Possession and exorcism

Abstract

A good case can be made that human beings are naturally intuitive dualists. For a number of reasons, we find it hard to believe that our subjective self-awareness is nothing more than complex patterns of neural activity and easy to believe, along with the great mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, that mind-stuff is irreducibly different to matter. This dualist position raises as many philosophical problems – perhaps even more – than it answers but, for my money, no one has yet solved the so-called “hard problem”, i.e. explained how it is that consciousness can arise from atoms and molecules in the brain presumably interacting in line with the same laws of nature that govern the atoms and molecules in stones, clouds, stars and pancakes (see e.g. Blackmore, 2004; Chalmers, 1995).