Intro

Life is essentially a long string of decisions. We do not choose where we are born, what we look like, or how we are raised. Despite this, I believe that something firmly in our grasp is the ability to control what we believe. With this in mind I urge you to consider the age-old debate regarding the existence of the soul. While the more intuitive and widely accepted view in contemporary philosophy of science is that no metaphysical soul exists, I intend to take the road less traveled. I will utilize a classic thought experiment to defend a dualist position: that a non-material soul is real and exists within all of us. Materialism, for all its explanatory power, ultimately fails when confronted with the irreducible reality of conscious experience—the subjective awareness and qualitative facets of life that resist physical descriptions. Only a dualist framework can offer a more complete and truthful account of what it means to be human. 

The Problem

In philosophy, opposing or differentiating views incessantly clash. Sometimes, sorting through these ideas without a basis of comparison can be excruciatingly difficult. To remedy this problem, Medieval philosopher William of Ockham created a principle later termed Ockham’s razor. The razor states that, given two answers have equal explanatory value, the one that makes the fewest assumptions (i.e., simplest) should be preferred when explaining a phenomenon. 

Ockham’s Razor has profoundly shaped philosophy. It provides a rule of thumb, leaving in its wake a bias towards simpler answers. While this is not necessarily bad, we must not oversubscribe to its veracity. In debates around the philosophy of the mind, Ockham’s razor is often used as a materialist “gotcha” move. If one has two answers, one positing that reality is entirely physical, and the other positing that reality is physical and has an abstract, metaphysical, component, Ockham’s razor serves to slice off the metaphysical portion—leaving the more “parsimonious” answer behind. 

While convincing, the key here is that to utilize Ockham’s razor, both answers must have equal explanatory value. In the rest of this paper, I am to argue that fundamental facets of our life can only be explained by metaphysical properties—and therefore Ockham’s razor cannot be applied. 

Mary’s Room

One of the most famous arguments against a purely materialist view of the mind is Frank Jackson’s “Mary’s Room” thought experiment. Imagine Mary, a brilliant scientist who knows every single physical fact about color vision: the wavelengths of light, the neurobiology of perception, and the chemistry of the eye. One might even dare to say that she has a “PhD in color.” Here’s the catch: Mary has lived her entire life in a black-and-white room and has never actually seen color. So, when she steps outside of the room into the world, does she learn something new? The intuitive answer is that she does: she learns what it is like to see red. 

Mary’s room demonstrates the immutable gap between physical knowledge and subjective experience. There must be something beyond the physical facts—a subjective dimension of experience. If a materialist existence fails to account for this, it cannot have equal explanatory power. The heavily traveled road is not the best—and the simplest answer is not immediately acceptable. If the more complicated answer is the answer that explains a phenomenon best, we are required to accept it. 

Philosopher Thomas Nagel also supports this point in his classic essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat? In it, Nagel argues that even if we mapped our entire brain to a bat’s brain, then we would still not know what it is like for a bat, to, for example, experience echolocation. His conclusion mirrors the findings of Mary’s Room: that while objective, third-person science may explain mechanisms, it cannot capture the first-person essence of experience. The “what-it-is-like” dimension of consciousness—qualia—is inherently resistant to reduction, suggesting that reality contains aspects beyond the physical.

So without further ado, let us dive into counterarguments. 

The Future Development Argument

A materialist may argue that the failure to explain qualia in scientific terms is simply a current gap in understanding, not an unbreachable gap. The disciplines of neuroscience, psychology, and physics are moving towards explaining perception, thought, and even moral behavior in increasingly precise physical terms. Every mental phenomenon so far—from decision-making to emotion—has been tied to brain processes. What’s to say that consciousness won’t eventually be tied down to the physical as well? 50 years ago, the idea of self-driving cars on our streets would have seemed unthinkable. 150 years ago, a man on the moon would be madness. 500 years ago, heliocentrism was an idea so radical it was punished by death. The point is, technology has advanced to inconceivable levels of sophistication. Problems that seemed impenetrable in the past are trivial now. We can choose to deny the precedent, or accept the belief that human ingenuity will find some way to scientifically define subjective experience. 

However, while this “appeal to science” argument is convincing, it still falls short. In modern society, and Silicon Valley in particular, science is often revered as the ultimate—and only—way of deriving proof. The scientific method relies on turning facts about the world into objective statements through the process of the hypothesis, induction, and deduction. On the other hand, conscious experience is decidedly subjective: while we could plausibly explain the mechanisms that give rise to consciousness, the actual feelings—like the taste of orange juice or the color blue—are deeply personal. Philosopher David Chalmers details this as the hard problem of consciousness: there is a fundamental disconnect between the physical processes of the brain and the emergence of subjective awareness. Thus arises a contradiction: if all knowledge must be objective to count as scientific, then the most fundamental feature of our existence—subjective experience—is excluded by definition. This is a structural gap in understanding, not just a temporary one: objective science and subjective experience seemingly speak different languages. It is foolish to think we can reduce consciousness to mental states—logical structure itself makes reduction impossible. No matter how many times you do it, 1+1 will equal 2. No matter how long we try, science will keep explaining brain functions without ever bridging the gap to subjective experience—and that gap is itself evidence for dualism.

The Intuition ≠ Truth Argument

As I mentioned before, the intuitive answer to Mary’s Room—the thought experiment designed to illustrate the subjective character of experience—is that Mary learns something new when she steps outside of the colorless room into the colorful world. However, as we have seen in the last few weeks of class, intuition does not always lead us to the truth. If we trusted our intuition for everything, we would be led to conclusions anyone would now deem unreasonable: like that the earth is flat or that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. If our intuition has misled us so much in the past, why should we trust it now? We should act rationally rather than rely on faulty intuition: when Mary stepped into the light, she merely uncovered a new way of reorganizing the information already available to her. The question then, is if Mary’s Room represents a new discovery or just tricks us into believing so. 

The materialist attempts to rebuke Mary’s Room by stating that when Mary steps outside into the real world, she is merely applying the theoretical knowledge she already had. In this way, nothing new is actually learned—what she “learns” is merely a new mode of access to the knowledge she already had. This view is flawed—while it’s true that our intuition often fails us regarding the outside world, it only does so because we can compare our intuitive solution with the objective truths of reality. In a process of comparison, we can determine the correct answer through empirical evidence. If we accept this criteria, then we should be able to apply it to Mary’s Room: through an objective consensus, we can determine that Mary’s Room and the outside world are undeniably different. Therefore, when Mary steps outside of her room, she has to discover—or experience—something new. The conclusion follows directly: Mary does not just intuitively learn the difference, there is also no way that she couldn’t. In the same way that we cannot explain color to a blind man, or what my red looks like versus your red, Mary’s room prevents her from exercising the theoretical knowledge she has learned. But when she steps out of her room, that knowledge is applied—and generated in the process is experiential data that was previously unavailable. Stating that Mary sees color is not just intuitive–it is the truth. 

Ockham Who? The Other Argument from Parsimony

Even if it was somehow true that we had a soul, a materialist may still argue that it is ontologically wasteful to use a dualist framework. If we have a soul, we still run into the uncomfortable problem of explaining how that soul somehow gained consciousness. In other words, the existence of a soul doesn’t prove conscious experience, it just asserts it. If having a soul gets us no closer to explaining the very phenomenon (qualia) that called us to reject the explanatory value of materialism in the first place, it seems contradictory. Without a clear mechanism for how consciousness arises out of the soul, dualists run the risk of equating two super complicated unsolvable problems with the hope that they somehow explain each other—a solution that is tenuous at best. 

Yet I’d argue that this argument goes both ways. Defining a soul as separate from conscious experience is unfounded. Proving that the soul cannot give rise to consciousness or subjective experience would require one to scan the metaphysical abstract realms of the world for every conception of a soul and then prove that none of them contain a mechanism that creates qualia. In other words, it’s impossible—and therefore it is premature to claim that our “soul” does not give rise to consciousness. A personal metaphysical entity, i.e., the soul, giving rise to qualia is certainly a conceivable proposition. Overall, materialism explains brain functions but leaves qualia unaddressed. Dualism, while unclear of the mechanism, at least gives an explanation as to where qualia can arise. The question is which incompleteness we can tolerate. If materialism already fails to give a full picture of reality, then dualism remains the more compelling option.

What Now?

There must be something in our lives above simple the physical. Soul, mind, or consciousness—it must exist in some form. We don’t yet know how it arises—I personally think it does through a process of emergence—but that’s an essay for another day. But just because we haven’t pinpointed the exact process that the metaphysical component comes from doesn’t mean we will not. And while this could be characterized as an “appeal to reason/science,” it doesn’t utterly contradict itself in the same way that the hard problem of consciousness does. To acknowledge the soul is to take the more difficult path: one that demands complexity in the face of mystery. Yet as Frost reminds us, it is the road less traveled that makes all the difference.