The disembodiment argument for mind-body dualism and the objection from multiple realizability

Abstract

The article discusses several recently advanced varieties and defenses of the anti-materialist Cartesian argument from the conceivability of the disembodied mind. The case is made that these varieties, as well as the initial Descartes’ argument, are vulnerable to the objection from multiple realizability: they either fail to meet this objection, or avoid it by price of making the metaphysical possibility of disembodied human mental subjects highly contestable. In particular, attempts to neutralize this objection by interpreting the disembodiment argument as one involving de re (rather than de dicto) conceivability (Richard Swinburne, Charles Taliaferro, William David Hart, David Lund, Uwe Meixner, Brandon Rickabough, J.P. Moreland) is problematic because if conceivability/logical possibility is a matter of there being no contradiction, it has to do with consistency of some statement, which is a matter of relationship between concepts involved in it. The replacement of conceivability/logical possibility with modal intuition also does not solve the problem, because the reliability of the latter seems no less dubitable than that the reliability of the former. Alvin Plantinga’s replacement argument fails because it overlooks the most natural and plausible strategy for a materialist: to hold that whatever happens with the identity of a human body or brain, the same happens with the identity of the self that is identical with this body or brain. Philip Goff’s lonely ghost argument can be countered by challenging its assumption that if experiential properties are fundamental in some possible worlds (conceivable worlds of a lonely ghost), then they are fundamental in the actual world as well.