As Nagel notes near the beginning of Mind and Cosmos, “the conclusion of antireductionist arguments against materialism cannot remain purely negative forever” (p. 15). Back in 1986, he tentatively adopted a “dual-aspect” stance, in The View from Nowhere. Or rather, he had a few sympathetic words to say about that stance, albeit with much ambivalence. Here they are, minus a few intervening sentences:

One can formulate the view by saying that the brain has nonphysical properties, but that is just a label for the position and one must be careful to recognize that it doesn’t by itself increase our understanding any more than the postulation of a nonphysical substance does. The main question, how anything in the world can have a subjective point of view, remains unanswered (p. 30).

 

I won’t directly attack this unformulated problem, which is as much a problem for dualism or physicalism as it is for a dual-aspect theory—for they, too, are motivated by the desire for an integrated conception of a single reality in which the mental and the physical are located in a clear relation to one another… [D]ual aspect theory… [is] the view that one thing can have two sets of mutually irreducible essential properties, mental and physical ([my emphasis] p. 31).

 

There is something deeply suspect about the whole enterprise of fitting subjective points of view smoothly into a spatiotemporal world of things and processes, and any dual-aspect theory is committed to that goal and that picture—the picture of appearances as part of reality. But I can’t say what might be wrong with it (p. 31).

The appeal of dual-aspect theory is presumably that it offers a hedge against dualism, permitting us to include subjectivity among the contents of the universe without having to posit a soul. But this strong motivation to avoid dualism is a point of culture. From Sigmund Freud’s sworn oath (“No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism”), to the positivists of the Vienna Circle, to Churchland and Dennett, various otherwise sophisticated thinkers recoil from the notion of the soul as if it represented the total defeat of humanity’s heroic quest to be liberated from medieval superstition. Nagel is not one of their number; his aversion to theism does not spoil his thinking, nor his prose.

 

References

Feynman, R. (1965) The Character of Physical Law. The MIT Press.

Lund, D. H. (1989). Death and Consciousness: The Case for Life After Death. Random House.

McGilchrist, I. (2019). The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking

of the World. Perspectiva Press.

Nagel, T. (1986). The View from Nowhere. Oxford University Press.

Nagel, T. (1993, March 4). The Mind Wins! The New York Review of Books.

Nagel, T. (2012). Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature

Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford University Press.

Searle, J. (1992). The Rediscovery of the Mind. The MIT Press.