Maverick Philosopher

It is difficult to see how items such as sensations can be called surds in nature when they are precisely not in nature as physicalistically conceived, but I shall let that pass the better to get on with spookstuff.

There are philosophers who seem to think that doctrines held by great philosophers and outstanding contemporaries don't need to be studied and refuted but can be shamed or ridiculed or caricatured out of existence. Daniel Dennett is an example:

Dualism (the view that minds are composed of some nonphysical and utterly mysterious stuff) . . . [has]been relegated to the trash heap of history, along with alchemy and astrology. Unless you are also prepared to declare that the world is flat and the sun is a fiery chariot pulled by winged horses — unless, in other words, your defiance of modern science is quite complete — you won't find any place to stand and fight for these obsolete ideas. (Kinds of Mind, Basic Books, 1996, p. 24)

This is an amazing passage in that it compares the views of distinguished dualist philosophers such as Richard Swinburne to the views of astrologers, alchemists, and flat-earthers. It would be very interesting to hear precisely how the views of Swinburne et al. are in "defiance of modern science" — assuming one doesn't confuse science with scientism. But let's look at what Dennett has to say in his more substantial (511 page!) Consciousness Explained (1991).

Dennett there (mis)characterizes dualism as the doctrine that minds are "composed not of ordinary matter but of some other, special kind of stuff. . . ," and materialism as the view that "there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter — the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology — and the mind is some nothing but a physical phenomenon." (33) "In short, the mind is the brain." (33)

But as I have said before,

A substance dualist such as Descartes does not hold that minds are composed of some extraordinarily thin intangible stuff. The dualism is not a dualism of stuff-kinds, real stuff and spooky stuff. 'Substance' in 'substance dualism' does not refer to a special sort of ethereal stuff but to substances in the sense of individuals capable of independent existence whose whole essence consists in acts of thought, perception, imagination, feeling, and the like. Dennett is exploiting the equivocity of 'substance.'

The point is made very well by the prominent idealist, T. L. S. Sprigge:

It is often difficult to get people to realize that the non-physical mind of which Cartesians speak is not, as some have thought it, 'a ghost in the machine' of the human body, since ghosts and 'spirits' such as might appear in a seance are, in contrast to it, as physical, if made of a finer stuff, as our ordinary bodies. When we speak of the mental we do so mostly or entirely in metaphors (more or less sleeping) of a physical kind: we grasp ideas and have thoughts in our minds. Whatever the real source of this materialism which is endemic to most of our thinking, it is not surprising that there should be a theory of existence which follows its leadings. As thinkers we are subjects, but the natural object of thought is objects and it is only with effort that the subject turns its thoughts upon its own un-object-like nature. (Theories of Existence, pp. 46-47, bolding added.)

The materialist cannot understand how anything could be real that is not physical in nature. So if mind is real, which it obviously is, then it too must be physical in nature. But to treat mind physically is precisely to miss its "un-object-like nature." Mind is subjectivity, and no matter how the materialist twists and turns, he cannot grasp this subjectivity objectively. The materialist project is fundamentally absurd in that it tries to treat as objective what is irreducibly subjective, all the while presupposing subjectivity without which there would be no access to objects at all.