I’ve been thinking a lot lately about determinism and substance dualism.
My primary argument for substance dualism is that there has to date been no success in researcher’s attempts to accurately describe thoughts or feelings solely by analyzing brain activity (as far as I’m aware). There are certainly correlations between brain activity and thoughts, we can see the amygdala firing when a person is afraid, for instance, but as of yet there is no way to have a person think about an image and have an analyst accurately determine what image the subject is imagining without the subject describing it.
It could be argued that we simply haven’t yet developed the technology for such analysis, but I think this response fails. The typical conception of the brain by believers in monism is that of a highly complex computer-like system which stores memories like a flash drive and runs “thought programs” per the instructions of binary-code-like electro-chemical nerve impulses. Their argument is that if we could interpret this binary code, if we could exhaustively catalog the various algorithms which decipher the meaning in these codes, we could indeed find exactly what a given person was thinking by analyzing their synapse firings. This very computer metaphor which is utilized to undermine dualism, however, is helpful in showing how this conception can’t be accurate.
Binary code in a computer system contains no pertinent information in and of itself; it requires interpretation by an algorithm which turns the code into useful data. These algorithms can only interpret code up to the limitations of their design. Unicode, for instance, can interpret no greater than 109, 449 characters (as of this past October), because these are the only characters defined within the standard. A program utilizing Unicode must have every instance of the 109,449 binary blocks in its reference stores in some manner. Despite this requirement, this system is still helpful for transmitting data, because binary code is more compact than alphanumeric characters.
A system which could interpret and express all possible thoughts, feelings, memories and senses, however, even if incredibly efficient, would be so physically dense with algorithms as to certainly take up many times the physical space of even the largest human body. Theoretical algorithmic efficiency in computer science is so far from being able to accomplish such a task even with quantum computing that it seems fundamentally impossible. Integer factorization is trivially simple compared to such a monumental undertaking. Therefore, the theory that a non-physically limited system is interacting with our physical brains in order to produce thoughts and other aspects of consciousness seems reasonable.
Accordingly, I believe that the indeterminism we all seem to inherently experience in “making” our decisions is not illusory. There truly does seem to be a non-physical “mind” which interacts with our physical brain, therefore our decisions can’t be physically determined. The entirety of human experience throughout time has been built upon personal responsibility for choices, and I think this is not simply a manifestation of folk psychology, but reflects something we know deeply to be true.
Though experience and genetics clearly shapes us, we are ultimately responsible for the choices we make.
