Dualism and the Atoms of Thought

Abstract: Contemporary arguments for forms of psycho-physical dualism standardly depart from phenomenal aspects of consciousness (‘what it is like ’ to have some particular conscious experience). Con-ceptual aspects of conscious experience, as opposed to phenomenal or visual/perceptual ones, are often taken to be within the scope of functionalist, reductionist, or physicalist theories. I argue that the particular conceptual structure of human consciousness makes this asymmetry unmotivated. The argument for a form of dualism defended here proceeds from the empirical premise that conceptual structure in a linguistic creature like us is a combinatorial and compositional system that implicates a distinction between simple and complex, or ‘atomic ’ and ‘molecular ’ concepts. The argument is that conceptual atoms, qua atoms, are irreducible to anything else. If so, and if the atoms are essentially semantic, a form of dualism fol-lows: though positively inviting naturalistic inquiry into the semantic and mental aspects of nature, it requires that we look at the mental as a primitive domain of nature. Schematically, then, the argument is as follows: (1) Human consciousness/thought is conceptually structured. (2) The human conceptual system is a ‘particulate ’ system at a syntactic and semantic level of representation (the notion of a ‘particulate ’ system is developed in Section 2). (3) This implies the existence of conceptual ‘particles’, concepts that have no further semantic decomposition (‘atoms’). (4) A conceptual atom cannot be explained in terms of anything that does not involve its own intrinsic properties (Section 3). (5) Physicalism as normally conceived is inconsistent with (3