William S. RobinsonSubstance Dualism claims that our minds are substances that are distinct from any physical
substance. The use of the term “substance” in philosophy follows this rule: if A and B are distinct
substances, then neither one is required in order for the other to exist. So, substance dualism
says that our minds are a kind of thing that could exist without anything physical existing – in
particular, without our bodies existing. Of course, while we are alive, we are composites of two
substances, mind and body.
Substance dualism leaves open the possibility of survival of our conscious mind after the
death of our body. This implication provides a motivation that may lead some to hope that sub-
stance dualism is true. It does not, however, provide an argument for that view, since survivability
after bodily death is itself controversial. Later in this article, we shall look at some arguments for
substance dualism that do not rest on a prior assumption of survivability.
A more popular view among contemporary dualists is property dualism, the view that there
are non-physical properties of events that take place in our bodies. Property dualists hold that
instantiation of non-physical properties cannot happen without bodies, but nonetheless, the
properties themselves are not physical properties.
To understand this view, we need to understand two ways in which a property can count as
“physical.” First, the properties of fundamental physical objects are physical. We accept that there
are these properties because the physical theories that propose them provide the best explana-
tions of events that we can observe, either in laboratories or in everyday life.
Second, non-fundamental properties are counted as physical if they can be explained by the
laws of interaction of fundamental physical properties plus facts about how things are composed.
The liquidity of water or alcohol, for example, is explained by their being composed of parts
that are able to pass by each other without much resistance. When we can give explanations like
this, we can say that a property (liquidity, in this case) has been “reduced to,” or “constructed
from” physical properties of its parts (in this case, properties of atoms or molecules that are held
to compose the liquid). The essential claim of property dualism is that there are some properties
that are not reducible to (or constructible from) physical properties.
Property dualism does not require a non-physical substance. A property dualist can consist-
ently say that some physical objects or events have both some physical and some non-physical
properties. So long as the properties themselves are not reducible, there will be something that
actually exists but cannot be fully accounted for solely by physical objects, events, and properties.
Event Dualism understands non-physical properties in the same way as property dualism. Its
distinctive claim is that non-physical properties do not need to be instantiated in – need not be
properties of – objects, physical or otherwise. The smell you experience when entering a bak-
ery, for example, is an instance of a particular odor property. That property is in your stream of
consciousness during a certain interval of time, but it is not a property of your brain, nor of an
event in your brain, nor of molecules in the air.
When we refer to facts involving a property, we usually attribute the property to a thing –
a thing that, we say, “has” the property. So, event dualism may seem puzzling at first sight.
Physicists, however, often talk of fields, for example the magnetic field that surrounds the Earth.
The strength and direction of that field are properties that differ at different points. We can say
that a point in space has a magnetic field of a certain strength and direction. A point, however, is
just a location, and neither a point nor a location is a thing. Analogously, event dualism proposes
that an occurrence of a non-physical property does not require a thing to “have” it.
The pull to find a thing to have non-physical properties is a powerful one. It sometimes
leads critics of property dualism or event dualism to invent a bearer for non-physical proper-
ties, and a popular name for this alleged bearer is “ectoplasm.” Readers, Beware! Ectoplasm is a
caricature drawn by physicalists. It is supposed to be a special kind of stuff. But property dualists