Interactions Between Physical and Non-physical Entities
As the physicalist school has its problems with non-physical entities, so too does the dualist school. The dualist school acknowledges the existence of non-physical entities, the most widely discussed one being the mind. But beyond that it runs into stumbling blocks. Pierre Gassendi put one such problem directly to Descartes in 1641, in response to Descartes's Meditations:
still remains to be explained how that union and apparent intermingling can be found in you, if you are incorporeal, unextended and indivisible . How, at least, can you be united with the brain, or some minute part in it, which (as has been said) must yet have some magnitude or extension, however small it be ? If you are wholly without parts how can you mix or appear to mix with its minute subdivisions ? For there is no mixture unless each of the things to be mixed has parts that can mix with one another.
—Gassendi 1641
Descartes' response to Gassendi, and to Princess Elizabeth who asked him similar questions in 1643, is generally considered nowadays to be lacking, because it did not address what is known in the philosophy of mind as the interaction problem. This is a problem for non-physical entities as posited by dualism: by what mechanism, exactly, do they interact with physical entities, and how can they do so?Interaction with physical systems requires physical entities, such as mass-energy, which a non-physical entity does not possess.
Dualists either, like Descartes, avoid the problem by considering it impossible for a non-physical mind to conceive the relationship that it has with the physical, and so impossible to explain philosophically, or assert that the questioner has made the fundamental mistake of thinking that the distinction between the physical and the non-physical is such that it prevents each from affecting the other.
Other questions about the non-physical which dualism has not answered include such questions as how many minds each person can have, which is not an issue for physicalism which can simply declare one-mind-per-person almost by definition; and whether non-physical entities such as minds and souls are simple or compound, and if the latter, what "stuff" the compounds are made from.
Read more about this topic: Non-physical Entity
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