Reducing mind to matter only explains away one part of the mind-body duality
The idea that consciousness emerges from matter is a product of consciousness itself, but it is an equally misplaced concern with the whatness of things that leads to the apparently anti-Cartesian, materialist, idea that the mind and body are the same thing. The type of monism represented by scientific materialism most often espoused by neuroscientists is not radically distinct from the Cartesian dualism to which it is often thought to be opposed. Its solution to the problem has been simply to ‘explain away’ one part of the duality, by claiming to reduce one to the other. Instead of two whatnesses, there is just one: matter. But Descartes was atleast honest enough to acknowledge that there is a real problem here, one he wrestled with, as is clear from the passage in Meditation VI where he writes:
… I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but … am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I form with it a single entity.
References
- Mcgilchrist, Iain. (2010). The Master and His Emissary Chapter 1 Asymmetry and the Brain (p. 46). London, UK: Yale University Press.
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