Death & What Follows
Substance Dualism and the Survival of the Soul
Holds that a person consists of two distinct substances — a physical body and a non-physical mind or soul — and that because the soul is not made of matter, it is not necessarily destroyed when the body dies, leaving open the possibility of conscious survival.
Proponents
Plato, René Descartes
Evidence For
Grounded in the strong, widely shared first-person intuition that one's conscious experience feels categorically different from any physical process one can point to, and that 'I' seem to remain the same continuous subject despite the body's matter constantly being replaced.
Evidence Against
Faces the unresolved "interaction problem": if the soul is truly non-physical, it is unclear how it could causally interact with a physical brain and body at all — a difficulty philosophers have pressed against dualism since Descartes' own contemporaries raised it directly to him.
Real Sources
Transmissions
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