by Marinus Jan Marijs
“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” – J. B. S. Haldane, is a British-born geneticist and evolutionary biologist generally credited with a central role in the development of neo-Darwinian thinking.
– Haldane, J.B.S., Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209.
Dualism in the philosophy of mind, brings forward some objections against monistic materialism: One aspect of the mind that is especially difficult to account for in materialist terms is intentionality, which is the characteristic of a mental state. Mental activity possesses an inherent meaning or intentionality; (pertaining to an appearance, phenomenon, or representation in the mind; phenomenal; representational).
Brain processes are totally devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes. Monistic materialist denies or cannot explain final causes – goal-directedness and purposiveness that are associated with conscious awareness. Consciousness is extremely difficult to place in a mechanistic worldview. So are the qualitative aspects of perception: colours, sounds, odours, tastes, feels, and so on, the secondary qualities. The duality of both primary and secondary qualities cannot be explained within monistic materialism.
“A platonic view of reality is commonly held by many theoretical physicists and mathematicians. They are taking their equations and model as existing on one-to-one correspondence with the ultimate nature of reality.”
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“Platonism is the view that there exist [in ultimate reality] such things as abstract objects—where an abstract object is an object that does not exist in space or time and which is therefore entirely nonphysical”
Platonism is a dualistic philosophy, which implies that next to the physical world there is another, non-physical world.
