The (non)existence of an immaterial soul or mind has been a longtime philosophical interest of mine. I’ve done several OPs on the subject at TSZ, so when I ran across the book The Substance of Consciousness — A Comprehensive Defense of Contemporary Substance Dualism, I knew I’d want to take a closer look.

The authors are Brandon Rickabaugh and J.P. Moreland. Rickabaugh is unfamiliar to me. He’s a self-described “public philosopher” and a former professor of philosophy at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Moreland is someone whose views I’ve criticized in past threads. He’s currently a professor of philosophy at Biola University in southern California (formerly known as the Bible Institute of Los Angeles), an evangelical institution.

Substance dualism is the view that humans consist of two distinct “substances”: matter, which is physical, and the mind or soul, which is nonphysical. Many religious belief systems including Christianity depend on substance dualism as a way to explain how an afterlife is possible. As a professor at an evangelical institution, Moreland is naturally drawn to the topic.

The book is over 400 pages long and covers a lot of ground, so I’ll have to read it in bits and pieces as time permits. I figured I’d start a thread on it here at TSZ to record my thoughts as I work through it and to discuss it with anyone who’s interested. The topic is relevant to our recent conversations about whether AI is truly intelligent, since at least one commenter here believes that true intelligence depends on a nonphysical component of some kind and is therefore permanently out of reach for machines.