Philip Goff

If dualism is true, what you are now looking at is not Susan. Strictly speaking, Susan is an invisible mind; what you are looking at is merely the body and brain that Susan uses to negotiate the world.

mind and brain are entirely distinct and independently existing things. Feelings, emotions, and experiences reside not in the brain but in the nonphysical mind.

Minds and bodies certainly seem to be very different things. The dualist takes this appearance at face value.

dualist thought is hardwired into us and that from an early age children start to categorize “mental things” as distinct from “physical things.”

Descartes’s idea that the mind is better known than the body: you don’t know for certain that you have a body or a brain, but you do know for certain that you exist as a conscious being.

some of the most serious challenges to dualism arise from the difficulty of understanding how mind and body interact.

Newton’s theory of gravity. Newton’s theory didn’t really explain gravity; rather it proposed a mathematical law that describes the gravitational attraction between all material entities.

According to Newton’s law, all material entities attract each other with a force that is proportional to their mass and inversely proportional to the distance between them.

Newton didn’t explain why objects exert this force. And he admitted it: concerning the underlying mechanism that generates gravity, Newton famously said “Hypotheses non fingo” or “I frame no hypotheses.”

just as Newton didn’t provide an explanation of why objects exert gravitational force, so Einstein didn’t provide an explanation either of why matter curves spacetime or of why matter follows the shortest path through spacetime.