For starters, let’s take Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) hylemorphic
dualism. The A-T view is that the intellect is immaterial, but that
sensation and imagination are not. Hence it is no surprise at all that
neuroscience has discovered various neural correlates of mental imagery
and the varieties of perceptual experience. Moreover, A-T holds that
though intellect is immaterial, its operation requires the presence of
the images or “phantasms” of the imagination. Hence it is no surprise
that neural damage can affect even the functioning of the intellect.
Most importantly, the soul, of which intellect, sensation, and
imagination are all powers, is not a complete substance in its own right
in the first place, but rather the form of the body. The way
intellectual and volitional activity relates to a particular human
action is, accordingly, not to be understood on the model of billiard
ball causation, but rather as the formal-cum-final causal side of a
single event of which the relevant physiological processes are the
material-cum-efficient causal side. That alterations to the body have
mental consequences is thus no more surprising than the fact that
altering the chalk marks that make up a triangle drawn on a chalkboard
affects how well the marks instantiate the form of triangularity. It is
important to emphasize that none of this involves any sort of retreat
from some stronger form of dualism, as a way of accommodating the
discoveries of contemporary neuroscience; it is what A-T has always
said about the relationship between soul and body. There is absolutely
nothing in modern neuroscience that need trouble the A-T hylemorphic
dualist in the slightest.
-Edward Feser [source]
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