5. Arguments for the existence of the soul, Part III: Free will and near-death experiences
SourceProfessor Charles D. All right. We've been talking about arguments that might give us reason to believe in the existence of an immaterial soul. The kinds of arguments we've been considering so far all fall under the general rubric of inference to the best explanation. We posit, or the proponents of souls posit, the existence of souls in order to explain something that needs explaining about us. Now, I've gone through a series of such arguments, and the one that we ended with is the need to believe in the existence of a soul in order to explain the fact that we have free will.
The fact that we have free will is something that most of us take for granted about ourselves. However, the complaint or objection to the physicalist position takes the form of the claim that we couldn't be merely physical entities, because no purely physical entity could possess free will. Since we have free will, there must be something else at play. If we push the dualist to explain what it is about free will that rules out the possibility of being merely physical objects, I think the natural suggestion for articulating the argument goes like this. This is where we left off at the end of our previous discussion: the thought is that there is a kind of incompatibility between being free and being determined.
After all, from the physicalist's point of view, we are glorified robots, able to do all sorts of things that most robots in science fiction movies can do. But still, in a sense, we're just glorified physical objects. We're just robots. And robots, the objection goes, are programmed. They necessarily follow their programs.
More generally speaking, we might say they are subject to deterministic laws. As physical objects, it is true of them that they must do what the laws of physics and the laws of nature require them to do. The laws of physics take a deterministic form. Determinism is a bit of philosopher's jargon for when it is true of these laws or a system that if you set it up a certain way, cause and effect play out such that given that initial setup, the very same effect must follow. It is determined by the laws of nature that the effect follows from that cause.
And so, if you rewind the tape and play it again, over and over and over again, each time you set things up the very same way, they must move or transform or change or end up in the very same state. Well, that's what determinism is all about. Intuitively, it seems plausible to many people that you couldn't have free will and be subject to determinism. The notion of free will suggests that even if I were in this spot again, facing the very same situation, I could have chosen differently. Therefore, I wasn't determined or predetermined to make that choice.
So, if we were to spell out the argument somewhat more fully, it might be that we have free will, but you can't have both free will and be subject to determinism or deterministic laws. Every physical object, or every purely physical object, is subject to deterministic laws because the laws of physics are deterministic. When you put these things together, you arrive at the conclusion that, since we have free will, we cannot be purely physical objects. There must be something more than the purely physical in us. That's the argument I put up on the board at the end of last class.
And here we've got it up here now. One, we have free will. Two, nothing subject to determinism has free will. Three, purely physical systems are subject to determinism. So, the conclusion is that we are not a purely physical system.
To explain the fact that we have free will, the objection goes, we must appeal to and posit the existence of a soul—something non-physical, something beyond the purely physical. While that is the argument, I do not find it compelling. The first thing to notice is that to reach the conclusion, all three premises must hold true. If we give up the premise that we have free will, it does not necessarily follow that we are non-physical.
Even if something that had free will had to be nonphysical, it wouldn't follow that we are nonphysical. That's true for each one of the premises. Give it up; the conclusion doesn't hold. The interesting thing is that each of these premises could be plausibly challenged. As I said last time, free will, determinism, causation, and responsibility—this cluster of problems is an extremely difficult and complicated philosophical issue.
And we could easily devote an entire semester to discussing it. So all we're doing here is the quickest and most superficial glance. But still, let me quickly point out why you could resist the argument from free will regarding the existence of a soul. As I just noted, the argument requires premise number one. It has to be proven that we have a soul for this argument to work.
It's got to be the case that we've got free will. Now, that could be challenged. There are philosophers who have said we certainly believe that we have free will, but it's an illusion. We don't really have free will. Indeed, why don't we have free will, but it's an illusion?
We don't really have free will. Indeed, why don't we have free will? This is a point addressed by the rest of the argument. Some might argue, "Well, you know, we're physical objects. Determinism is true of us. No physical object that is subject to determinism can have free will, so we don't have free will."
Of course, we mistakenly believe we've got free will. We are physical objects that labor under the illusion that we have free will. But after all, free will isn't something that you can just see. You can hear it in your mind and perceive the fact that you've got free will. Yes, we have the sense that we could have acted differently, but maybe that's an illusion.
As I say, there are philosophers who have argued that way, denying that we have free will. If we conclude that we don't actually have free will, then we no longer have this argument for the existence of a soul. It's a way to avoid the argument. Although, for what it's worth, I should mention that I don't believe it is false that we have free will. That is to say, I do think premise one is true. I believe we do have free will. So, although I don't believe the argument is sound, premise one isn't the premise I would want to reject.
But there are two other key premises. What about premise number three: all purely physical systems? That's the concept.
All purely physical systems and determinism. Well, we need that premise as well to make the argument hold. Suppose we consider that you can't have free will and determinism; they cannot be combined. The view that they cannot be combined is sometimes known as incompatibilism, for the obvious reason.
It's the view that these two things are incompatible. You can't have determinism and free will. Suppose we do believe in incompatibilism and believe that we have free will. It would follow, then, that we're not subject to deterministic laws. Well, the dualist says that shows us that we have to believe that there's something non-physical about us.
Because after all, premise three states that all purely physical systems are subject to determinism. Isn't it true that the basic laws of physics are deterministic laws? The answer is that it’s not so clear that this is true, and premise three of the argument can be rejected as well. Now, at this point, I have to confess, as I've confessed at other times before, that this is a claim about empirical science. What does our best theory about the laws of nature tell us?
And I'm no scientist, and I'm no specialist in empirical matters, and believe me, I'm no authority on quantum mechanics. Our best theory is of fundamental physics. Still, I take it—I gather—here's what I'm told: the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics says that, despite what many of us might have otherwise believed, the fundamental laws of physics are not, in fact, deterministic. What does that mean? Suppose we've got some sort of radioactive atom, which has a certain chance of... What does that mean?
Well, it means that there’s maybe, let’s say, an 80% chance that in the next 24 hours it will break down. Eighty percent of atoms that are set up like that break down in the next 24 hours, while 20% of them do not. Now, according to quantum mechanics and the standard interpretation, that’s all there is to say about it. You have an atom like that with an 80% chance that in the next 24 hours, it will break down.
Suppose it does break down. Can we say why it broke down? Sure. We can say, well, after all, there was an 80% chance that it would. Take an atom that, after 24 hours, hasn't broken down. Can we say why it hasn't broken down?
Sure. There was a 20% chance that it wouldn't break down. Can we explain why the ones that do break down, break down, and the ones that don't break down, don't break down? No. What I can say is that there was an 80% chance it would break down and a 20% chance it wouldn't. So, most of them do break down.
Some of them don't. That's as deep as the explanation goes. There's nothing more. Now, when we've got our deterministic hats on, we think to ourselves that there must be some underlying causal explanation, some feature about the atoms that explains why they broke down, which was missing from the atoms that explain why they don't break down. After all, determinism, right?
If you set up the atoms exactly the same way, they are always going to break down. However, the answer is that, according to the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, that's not how it works. All we can say is that some of these will break down and some of these won't. The fundamental laws of physics, according to the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, are probabilistic. Determinism is not true at the level of fundamental physics. Well, that's what I'm told.
Believe me, I'm in no position to say, but that's what I'm told. And, of course, if that's true, then premise three is false. It just isn't true that all purely physical systems are subject to determinism. So even if it does turn out that you can't have free will and determinism, that doesn't rule out the possibility that we are purely physical objects because not all purely physical systems are subject to determinism. If determinism isn't true of us at the fundamental level, then even if you couldn't have both determinism and free will, we could still have free will.
And yet, for all that, they can still be purely physical systems. While I'm busy pointing out ways in which the argument doesn't succeed, I also want to take a moment to mention that Premise Two is also subject to criticism. Premise Two was the incompatibilist claim that nothing subject to determinism has free will. You can't combine them; they're incompatible. Now, incompatibilism, I take it, is probably something like the common-sense view here.
It's a view that probably most of you believe. But again, it's worth noting that philosophically it can be challenged. There are philosophers, and here I'll tip my hat and say I'm one of them, who believe that the idea of free will is not incompatible with determinism. So even if determinism were true of us, that wouldn't rule out our free will because you can, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, have both determinism and free will.
They're compatible. Hence, this view is known as compatibilism. If we accept compatibilism, we'll be able to say, "Look, maybe we have free will and determinism is true of us, but for all that, we're still just purely physical systems." Somehow, at the macro level, all the indeterminism boils out, and at the macro level, we are deterministic systems. So what? If a deterministic system could nonetheless have free will, we could still be purely physical systems. Now, mind you, I haven't said anything today to convince you of the truth of compatibilism, nor am I going to try to do that. The point here was only to say we shouldn't be so quick to think that we have to believe in the existence of a soul in order to explain our having free will.
It takes all of the premises of the argument to reach the conclusion that the soul exists, and each one of the premises can be challenged. I do not mean merely that, logically speaking, you can reject any argument; rather, I mean that there are reasonable philosophical or scientific grounds for questioning each one of the premises. The argument requires a lot. That doesn't prove that the argument fails, but it does mean that you will have your work cut out for you if you choose to use this route to argue for the existence of a soul. All right, let's recap.
As I said, we've been considering different kinds of arguments, each of which appeals to some feature about us: our creativity, our ability to feel, the fact that we have a qualitative aspect of experience, our ability to reason, and so on. These are all facts about us that call out for explanation. The claim on the part of the dualist is that we couldn't explain it without appealing to a soul. I have argued and shared my reasons for thinking that those arguments are not compelling. The kinds of considerations I have pointed to so far are what we might think of as everyday, familiar features about us. It's an everyday occurrence that we can think, reason, feel, and be creative, or choose otherwise and have free will. Perhaps the better arguments for the soul focus not on the everyday, but on the unusual and the supernatural.
Here we might then have an entirely different family of arguments, again in the form of inference to the best explanation. Perhaps we need to posit the soul in order to explain ghosts. Maybe we need to posit the soul to explain extrasensory perception (ESP). Additionally, we may need to posit the soul to account for near-death experiences. We might also need to posit the soul to explain what occurs during séances or communications from the deceased, or what have you. For any one of those, we could again construct an argument where we say, "Look, here's something that needs explanation."
The best explanation appeals to the soul. Now, I'm going to be rather quicker in discussing this family of arguments, but let me take at least a couple of minutes to elaborate on that. Take, for example, near-death experiences. This is something that you read a bit about in the selection from Schick and Vaughan in your course packet. The basic idea is probably familiar to most of you anyway: the following occurs with people who, perhaps, experience cardiac arrest or other critical conditions, and they die on the operating table, but then they are brought back to life, as we put it. Many such individuals, when questioned afterward, report having a very striking experience.
One of the things about the experience is that it varies from person to person and from culture to culture. Many individuals report having some notion, while they are dead on the operating table, of leaving their body. Perhaps they begin to view their body from a vantage point above it. Eventually, they may leave the operating room altogether during this experience, feeling joy and euphoria. They often describe going through a tunnel and seeing a light at the end of it.
Perhaps at the other end of the tunnel, they begin to have some communication or see a loved one who has died previously, or perhaps a famous religious figure from their tradition. They have the sense that what they’ve experienced is essentially having died and gone to heaven. But then, suddenly, they get yanked back and wake up in the hospital room. So, they’ve had near-death experiences, or perhaps a better term would be death experiences, but then have been brought back to life. There it is, right?
You survey people, and they share their experiences. Now, we need to ask ourselves: what explains this? Here’s a perfectly straightforward and natural explanation: these people died. Their bodies died, and they transitioned to the next world. They moved on to the next life.
They went to heaven, but then were yanked back. Now, their bodies were lying on the operating table. Their bodies weren't in heaven, so something non-bodily must have gone to heaven. That's how the explanation goes.
It's a natural, straightforward explanation of what's gone on here. Hence, inferences to the best, we need to posit the soul—something immaterial that survives the death of the body and can leave the body to go up to heaven. However, in these cases, the tie is never completely broken. They are yanked back; the soul is pulled back by some cause and reconnected to the body.
It's as though we might think of there being two rooms. Here's a kind of analogy: there's the room that this world represents, what life represents. In these experiences, your soul leaves this room and goes into a second room, the room of the next world or the next life. However, for various reasons, it isn't allowed to stay in the next room and gets yanked back to this room.
Well, that's a possible explanation. In a moment, I'll ask whether it's the best possible approach to turn to that question. There's an objection to this entire way of looking at things that is probably worth pausing to consider. The objection is similar to the dismissive attitude we encountered at the beginning of the course regarding the question, "Could I survive my death?" Well, duh.
Could there be life after there’s no more life? Well, of course not. Here, the objection says that this two-room notion has to be mistaken. It can’t be that what’s going on in near-death experiences is that people are reporting on what it’s like to be dead because, so the objection says, they never really died. After all, twenty minutes later, whatever it is, there they are, up and about. Well, not exactly up and about.
They're presumably lying in their hospital beds. But they're clearly alive. Hence, it follows that they never really died. Or, if you want, you could say maybe they died, but since they obviously didn't die permanently—after all, they were brought back to life—how could they possibly tell us what it's like to be permanently dead? How can we take their experiences as veridical reports of the afterlife?
Because what we want to know is: What is it like to be permanently dead? And these people were never—whatever unusual experiences they may be having—they are not reports of the afterlife. That's how the objection goes. Although I think I was pausing for a moment to raise that objection, it's not one that I believe we should take all that seriously. Suppose we were to agree, all right, strictly speaking, these people didn't die.
Or, strictly speaking, they didn't die permanently. Does it follow from that that their experiences should not be taken as evidence of what the afterlife is like? I think that's really a misguided objection. Suppose somebody said, "Look, I spent twenty years living in France, and then I came back to the United States. I want to tell you what it's like in France." And somebody responded, "I came back to the United States."
And so I want to tell you what it's like in France. Somebody says, "You know, you never really moved to France permanently, so your experiences in France, interesting as they may be, can't really cast any light on what it would be like to permanently move to France." We’d say, "Give me a break." It's true that, of course, I didn't move to France permanently.
Still, I have some experience in France, and so I can give you a pretty good idea of what it's like to live there, even if I didn't move there for the rest of my life without ever coming back. You can't say quite as much if you've only been in France for a couple of days before returning, but you can still say something relevant. Indeed, suppose I never went into France at all. Suppose all that happened was that I stood right on the border and talked to some people in France. They were on the French side of the border.
I was on the other side, but I talked to them for a while. Still, I never went in. However, I might have something helpful to say about what it's like in France. If that's the right thing to say about the France case, then why not say the same thing about the near-death experience case?
Even if these people didn't stay in the second room, they didn't stay dead; they had some experience of being dead. Isn't that relevant to what it would be like to be dead? Or even if we say, no, strictly speaking, these people didn't die at all. They were just on the border looking in. They never, strictly speaking, died at all.
So what? They were on the border looking in. To suggest that this couldn't be relevant evidence is like saying, "I can't tell you anything interesting about what's happening in the hallway right now, because after all, I'm not in the hallway; I'm here in the lecture hall." But so what?
Even though I'm here in the lecture hall, I can see into the hallway and tell you what's going on in it. So, attempts to dismiss the appeal to near-death experiences on what we might call philosophical grounds — this would be the bad notion of philosophy — I think that’s misguided. Still, that doesn't mean that we should believe in the argument for the existence of the soul based on near-death experiences, because the question remains: what is the best explanation for what’s going on in near-death experiences? Now, one possibility, as I suggested, was what I called a moment ago the two-room explanation. There's the room of this life, and there's the room of, as I suggested, what I called a moment ago the two-room explanation.
There's the room of this life, and there's the room of the next life. People who have had near-death experiences, either temporarily or otherwise, were either in the second room or at least glancing into it. That's one possible explanation. But, of course, there's a different possible explanation—the one-room explanation. There's just life, this life. And as you come very close to the wall of the room, things end up looking toward life.
And as you come very close to the wall of the room, things end up looking rather different than they do in the middle of the room. Now, maybe the one-room metaphor is not the best metaphor because it immediately prompts the question, “Well, what's on the other side of the wall?” And of course, the physicalist's suggestion is that there isn't anything on the other side of the wall. So maybe a better way to talk about it would be: life's a biological process. We're all familiar with that process, sort of in its middle stretches.
In its closing stretches, some fairly unusual biological processes kick in. In rare but not unheard of cases, some people begin to experience these unusual biological processes and then return to normal biological functions, allowing them to articulate what was happening during those unusual processes. This emphasizes the need to provide a biological and physical explanation of what occurs in near-death experiences. However, it's important to note that this is not yet a complete physical explanation; it's merely a promissory note. We now have two rival explanations: the solely dualist perspective that posits we enter another world, and the physicalist promissory note suggesting that we can explain the white lights, feelings of euphoria, and the sensation of seeing one's body from a distance in physical terms.
We don't really have much of a physical explanation until we begin to offer scientific accounts of each aspect of the near-death experience. However, this is, in fact, an area where scientists are actively working. You saw some of the beginnings of an explanation offered in the reading by Schick and Vaughan. For example, when the body is in stress, which likely occurs towards the end of biological processes, certain endorphins are released by the body. Perhaps this explains the feelings of euphoria. During times of stress, we also experience various unusual stimulations of the visual system and the expressions of the brain.
And perhaps that explains the white light or the feeling of compression in the tunnel. Now, again, I'm not any kind of scientist, and so I'm not in any position to say, "Look, here's the details of the explanation." But you get the beginnings of that sketched in the readings, and it's a judgment call you've got to make. Does it seem more plausible that we can explain these experiences in terms of the traumatic stress that your body and brain are going through when you are near death? Or is it more plausible to suggest that what’s happened here is the soul has been released from connection with the body?
For my money, I find the beginnings of the scientific explanation sufficiently persuasive, and thus I don't find the argument from near-death experiences as a compelling argument for the existence of a soul. I don't find it especially persuasive. Of course, there are various other things we could appeal to in terms of supernatural occurrences. I have only mentioned and discussed one of them in detail now. However, there is a variety of phenomena, such as people who claim to communicate with the dead, ghosts, séances, or what have you. And what a physicalist would need to do is to address each one of those.
For each of those instances, you can imagine a dualist who argues that we need to believe in a soul to explain séances. How do we account for the fact that the person conducting the séance knows details about your history that only your deceased uncle would know? The dualist can provide an explanation by appealing to ghosts and similar concepts. How does the physicalist explain phenomena like that? The short answer is, I don't know. I'm not the kind of person who makes it my business to attempt to explain those things in physicalist, naturalistic, materialistic, or scientific terms.
But there are people who make it their business. For example, there’s a magician. The question is not, "Could I explain to you how the séance manages to do the amazing things that it does?" You’re wasting your time asking somebody like me. The person to ask is a magician, someone whose profession it is to fool people and make it look like they can do things with magic. In fact, there are professional magicians who make it their business to debunk people who claim to genuinely be in contact with the dead and the like.
There's a magician; I think his name is the Amazing Randi. He has a sort of standing offer. He says, "You show me what happened in the séance or in communication with the dead, or what have you, and I'll show you how to do it. I'll debunk it for you." Spoiler alert: he has a standing offer.
He says, "I'll pay whatever the amount is, $10,000 to the first person who can document some effect done in supernatural terms that isn't trickery." So far, he's never had to pay out. Again, that doesn't prove that the dualist is wrong. It could be that there are genuine seances. It could be that there really are ghosts.
It could be that there really is communication from the dead. As is typically the case, you have to decide for yourself which explanation seems more likely: the supernatural dualist explanation or the physicalist explanation. For example, you might have a dream where your deceased mother has come back to talk to you. One possible explanation, the dualist perspective, is that it is the ghost of your mother—an immaterial soul—communicating with you. The second possible explanation is simply that it is just a dream.
Of course you dream about your mother because your unconscious cares about her. What's the better explanation? We don't have the time here to go through each case and ask ourselves how the evidence falls on one side versus the other. But when I review the evidence, I come away thinking there's no good reason to move beyond the physical. So, again, let's recap.
One group of arguments for the existence of a soul suggests that we need to posit a soul in order to explain something, whether it is something everyday or something supernatural. The existence of a soul would provide a possible explanation. However, the question is never whether that is a possible explanation, but whether it is the best explanation. When I review these various arguments, I come away thinking that the better explanation lies with the physicalist perspective. Mind you, I do not want to deny that there are some things that have not yet been explained very compellingly.
In particular, as I've mentioned previously, I think there are mysteries and puzzles about the nature of consciousness, the qualitative aspect of experience—what it's like to smell coffee, taste pineapple, or see red. It's very hard to see how you explain that in physicalist terms. To that extent, I can say the jury may still be out. However, I don't think we should say that the better explanation lies with the dualist because I believe positing a soul doesn't really offer us a satisfactory explanation.
It just holds out the promise of an explanation. So at best, that's a tie, and hence no compelling reason to believe it one way or the other. It would be one thing if we could see that no conceivable physicalist explanation could possibly work, but I don't think we're in that situation. All we're in right now is perhaps existing with regard to consciousness and maybe some other things; we don't yet see how to explain them. However, not yet seeing how to explain it is not the same thing as seeing that it can't be explained in physicalist terms.
Of course, again, if we had a dualist explanation with some details really worked out, maybe we’d have to say, "Look, this is the better explanation." But dualism doesn’t typically offer a robust explanation; it merely suggests that maybe we’d be better off positing something immaterial. That, I think, is not very compelling. Now, let’s ask: what other kinds of arguments could be offered for the existence of a soul? I want to emphasize the point that the various arguments I’ve been discussing so far, although they share a common strand of inference to the best explanation, are each separate and distinct arguments. One of them might work even if the others don’t.
But I want to turn now to a rather different kind of argument. The argument I'm about to sketch is a purely philosophical argument. It is not really a matter of who can explain this or that feature of us better than anyone else. It’s an argument that doesn’t seem to have any empirical premises. It works from purely armchair philosophical reflection.
And the striking thing is that many people find this a pretty compelling argument. It traces back to Descartes, the great early modern philosopher. I'm not going to follow the details of his argument, but the basic idea goes back to Descartes. It starts by asking you to imagine a story. So I'm going to tell the story in the first person. I'm going to tell it about myself, but you'll find the argument perhaps more persuasive if, as I tell the story, you imagine it being told about you.
So, each one of you should translate this into a story about yourself and your morning. This is a story about my morning. Imagine that this didn't, of course, actually happen, but imagine. The crucial point here is simply that we can envision this story unfolding. Not that we think it's empirically possible, just that it's conceivable.
It's an imaginable story. So suppose that I woke up this morning. That is to say, at a certain point, I looked around my room and saw the familiar sights of my darkened bedroom. I heard perhaps the sounds of the cars outside my house, my alarm clock ringing, and so on. I moved out of the room toward the bathroom, planning to brush my teeth.
As I enter the bathroom, it's much brighter. I look in the mirror, and here's where things get really weird. I don't see anything. Normally, of course, when I look in the mirror, I see my face. I see my head.
I see the reflection of my torso. But now, as I'm looking into the mirror, I don't see anything at all. Instead, I see the shower reflected behind me. Normally, that's blocked, of course, by me, by my body. But I don't see my body.
Slightly freaked out, or perhaps we should say, I reached for where I would expect my head to be, but I don't feel anything there. Glancing down at my arms, I don't see any arms. Now, I'm really panicking. As I begin trying to touch my body, I don't feel anything. Not only can I not feel anything with my fingers, but I also don't have any sensations where my body should be. Now, we could continue this story, but I've probably said enough for you to understand that what I've just started doing—a novelist could do a better job of telling this story than I just did—but what I've just done was basically imagine. I've imagined a story in which I discover that my body doesn't exist.
Or I've imagined a story in which I discover that my body doesn't exist. Or I've imagined a story in which my body has perhaps ceased to exist. Or I've imagined a story in which I exist, or at least my mind exists. I'm thinking thoughts like, why can't I see my body in the mirror? Why can't I feel my head?
What's going on? I'm panicking. We've got a story in which I'm thinking all sorts of thoughts. My mind clearly exists, and yet, for all that, my body does not exist. We can certainly, it seems, imagine that possibility.
Now, the brilliant thing about this argument is that it leads to a conclusion about the difference between my mind and my body. What we've just done, after all, is imagine that my mind exists while my body does not. Now, what does that show? Descartes states that this raises the question of whether the mind and body are two logically distinct things. The mind and body cannot be the same entity because, after all, I just imagined my mind existing without my body.
But how could I even do it? How could it even be possible to imagine my mind without my body if talking about my mind is just a way of talking about my body? If they're really, bottom line, metaphysically speaking, the same thing, then you couldn't have one without the other. After all, you can't talk about one thing without referencing the other. So, here's a try to tell a story in which this podium exists, but this podium does not exist. You can't do it, right?
If the podium is just one thing, the podium, and if there's just one thing, you could tell a story in which it exists; you could tell a story in which it doesn't exist, but you can't tell a story in which it exists and doesn't exist. If I can tell a story in which it doesn't exist, then you can't tell a story in which it exists and doesn't exist. If I can tell a story in which A exists and B doesn't exist, it's got to follow that A and B are not the same thing. Because if B was just another word for, or another way of talking about A, then to imagine A existing but B not existing would be imagining A existing but, well, B is just A, not existing. But, of course, you can't imagine a world in which A exists but A doesn't exist.
Reformat with correct capitalization and spelling: "Put the same point the other way around. If I can imagine A without B, then A and B have to be logically distinct things. They cannot be identical. Since I can imagine my mind existing without my body, it follows that my mind and my body must be logically distinct things. They cannot be identical. My mind cannot simply be a way of talking."
Talking about my mind cannot just be a way of talking about my body. Now, it's a very compelling argument. Philosophers love this argument. And I've got to tell you, to this day, there's a debate in the philosophical community about whether or not this argument holds up. Look, it's one thing to be clear about a couple of things: What exactly is this argument not doing?
The argument is not saying that if something is possible and if I can imagine it, then it's true. I can imagine unicorns, but that doesn't mean unicorns exist. That's not what the argument is saying. The argument is only making a much more specific claim.
If I can imagine one thing without the other, they must be separate things. Now, of course, it could still be that in the real world, one thing cannot exist without the other. There may be some sort of metaphysical laws that tie the two things so tightly together that you will never actually get one without the other. That's not the question. The point is, if I can at least imagine one without the other, they must, in fact, be two separate things.
Because if there was really just one thing there, you couldn't imagine it without it. Since I can imagine my mind without my body, it must be the case that my mind is something separate and distinct from my body. Otherwise, how could I imagine it existing without the body? If they were the same thing, I can't imagine the body existing without the body. If the mind is just a way of talking about the body, how could I imagine the mind without the body?
Since I can imagine the mind without the body, it follows that they are separate. So, the mind is not the body after all. It's something different. It's the soul. Is that a good argument or not?