Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 42 of 138
The insight that drives dualism
My guess is that dualism, in spite of being out of fashion, will not go away. Indeed in recent years dualism, at least property dualism, has been making something of a comeback, partly due to a renaissance of interest in consciousness. The insight that drives dualism is powerful. Here is the insight, at its most primitive: we all have real conscious experiences and we know that they are not the same sort of thing as the physical objects around us. This primitive insight can be given a more sophisticated formulation: the world consists almost entirely of physical particles and everything else is in some way an illusion (like colors and tastes) or a surface feature (like solidity and liquidity) that can be reduced to the behavior of the physical particles. At the level of molecular structure the table is not really solid. It is, as the physicist Eddington said, a cloud of molecules. It is just that from our point of view it seems solid. But at bottom the physical world consists entirely of microentities, the physical particles. However there is one exception. Consciousness is not just particles. In fact it is not particles at all. Whatever else it is, it is something “over and above” the particles. I believe this is the insight that drives contemporary property dualism.