Materialism and dualism

Here's a post on dualism and the mind-brain problem.

That we are deepening our understanding of how our brains bring about our minds — and learning that other animals may perform some of the same tricks — undermines not in the least Descartes’s cogito, which is simply a demonstration by the mind, to the mind, that the thinker exists.

The aspect of Descartes’s model that is almost universally rejected among scientists these days is his assumption that the mind is a “substance” unto itself, capable of independent existence, and that it is in this nonmaterial substance that all our reasoning, decision-making, hoping, fearing, hypothesizing, and, of course, doubting, take place. The Mind, in this dualist model, then exerts its Will upon its puppet body in some unknown way; Descartes speculated that the point of entry might be the pineal gland.

The way that all this actually happens in the brain is now at the convergent focus of a number of scientific disciplines, equipped with brand-new tools of amazing power and resolution, and as has been the case in so many other areas of scientific inquiry, much that was previously regarded as ineffably mysterious is beginning to be understood as explicable natural phenomena. The manner in which the physical processes of the brain result in subjectivity itself is still outside the circle of illumination, but that we have not yet explicated how the trick is done is not in itself evidence for interactionist dualism, any more than not understanding the physics of lightning was evidence that thunderbolts were hurled by Zeus.